The Rimworld paradox: the exciting sandbox plot

Whose tale do you want to listen to?

Rimworld is a simulator of building and surviving a colony on a not very friendly planet. You build a base, and occasional events happen - cosmic pirates will attack, then a star flash will destroy all electrical devices, the battery will explode and your hydroponic farm will burn.

The key feature of the gameplay - the AI ​​narrator selects the most interesting "random" event, which right here and now will have the most dramatic effect. Good or bad - but emotionally strong.
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But about how it works, a little later. Immediately the main thing - you can fall in love with this game for an amazing plot. Which is "smeared" around the world. The plot, which, in principle, no.

So, the beginning of the first game: your ship explodes. You barely have time to reach the capsules and land on the surface. 30 emergency rations, steel fragments, weapons. Next - the ruins of some ancient buildings.


Your ship

The basics

Everything, survive as you please. If you fall in a favorable climate, then after a while you cut down trees, adapt one of the ancient houses for housing, make a fire.



A bit of hunting, a bit of wood hikes, excavation of metal deposits nearby - and soon you will have fields with potatoes and rice, a solar panel or a windmill, electric heaters and air conditioners.

Next - protective turrets, a normal large base with comfortable living rooms, a laboratory and the progress of science. And so on until you build a spaceship and fly away from this planet.

What does the gameplay look like

You do not directly control the settlers (or rather, you can, but this is only necessary in critical situations). General interface - you build or form tasks for the settlers.


These are the works that your people can do. Priorities you designate what is now most needed. If you have allocated a place under the stove, then soon the builder-repairman will do it. Or choose something else if construction is not in his priority.


Here you gave the command to build modules to the ship - they are translucent. The builders of your settlement will come and do it. The ship, by the way, is examined with interest by local natives.

That is, this is the usual settlement management, where you, rather, build processes, rather than manage people. And it lays some interesting sensations, referring to our business processes. But about this a little later, while let's go back to the events of AI.

Plot

From the very beginning of the game you are trying to understand where you are, what kind of planet it is and, actually, what is happening at all. Even when in orbit you chose the landing site for emergency capsules, you saw a map of the world and several nearby settlements.



From time to time, cargo containers fall around your colony — sometimes with chocolate, now with a load of hides, now with plastal. Where do they come from? Does someone send you help from the orbit or are other ships broken? Falling wreckage of a number of ships suggests that, rather, the second.

When your settlement becomes noticeably rich, just travelers and merchants first come to visit, and then gangs of pirates or hostile groups from other settlements of the planet. Anything can wait for you - starting with natives armed with spears with personal power shields, and ending with high-tech citizens who, instead of a frontal attack on the base, build a wall and a couple of mortars nearby and start beating your defense and energy centers. For sweetness - the orbital landing of pirates right in your science lab.

One of the prisoners whom you left after a serious wound and infection joins you. He also finds, three kilometers from the base, an ingrown into the rock, but a preserved ancient building. And from it carries such a danger that until you decide to touch it.

More and more you learn about the planet. Sometimes merchants come to you and show goods - among other things, they have power armor, bionic organs (to gradually make people out of cyborgs). Carefully reading the biographies of your colonists (who are already getting under a dozen - you recruited someone from the surviving raiders, someone came himself, another two you bought from a slaveholder who looked in at the light). Gradually, from in-game texts, you learn that almost all were born outside of this system. Many in the neighboring settlements have friends-former-parents-children. Reading all the in-game texts, you continue a detective story, forming an idea of ​​the world.





Another rescue capsule with a barely alive cosmic wanderer falls next to it, which allows one to assume that something is wrong in orbit, and this planet is the Bermuda triangle by the standards of space.



It is difficult to survive the rut of wild boars. Fortunately, the ammunition turret rushed just as they stuck it. The whole hospital in the wounded.

Communication console becomes the first breakthrough outward. It turns out that ships of trade consortia fly over your head once every 3-4 months - that's where toys like energy rifles and bionic eyes, as well as advanced medicines come from on the planet. Neighboring settlements can send you trade caravans, just build an orbital beacon to send them silver in advance (which means there is an automatic exchange system in orbit!).



Then hostile mechanoids come to visit you. You barely destroy them, bury the fallen and begin to figure out what it was. From scraps of data, you understand that it seems that a swarm of mechanoids settled down somewhere near. And precisely because of them here this happens - again, I guess.


