RimWorld

RimWorld

729 ratings
War Crimes, and How to Keep Getting Away With It
By Samir Al-Hayjid
War, the lifeblood of nations. It's a great thing, but sometimes you need to break a few rules to make an atrocity
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Introduction
If you choose to follow the actions detailed in this guide, do note that you may not be very popular amongst the natives of the planet. However, more enemies means you will always have more opportunities to practice your skills, sharpen your creative mind and develop a feel for your strengths and limitations. It should be noted that you should become at least proficient in the game in relation to combat, setting traps, establishing industry and annihilating your enemies. I have over 400 hours of playtime and believe i have mastered all necessary game mechanics to some degree. However, I will readily admit that Randy Random still beats me senseless come late game, Cassandra Classic's Alphabeavers still eat all my trees and Pheobe Chillax still haunts my dreams with her intestinal parasites and simultaneous tribal raid concoction. To ensure you are ready for the actions of this guide, play for at least 3 years on Randy Random commitment mode on the max difficulty as to ensure you are able to live with your actions, so even if Giggles gets her eyes ripped out by manhunting squirrels you will continue to play despite the consequences of your actions. This playstyle is supposed to be fun, which of course means risks must be taken and suffering endured, which means no reloading saves.

(Read the following paragraph like a stuttering schoolchild reading his religion essay)
This essay will proudly contain 5 sections, each relating to the 7 cardinal virtues of Christendom (except chastity and humility) as no matter how many people you kill your actions should always reflect the holy virtues that should all guide our lives and blah blah blah

Yeah, the holy virtues are my themes but really it's just five topics that sort of relate to them but I just wanted to be somewhat interesting.

Note: I do not condone any of the actions described in this guide in the real world and any attempt to recreate them in real life will get you killed or thrown in prison, duh.
Virtue 1, Temperance
Temperance is the virtue of abstaining from gluttonous or greedy behaviours, but in Rimworld this means controlling your wealth meter as to ensure you keep getting away with your crimes. It is no secret that dangers such as raids scale in difficulty depending on how wealthy your colony is. Thus, it is important to constrict the level of trade, commerce, production and raiding you perform as to ensure your colony's future. In other words, don't go hording rooms full of silver or building gigantic golden statues in people's bedrooms (unless they have the jealous trait or something). Ensure you have weapons, a roof over your head, a nutrient paste dispenser, enough organs to supply a nation, a table, a walk-in holocaust oven, a bed to sleep in and strong perimeter walls as the bare necessities. Gift your excess resources to your rivals as to ensure peace. (Don't give anything to the pirates though). Burn, destroy or give away anything you will never use, as one man's trash is another man's treasure, and the pirates really want your trash.

Do not let the corrupting presence of drugs enter your colony due to it's immense wealth, stat penalties, the danger of addicted colonists and gargantuan mood debuffs caused by withdrawal. (Except for flake that is, the tribes love that ♥♥♥♥ and will buy hundreds of units if you visit their bases). If someone corrupted by chemical addiction enters your colony, whether by choice or by force, put them to bed and administer the drug they are so addicted to them by force until they die, so as to kill them with mercy and to make them happy as they die. This will remove both the drugs and addicts at the same time. If they are addicted to a drug that cannot kill them, burn the drug in a campfire, put the addict in a room with enough food to last a week, replace the door with a wall and add more walls around the already existing ones, and they cannot harm anyone when they fly into their murderous rages.
Virtue 2, Kindness
When you commit your war crimes, people may call you things like "murderer" or "genocidal". However, they do not see that you do these things out of kindness and mercy. After all, those children were tribal. It's not genocide, it's pesticide.

While this sounds like the beginning of a manifesto, know that it is a kindness to kill them quickly yet painfully as to ensure no one crosses you in the future. My favourite way to do this is by constructing the walk-in holocaust oven. Construct a snaking hallway of stone 1 tile wide (not including walls) at the entrance of your base so that raiders will be forced to go through it to access your base. At the end of the hallway, have a colonist start a nice roaring fire with some wooden furniture, and once the raiders are all in the hallway, lock them in. The room temperature will quickly soar the several hundred degrees Celsius. Skin melts, flesh turns to ash, organs boil, you win. Once all of the people inside have died or collapsed from heatstroke, deconstruct one single wall so that the hallway inside is considered outside by the game. The room will instantly revert to the outside temperature, and you can capture the survivors as prisoners of war.

Speaking of prisoners, we will discuss what you can do with them. However, to make this easier for ourselves we will no longer categorise these things as human. This is easy to do if they are tribal, as they have achieved this before you even captured them. We will now refer to your property as "investments" or "meatbags".

