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The best games like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress

As Charles Caleb Colton said back in the days of the Commodore 64: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". But what must also be remembered is that without imitation we wouldn't have innovation, and without innovation we wouldn't have variety.


Dwarf Fortress, iconic for its deep, emergent gameplay and ASCII graphics, actually innovated on games like King of Dragon Pass. That older but just as classic text-based clan manager is near unrecognisable to our modern town-builders, but its influence is still felt. Dwarf Fortress has since gone on to inspire its own new generation of city-builders and narrative management games.


While the free version of Dwarf Fortress is great, it's arcane UI and losing-is-fun design does turn off a lot of would be players. So the design was innovated and along came Rimworld. But now Rimworld has been around for years and it's time to see what new innovations have come along since. Let us present to you our top picks of games that are like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress for those who are wanting more, but are struggling to know where to look.


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RELATED LINKS:

The best Rimworld mods

RimWorld multiplayer - a quick guide

RimWorld Royalty review - bringing chaotic order to ordered chaos

The best Rimworld mods

What are the best Rimworld mods? Rimworld is a colony management game with a very simple premise - you must ensure the survival of a ragtag bunch of colonists, each with their own randomly generated skills, backstories, and idiosyncrasies. Depending on the AI storyteller settings, your experience might fall anywhere between 'wholesome farming sim' and 'relentless cascade of disaster'.


There are plenty of Rimworld mods out there to add extras and quality of life tweaks to your playthroughs. Some of them are basic improvements that let you organise your colony better or become more efficient, some add brand new mechanics like hygiene and children, and there are a few that completely transform the game by adding magic or space exploration.


We recommend trying the mod-free experience first, and gradually adding mods once you've tucked a couple of vanilla Rimworld colonies under your belt, and moved on emotionally from the harrowing tales that have emerged from your adventures. Like that time one of your ailing colonists passed away and your doctor immediately fed their corpse to the other patient, or when everyone got food poisoning on a cross country road trip and the only upright colonist, who had sworn never to do violence, was mauled to death by a mad squirrel.


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RELATED LINKS:

RimWorld multiplayer - a quick guide

The best games like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress

RimWorld Royalty review - bringing chaotic order to ordered chaos

RimWorld multiplayer - a quick guide

RimWorld is one of the 'original' steam early access darlings, an excellent survival city builder game that drops you on the frontiers of known space and expects you to scrape a living surrounded by deadly mechs, weird aliens, and weirdos who most of the time want to kill you.


It's a modern successor to something like Dwarf Fortress, an excellent management strategy game, and a wholly solo affair as far as the original design is concerned... but that's not stopped people wanting to play RimWorld in multiplayer. If you're having fun keeping your rag-tag band of misfits alive in a hostile world, imagine how much fun you can have doing it with friends.


RimWorld spent five years in early access, and since its full release in 2018 has had two major patches and a premium expansion called 'Royalty', but no 'official' multiplayer support. What developer Ludeon has done, though, is make modding the game especially easier and it's to the RimWorld mods community we turn to get that multi-person frontier experience we're all craving.


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RELATED LINKS:

The best games like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress

The best Rimworld mods

RimWorld Royalty review - bringing chaotic order to ordered chaos

Version 1.2.2900 updates languages and names

This version updates community-created language data and adds the latest batch of names from users who bought the Name in Game version of RimWorld.

There have been no functionality changes. All savegames and mods should be compatible.

Update 1.2.2753 add new gear, new permits, and many refinements

I'm happy to bring you another RimWorld update! This is a refinement update for 1.2 which also includes some new apparel and permits. Below is the full list of changes.

Compatibility: Hundreds of testers have been trying this build for weeks, so it doesn't have major known mod incompatibilities. Of course, with thousands of mods out there I expect a few hiccups but in general it should be compatible. Non-modded savegames will of course be totally compatible.

If for any reason you want to continue with an old version, please use the Steam betas feature to go back to the version you want.

Thanks to all the testers, translators, and our amazing developers!

