Third Expansion For RimWorld Will Be Released Later This Month

RimWorld has announced its third expansion along with update 1.4. This expansion will allow players to gene-model the residents of their colony, allow those colonists to control mechanoids, and have babies, both naturally and artificially.

RimWorld is a colony management simulation game published and developed by a Canadian Indie game studio Ludeon Studios. This game’s development began as a crowd-funded project on Kickstarter in 2013. The game was officially released in 2018 for PC. The game was ported to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in late July this year.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS

• The third expansion for RimWorld has been announced. This will be known as RimWorld Biotech.
• The expansion has added new features including human-controlled mechanoids and the ability to have babies both naturally and artificially.
• The expansion will go live later this month along with update 1.4.

RimWorld is a sci-fi game based in the future where the whole universe is being sought by humans to colonize it. Due to the difficulty of fast travel, several human colonies develop independently of each other. Some colonies achieve prosperity and peace while others are not fortunate enough. They are plagued by disease and war.

RimWorld strives to give players adventurous scenarios generated by AI.

The game has had three expansions so far. Biotech is the latest. This third expansion has added a variety of new features from colonists controlling mechanoids to gene-modified “xenohumans.”

Talking about the expansion on Steam, Tynan Sylvester, the lead designer of RimWorld, said that he wanted RimWorld to be different RTS games and be a more “character-oriented story generator.” That’s why mechanics will now be controlled by human residents of the colony. Furthermore, he said,

I didn’t want to just add the mechanoids as independently-controlled robots the player can order around like an RTS. This would have been moving away from the character orientation that defines RimWorld. The mechanoids needed to be human-connected.”

They have also added a new cost-based system for mechanoids because, unlike humans, they don’t need food or living space.

Just eating resources wouldn’t feel novel or interesting enough, so we needed a new kind of cost. I decided to explore the concept of pollution. Pollution doesn’t cost anything to make, but it incurs challenges that come afterward. It’s a bit like going into debt – not a problem at first, but if you let it catch up to you, it soon becomes a transformative challenge.”

Pollution will have a negative transformative effect on animals as well as the landscape of the colony. Players can either choose to alleviate the pollution or choose to live with it.

The game has also added a new baby-making feature. The reasoning behind it, as Tynan said, was that RimWorld’s goal is to provide “emotionally-compelling human stories.” And family is the “most relatable” and “strongest” of emotions.

They’re powerful because family is important to us. They’re relatable because everyone has a family, so everyone can empathize with what it might be like to help a brother or parent, have a child, help them, or fear losing them.”

This also adds a whole new dynamic to this story-driven world.

Gene-modding has many new added features as well. It has been at the core of RimWorld’s storytelling as it added “more variation to the human world” and allowed players to mod humans to their needs. Talking about the changes made in Gene-modding in the latest expansion Tynan Sylvester said,

We experimented with a lot of gene effects before settling on a set that is diverse and consistently fun to play with without breaking the game. It took a while, but in the end, testers are loving it.”

The RimWorld Biotech will be released in the coming weeks. Will this expansion be as successful as the previous expansions? Tell us in the comments section below.