Wedding

You master multi-analyzers and build your high-tech laboratory. In the first place - to launch geothermal generators, because relying on the wind and the sun is already difficult, and rumbling pyrolysis generators are not an option. And you also really, really need medicine - one of the first colonists developed asthma from orbit, two people caught sleeping sickness, their left hand was shot off from the most beautiful girl of the settlement and their eyes were gnawed, after regular bites and wounds of your fighters you need to treat something and now you have a high-tech hospital, you are exploring a mineral detector.



Nearby falls a piece of exactly an enemy ship. By destroying the mechanoids, you capture the most valuable thing on the planet: the core of AI. With it, then you can make the on-board computer already your future ship.

Three power bolts, a machine gun, a pair of snipers and several shotguns of hunters plus personal shields inspire confidence. You go to the very ruins and open them. Inside there are still mechanoids — and ancient crypto-sleep containers, unopened rescue capsules. Pull people out of there, treat them and take two to the settlement, the rest go.

Each climate has its own surprises: a lightning storm, an invasion of underground beetles, greetings from alpha-beavers, rare expensive animals, an invasion of local endemics - bumkras (exploding after death). Domestic dogs coming to the settlement (whose?) And remaining with you, the former mistress of your engineer fleeing from persecution - in general, the plot drive is excellent.

Yes, yes, AI selects events for your colony, but it looks very, very organic. The game has three types of AI - Phoebe Tikhonya gives you the opportunity to quietly build a base, makes pleasant surprises at the time, once a season drives the enemies to the crowd. Cassandra Klassicheskaya - medium mode, on low complexity simply generates frequent random events, on high - often complex, and colonies hitting at vulnerable places. And Randy Chance is a joker moron who creates chains of coincidences. The outbreak of the star turned off all the switching, the animals in the region became frantic and rush to you with a huge crowd from the north - and here you are still catching the orbital landing, robbing the hospital. Few? Please fend off all this during a heatwave and to the accompaniment of battery explosions.

Business game

As I have already said, the game with its indirect management system gives rise to a lot of associations with the construction business.

First, your settlers can do different things (or do not know them) - and if you put an uncle-lancer with a skill unit as a cook, then get ready - people will regularly eat food. That is, for each person - the balance of work priorities.

Secondly, the work cycles themselves. You program things like: “Prepare a simple meal for a three-month supply, then cook delicious.” “Maintain a supply of shells at the level of such and such, if everything is good, to make armor,” “As soon as you see a broken mechanoid - disassemble!”, “There is a beast carcass - immediately butcher”. And so on. And you provide logistics - for example, it’s good if the stove is at the finished product warehouse, the farmer lives near the farm, and the refrigerator is right where people catch fish. And the doctor will not run after the drugs through the half-base to the main warehouse, but will take them right in the hospital.

Lined up the basic bundles. The first is a food chain. For example, the first priority on farming and gardening forces three at the beginning and end of the growth season to deal only with plants. They plant them, collect and carry them to a cold warehouse near the kitchen. Nothing grows? The second priority for cooks plus “prepare 30 servings of complex delicious food and infinitely - normal” in the off-season forces them to work in the kitchen and distill ready-made meals to ready meals. The same cycle with production - remelting of scrap metal, the creation of armor. Few stone blocks? Drop everything and ensure minimum storage balance. To the colony, standing on the verge of survival, completely nailed the old sculpted sculptor? Great, give him the task of cleaning for all his free time. The cleaning is over - the second priority is to work on the creation of native art objects: this “useless old man” will save you by selling his statue for an enormous amount of money to an exotic flying merchant and receive food and medicine for the settlement.

It is also important to manage the zones - for example, to limit the output of everyone from under the roof during acid rains, to collect everyone in a warm place, or to keep them in the “shift camp” on the edge of the miners' card near the mining operations.

The only place where you descend from the ecosystem level to the level of tactics is combat, when you have to manage each colonist separately as in strategies. And although the battle is not at the level of Jagged Alliance, but shelter, weapon quality, skills and range decide. The tactics are quite beautiful and understandable.