-Ty


[h2]New features[/h2]
- New apparel - Beret: Worn by various lower-ranking Imperial nobles.
- New apparel - Cape: This stylish cape functions similarly to a duster. Worn by various middle-ranking Imperial nobles.
- New apparel - Gunlink: This tactical headgear offers no protection, but increases shooting accuracy. It is used by Imperial troops.
- New apparel - Eltex skullcap: This offers little protection, but improves psycasting. Worn by some middle-ranking Imperial nobles.
- New apparel - Stellic crown: A unique, gigantic crown worn by the high stellarch.
- New permit - Steel drop: Call down some steel resources.
- New permit - Glitterworld medicine drop: Call down some glitterworld medicine.
- New permit - Silver drop: Call down some silver.
- New permit - Food drop: Call down some food.
- When forming a caravan, animals now instantly go to the caravan packing spot instead of waiting for a colonist to take them. This speeds up the caravan formation process significantly.
- You can now place blueprints separately for different types of buildings in a monument, so you can make them of different materials.
- We now display a text mote when a player pawn gains a new level in a skill.
- If you have a menu with a very large number of commands, as in a powerful psycaster, some of them will be displayed smaller.
- Use drug commands are now condensed onto a single command if a pawn carries more than one drug type.
- Allow projectiles to be rendered with a visual arc and ground shadow. Activated this behavior for: Phoenix and Grenadier armor, frag grenades, molotovs, emp/smoke/incendiary launchers.
- Allow right clicking on the shuttle with multiple pawns selected to load all allowed ones.
- Mods can now be tagged as translations in the workshop.
- We now automatically add appropriate bedrolls to caravan.
- Pawns will now not lose their skill levels until they fall 1000 XP under zero. This stops pawns from quickly leveling up and down around a threshold.
- Added a warning confirmation for calling for resources that would cause the caravan to be immobile.
- Add some text content to refugee hospitality quest.
- Recipes for crafted things now show work to make in their info card.
- New artwork for orbital targeters.
- Allow quick loading via permit shuttle from non-home maps with no hostiles.
- Upon death, all titles will not be instantly transferred to their heirs. Instead, we give favor up to the inherited title and generate a bestowing quest for the heir.

[h2]Adjustments[/h2]
- Adjust text and icon for the 'Take drug' command.
- In custom difficulty settings, rename "fixed wealth" mode to "wealth-independent" mode, and give the player a slider to control how many years until this mode delivers its maximum threat level.
- Move 'take to inventory' column over just to the right of the drug name.
- Dirt now washes away in rain.
- Changed precious lump hostile threats description to something more concise.
- Psycasts are now sorted on the interface by category and then level.
- Changed psychic droner to start off with medium bad strength as baseline and when spawned on sites its determined by points now, same as the 'raw' gamecondition.
- Ensure all the mech cluster buildings wake up once it was attacked.
- Adjustments to Precious Lump quest text and world object info.
- Make pawns count as guilty while in aggro mental state.
- Disable corpse obsession break for prisoners, as it's very unlikely to happen and is not implemented around this possibility.
- Reorganized permit UI. Exchanged horizontal scrollbar for vertical.
- Give the broadshield pack a smaller drawsize, so that its icon/map-icon is more congruent with its appearance on a pawn.
- Added faction icon to main work tab with click through to faction and scroll to faction.
- Added max lodger count to hospitality refugee quest.
- AI will now only deploy an NPC's Smokepop or Broadshield pack if the offending attacker is hostile. This prevents friendly-fire from activating an NPC's Smokepop/Broadshield.
- Rewrite noble requests for help in the pawn lending quest.
- Increase frequency of bandit camp mission and shuttle crash quests.
- Food and medicine renamed to travel supplies.
- Add hediff links to recipes for implants and parts.
- Apparel with utility now has a score offset to make AI more likely to automatically wear it.
- Made nature shrines minifiable and reinstallable.
- Made shrines improve anima tree meditation.
- Farskip now affects colony animals if not on the home map.
- Colonists and pack animals unload inventory automatically once farskipped to a player home map.
- Climate adjuster no longer will choose negative temperature offset for deserts nor positive offset for ice sheets (it will avoid being not dangerous).
- NPC pawns with titles now purchase random permits on generation.
- We now show the player a feedback message when calling resources to a caravan.
- Trade requests will no longer request patchleather.
- Added quest look target when bestowing ceremony cannot be accepted due to threat.
- Bestowing ceremony text now says that player is expected to keep bestower safe.
- Jump packs and locust armor now require enough chemfuel to provide their initial fuel, and one more component.
- Ensure auto-selected travel supplies doesn't exceed caravan mass capacity.
- Use phrase "Force equip" instead of "Force wear" when referring to utility-slot apparel items.
- Change the "Tornado generator" targeter to a utility-slot apparel item.
- Change the "Orbital mech cluster targeter" to a utility-slot apparel item.
- Increased warmup time for aerodrone permits by 1 second.
- Removed full-map light up effect of all strikes except orbital beam.
- Icons of spacer armor now display as off-white instead of dark gray.
- Adjust eltex gear colors to be darker.
- Shield renaming for clarity and consistency. "Mortar shield" is now "mech high-shield". "Bullet shield" is now "mech low-shield". "Broadshield pack" is now "low-shield pack". "Broadshield projector" is now "burnout low-shield". "bullet shield" psycast is now "skipshield". No code or defNames were changed.
- Rename orbital strike permits to aerodrone strike (for fiction coherence reasons).
- Don't autoselect beer, ambrosia, flowers or insect jelly in the form caravan dialog.
- Bestower is no longer required to have archotech eyes.
- Neural heat overload can no longer cause psylink degradation or any other permanent damage.
- Member stripped goodwill penalty increased from 10 to 40.
- Royal apparel production costs rebalanced.
- Prevent farskip when caravan is overweight.
- Improve meditation and medical rest priorities to allow meditation for pawns with healing injuries if they're on meditation schedule.
- Optimize monument marker drawing.

