Get the Best of Every Biome with A Semi Nomadic Playstyle in Rimworld
The default playstyle for Rimworld is very sedentary. You build up a base on your starting tile and stay there all game long.
One interesting alternative to this sedentary playstyle is the nomadic one. However, as the default settings only allow one base at a time, moving to a new site means abandoning the old one, forever, losing all accumulated infrastructure there.
I have a detailed guide to the full nomadic playstyle here.
However, with one little tweak to the game settings, we can have the best of both playstyles, the semi nomadic playstyle. This little tweak is to go into the gameplay options from the options menu and set the “maximum number of colonies” parameter to anything more than 1.
This will prevent the need to destroy an old base when you settle a new one.
Defining A Semi Nomadic Play Style
The semi nomadic faction is settled across two or more different permanent settlements, migrating between them according to a strategic plan. For the different uses of a semi nomadic playstyle read on!
Uses for a Semi Nomadic Style
A Winter and a Summer Camp
All biomes have their advantages and their challenges. Cold latitudes have low risk of disease, and wild healroot, but also food poverty and risk of hypothermia and frostbite in winter.
Tropical regions allow year round farming but have higher disease risk while usually also being barren of wild healroot.
If you are sedentary you have to work hard on mitigating the challenges even while you enjoy the benefits.
The semi nomad however can enjoy the benefits of two different biomes while dodging the challenges by having two camps in different biomes and migrating between depending on the season.
A camp in a tundra, boreal or cold bog biome can yield wild game and wild healroot in summer. A camp in a tropical biome can allow continued food production and milder temperatures in winter.
Helms Deep
The environment is not the only peril to face in Rimworld. Raiders are a perennial problem. The wealthier you are the more often raiders will come and in greater strength.
Some biomes have inherent defensive value; biomes where the environment itself works to kill invaders. This would be biomes such as: ice sheet, extreme desert and any biomes with lots of pollution.
The issue is that such biomes are also very difficult to inhabit and, for related reasons, quite unproductive economically.
The best of both worlds would be to have a tough-to-crack “Helms Deep” base storing accumulated treasures and another more productive but vulnerable one that can be abandoned as needed with little cost.
Wildcat Mining
Trees, crops and animals are endlessly renewable resources but not so much so with mineral resources like steel and stone. Although it can take a long while before those diminishing resources start to become exhausted.
The more rare, and thus valuable, resources like jade, silver, gold and uranium are a different story. Those will be quickly mined out from a tile.
The wildcat miner solves this by having one permanent base hosting his main settlement and a series of temporary mining camps for digging out rare minerals.
Once a tile is exhausted of its gold, silver and jade, strike the camp and move on to another site.
Starship Supply
Despite the endless replayability of Rimworld you may still want to get off this cursed planet. Rumour has it, there is a crashed starship you could fix up for a ride off. The trick is that wherever you crash landed, the starship is about as far from you as can be.
If you picked an easy tropical or temperate biome on which to start then there is a very good chance that the starship will be on a horrifically hostile biome like the extreme desert or ice sheet.
There is no need to abandon your easy biome settlement though. Use it to supply the starship camp while it works to fix up the ride out of Rimworld.
There we go, Solar Cross’s original guide to the semi nomadic playstyle for Rimworld.
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