Evolution - from the base "shoot from the trench to the oncoming enemies," then - "We should make the approaches to the base sweep and remove this hill", then - "The reapers of mechanoids shoot too far, let's put two fighters with powerful shields to distract them, running in the open area, while snipers come from the flank, ”and then the most difficult thing is all of the above plus“ before leaving you and you took heavy miniguns and got into the trench, and three with energy plugs take shields and go to the flank of mechanoids - you can't shoot through but so dober go to distant rocks and turn them off, and it will be possible to open fire almost closely. ”



After a while, with the growth of the colony of tasks, there is a lot of this - this feeling is always in the real business. But resources and time are short - and you have to choose what is best to do. Plus, each of your colonists has their own opinion - they try to do what they like and avoid what they don’t like. It is necessary to take into account the peculiarities - someone should not be sent across the glacier to dig deposits have become due to the cold - and someone does not like the heat and is ready to fire even in one raincoat. Two of your colonists with a programmer past love to work at night - no question. But very angry when someone walks through their room. And dozens of features of each character.


See how beautiful the society is


And here - straight life tragedy. Major Payne's nose was shot off while performing his military duty, and his wife left him. Everything, now operation on the chip of happiness.

In general, yes, business. The sea of ​​everything, when stable growth more or less sticks, a surprise always comes - and the routine constantly argues with the need to develop. Yes, an excellent company simulator. What I would include in the curriculum of the future for sure.

What is cool?

The game is wildest detailed. The author says that in October there were 100 thousand lines of code. Believe me, very much is thought out in the implemented features - starting from how the heroes' skills grow and degrade depending on the events, ending with the characteristics of the battle - the heroes can shoot by putting a rifle on their shoulder in front of them so as not to hook it with a crazy shot in the back.



When building a base on a glacier, frost can hit -50. Until it reaches -30 again, the caravans will not walk, even from the console the communications will not respond.


Fair under acid rain: three caravans at a party, we play on the price difference of several settlements.

Everything is thought out - even after 30 hours of play you will find small pleasant surprises.

Thanks to this detail and the selected AI, the game generates thousands of stories. Here came the caravan to your mountain settlement on the glacier. When you called him, outside it was -20, they dressed under -35. Hit the cold front, outside your base is now minus 54 Celsius. We went to bask on the base, their muffalo pack ate all your crops of medicinal plants. One of the caravans froze his toes and caught the infection. While you were treating him, the caravan went back. A week later, that guy recovered and went after them. When he reached - the leader of his settlement contacted you and thanked him, the relations between your factions improved. Or here: one dog - Muscat - heroically helped to defend the settlement. He was seriously injured, as a result he was left without hind legs and one eye. But he continued to crawl cheerfully with turtle speed on the front and with something to help. A month later, the settlement began to be threatened by famine, and just then an exotic trader appeared in orbit with a large party of dogs. It was decided to sell Muscat to him as a good manufacturer. And six months later, stray dogs drew up on the horizon who wanted to get close to the settlement. They were brought to the house by the same Muscat without hind legs and eyes.

Coincidences of the sea - from the important caravan that came, which was attacked by a wave of animals, to the banal quarrels of lovers, because of which then an innocent pet, which starts a chain reaction like in Dwarf Fortress, suffers. Yes, by the way, we can say that Rimworld is such a very beautiful story piece, similar to Dwarf Fortress.

What's next?

It is surprising, but it is interesting to play the game further, after the first departure. The second time is to start a tribe of savages of this world and learn what is the struggle with the mechanoids, to know the beauty of the glacier pits and the treatment of malaria with herbs instead of antibiotics. The third time is to build a base already completely hidden in the mountain - and without trees. Take a glacier and try yourself in hydroponics. The fourth time - full extreme - a glacier with an incredible frost at -50, start for a lone space traveler. My story - a 35-year-old girl flew to the glacier to heal from addiction. On the fifteenth day, she was forced to eat her dog, and she felt very guilty. Two years later, there was a technological base with nuclear reactors in the mountain, which gave birth to a new settlement.


Entrepreneur Gennady feels that his caravan can rob.

Something like that. I can say that Rimworld is one of the few games that hooks without 3D-graphics and does not let go. Excellent sketch, and very, very, very good attention to detail. The game is still in beta, but already proved to be one of the best-selling on Steam. If in doubt, even bet, you will like it. There all features are finished, but there are no modules of the type of extended medicine and communication with guests - but they are in addons from an already huge community.

What to learn in terms of game design? Of course, to how cool a chain of random events a la "Elite" can be made is a fancy story. Without the plot as such.

Well, yes. It is worth playing to find out where the AI ​​core will lead you from an enemy ship that you put on your ship - and plunged after crying for centuries into cryptographic containers.