[h2]Technical[/h2]
- Use the old root keys in PawnLend script to avoid breaking translations.
- Reset pawns enemyTarget after recovering from aggro mental state.
- Selectively finalize equipped stat offsets
- Use ThingDefCountClass to list dropped resources in permits. Added missing honor values. Zero honor cost produces a config error.
- Spread out re-validating FloatMenuOption across multiple frames.
- Improve FloatMenuMap caching and AddUndraftedOrders check order for better performance.
- Make the 'try add to inventory' debug option.
- Tweak the drawSize of various headgear to ensure their on-map size is congruent with their on-pawn size.
- Royal title requirement thought workers now pass RoyalTitle object into Formatted and GrammarResolverSimple provides all required symbols.
- Added some missing apparel score offsets for utility armor.
- GenStep_ConditionCauser now checks for existing buildings at scatter spot.
- Medieval surgeries now have links to the proper hediffs.
- Fixed an issue where if the "Insect spawning rate" custom difficulty setting was set to zero, it caused unnecessary every-tick re-checking of whether a hive should spawn more pawns.
- Remove remaining mentions of "default" load folder from ModUpdating.txt.

[h2]Fixes[/h2]
- Fix: Colonist with a sick thought won't meditate at all.
- Fix: Pawn lend initial description and final letter mismatch.
- Fix: Ability duration on the tooltip is shown in hours even for low values.
- Fix: Gunlink displays shooting accuracy stat offset as %.
- Fix: Becoming neutral/allied with imperials after taking the deserter quest then entering their site allows you to take the neuroformers without a fight.
- Fix: Auto-rebuild doesn't work on bridges.
- Fix: Quest prisoners can spawn on door tiles and walk away.
- Fix: Overlapping keybinds for assigning pawn and toggle prisoner-owned for beds.
- Fix: Psycast disabled status is not being updated in shrunk mode.
- Fix: Auto mortars are always active.
- Fix: Compressed commands are drawn from top to bottom.
- Fix: Quest reward pawn died before quest was accepted.
- Fix: Not all curve marks being drawn on graphs.
- Fix: Errors on generating long range mineral scanner quest via debug tools.
- Fix: Psyfocus target value on the gizmo tooltip is not updated until you finished adjusting it.
- Fix: Colonist pods returning from a 'pawn lend' quest can roof punch.
- Fix: No mech cluster building is multi-selectable
- Fix: Keyed translations from a mod can't replace existing values with the same key and log an error instead.
- Fix: XML Attribute IsNull only works on simple fields.
- Fix: Psylink neuroformers that are in a storage area do not appear on a resource readout.
- Fix: Ensure Graphic_RandomRotated preserves the of wrapped graphics.
- Fix: Projectiles were invisible for the first few cells of flight, due to them inheriting and interpolating their launcher's y layer, and being clipped/obscured out of the camera
- Fix: Auto Charge Turret fires when stunned
- Fix: Can't prioritize chatting with a prisoner if some other warden is already doing it.
- Fix: Unfogging adjacent cells of buildings which are more than 1x1 of size doesn't work properly.
- Fix: Grammar errors in a few 'title requirements not met' thought descriptions.
- Fix: Apparel scoring algorithm ignores heat armor.
- Fix: Rescuing downed noble ends shuttle rescue quest.
- Fix: Bandit camp returnees don't unload.
- Fix: Its possible to arrest non-violent/downed pawns and not have their faction notified of member captured.
- Fix: Some wrong import settings on a few UI icon graphics.
- Fix: "Unchangeable" text from visually overlaps with "Clear forced" button in assign-outfits panel.
- Fix: Incorrect memory thought when refugee arrested or violated and incorrect letter text when violated in refugee hospitality quest.
- Fix: Join letter in hospitality refugee quest remains (with disabled accept) if pawn leaves map before quest has ended.
- Fix: Rare exception when changing the "Allowed area" restriction of a colonist in the Schedule tab, while the colonist is performing certain multi-step actions (such as being in the middle of reloading a mortar).
- Fix: Gloomlight would prevent a Sun lamp from producing "brightly lit" cells within the radius of the Gloomlight. Due to: the glowColor of the Gloomlight not having an explicit alpha of zero. We now correctly ignore the alpha from the xml.
- Fix: Bestower quest has a rootSelectionWeight of 1.
- Fix: Quest helper went wild man, now wandering around on map, can't arrest or empire becomes hostile.
- Fix: Drug scheduling for inventory does not function when set to 1.
- Fix: Stellarch and other non-rewardable title holding pawns don't get any permits.
- Fix: Logging null leader error for factions which don't need a leader.
- Fix: Meditation preventing pawn from attending a gathering or giving speech.
- Fix: Using explanation text meant for anima tree (after letting letting it being enhanced with shrines) on other focus objects.
- Fix: Condition causer can be spawned ontop of power conduits (wiping them).
- Fix: lastPsylinkAvailable is reset whenever a game is loaded, causing fewer neuroformer quest rewards.
- Fix: Finding throne room spot for bestowing ceremony does not work if throne is blocked in front and back.
- Fix: In custom-difficulty settings, the minimum value of "Turret rearm cost" was set to 1%.
- Fix: Bestowing ceremony doesn't update permit points.
- Fix: Extra newlines in quest descriptions.
- Fix: If the "Insect spawning rate" custom difficulty setting was set to zero, it caused insect/mech hives to spawn every tick once they reached their next spawn time.
- Fix: Calling a shuttle to a caravan always costs favor instead of initiating cooldown.
- Fix: Resources with null stuffProps can be accepted as "Stony" resources in monuments.
- Fix: NRE when trying to get all pawns with specific mental state in quest part.
- Fix: Shuttle auto-load does not properly work on shuttle assault quest return.
- Fix: Bestowing ceremony escorte can be used as a fighting force. There will now be negative effects if they are killed.
- Fix: Bestower goes to wrong room for ceremony (added fallbacks when no spot in thronerome can be found).
- Fix: Animals refusing to eat reachable food when restricted to an area.
- Fix: Exception during reward-giving Quests when custom-difficulty setting "Quest Rewards" is set to 0%.
- Fix: Pawns don't face table when eating.
- Fix: Healer mech serum heals love
- Fix: Player blueprints prevent mech clusters from dropping.
- Fix: Attacking a settlement with a shuttle causes the map to be smaller compared to caravans and transport pods.
- Fix: Some single-use utility items could be used multiple times via shift-clicking.
- Fix: GenStep_MechCluster spawns mech that are awake, but marked as dormant.
- Fix: Pawn keeps meditating with a focus object that has 0 focus offset.
- Fix: "Clear prioritised work" command can interrupt neuroquake cast.
- Fix: Can't rescue invisible colonists.
- Fix: Lack of back-compatibility for mods that use old style of defining offsets in FocusStrengthOffset_BuildingDefs.
- Fix: Caravan food auto selection gives rotting food higher weight.
- Fix: Sick pawns falling out of bed because of trying to do meditation for joy.
- Fix: Errors on viewing bestowing quest while target pawn is not spawned.
- Fix: Uncapitalized first letters in some paragraphs.
- Fix: Arrested Refugee Leader can not be sold, leaves to unusual behavior.
- Fix: The mouse-attachment that indicates what resource is contained in areas found by ground-penetrating radars should show even when the area is fogged (such as under a mountain).
- Fix: Setting the butchering or mining yield to a high value in the custom difficulty settings may not result in actual increased yields.
- Fix: Mission shuttles cannot auto loot.
- Fix: Taking wake-up to inventory same wording as taking wake-up.
- Fix: Non-heat psycasts can be spammed when it shouldn't be possible.
- Fix: GetBuildingDefsForCluster_NewTemp() creates an infinite loop.
- Fix: Teetotalers can use drugs normally by using the new gizmos.
- Fix: JobGiver_OptimizeApparel.ApparelScoreRaw() reads an uninitialized variable which can lead to some weird behavior especially if there are modded races.
- Fix: You can use farskip on the caravan you're in.
- Fix: Received spelt recieved in mood and notification letter for titles.
- Fix: SoundDefOf.MeditationGainPsyfocus plays on loop after done meditating.
- Fix: Prisoner refugee leaves when refugee quest ends normally.
- Fix: Arrested refugees will join the player colony if arrest job is interupted before placing refugee in cell.
- Fix: Permit prerequisites are removed even when you don't have the permit.
- Fix: Can banish quest lodgers through character card UI.
- Fix: Game breaks if quest lodgers have RunWild mental break.
- Fix: Various typos.