How to deal with your investments:
1. Heal their injuries
2. Check the faction they belong to. Do they belong to pirates or not? Do they belong to a spacer faction?
3. Check their worth. First check their skills, then their traits, then their health and age.
4. Identify all colonists with outstanding skills and traits (industrious, iron-willed, beautiful, etc.) and recruit them
5. If they do not belong to spacers or pirates, release all unworthy investments (people with age over 65, investments with terrible trait combinations, for instance property with the traits gay and misogynist if female, traits such as bloodlust, pyromaniac, depressive, neurotic, etc.
6. If pirates or spacers, check the value of each investment using the information screen available for each colonist. If value is above 1700 and for some reason you haven't recruited them, write down their name on a piece of paper.
7. Set all other investments to have one kidney, one lung, and free choice between their liver or heart harvested.
8. Sell the investments who's name have been written down to a slave trader
9. ???
10. Profit
"But Sam, what're we gonna do if there aren't any slave traders???" -You
Me:
Virtue 3, Charity
As much as it pains me to say it, sometimes you have to be kind to do evil things. After all, you can't do war crimes if you are dead. Thus, sharing your material wealth with your allies and enemies alike is a worthwhile investment. However, this should only be done to achieve a goal. For instance, give leather or something fairly useless to a caravan to increase relations then use the comms console to order a caravan you actually want such as bulk goods trader, war caravan or slave trader. Finally, Buy cheap slaves, harvest their organs, butcher them for their skin, feed the meat to your rats, make cowboy hats and sofas out of their skins, sell all of these things to the caravan and make fat stacks of silver, only to realise you wealth level is getting too high and give it all to your enemies to make them your allies.
Virtue 4, Patience
Much like how you must wait for people to burn to death in your walk-in holocaust oven, or wait for the thrumbo to pass out from drunkenness before you stab it, you must always be patiently watching for opportunities to progress your colony. And much like when the thrumbo wakes up from his alcohol induced stupor right as you start stabbing, you must keep calm and stay cool headed, cooler than your base's third consecutive cold snap that wiped out your crops just before they became harvestable. You cannot plan to escape failure if you do not anticipate failure at every available opportunity. Carefully inspect the placement of every room, every piece of furniture, every trap and every corridor for weakness and inefficiency for every tiny improvement you can make will stack, and after countless miniscule changes to your colony, they really stack.

It should also be noted that no matter how rough your difficulty setting, Randy will supply the milk if you endure his pain. Just know that even after Randy burns your crops into ash, causes a "zzzt..." in your hospital and gives your cows the plague, once he has taken away everything he has given and more, he will auto-tame a husky to make you feel better and drop cargo pods filled with milk.

Let us all give a moment of prayer to thank Lord Randy Random, Provider of Milk
Virtue 5, Diligence
Once you play Rimworld enough, you will find it shapes your thought patterns in a special way. Take a simple problem, such as corpse disposal. How would you go through solving it? Would you dig graves for every person you kill? Sure, it seems moral and all that, but after killing hundreds of people, that is a lot of room taken up. Not to mention the amount of dead bodies your gravediggers come into contact with is a significant mood debuff. Do you leave them in a pile to rot? Now you have made several areas of the map unable to be accessed without, again, having significant mood debuffs. Perhaps you could burn the corpses! But even then, that is a lot of wasted resources, and cannibalism is a very volatile way of harnessing those resources. Thus, you could harness the meat associated with the dead body through feeding it to your rats. no mood debuffs, no waste, and you can feed carnivorous animals without hunting or ranching. Why not go further? Through manipulation of the allowed areas tool, sic hordes of rats on unsuspecting raiders, annihilating them without putting your own colonists at risk. The rat numbers drop to manageable levels after each raid, and the immense influx of corpses means more food is available to the rats that survive, ensuring a near infinite food source. Combine this with the extremely fast reproduction rates of rats and you have potentially endless waves of shock troops to deal with raids and sieges alike.

Once you play Rimworld long enough you start seeing everything as an opportunity to be taken, a resource to be consumed, a facet to be manipulated. You find yourself thinking over the most time-efficient, resource-efficient and lucrative ways to perform trivial tasks, as the only thing you know you have in Rimworld is time. So I ask you this: Will you seize the opportunity for victory while you have the chance, or let time slip through your fingers doing trivial tasks such as cleaning and corpse disposal?

In my hundreds of hours of playing this God-forsaken game, I know now that the most powerful thing in the game isn't some item or weapon or tool, but rather yourself. Through planning, intelligence and sheer force of will, you alone can make the game bend to your desires. A sharp, sober mind can plan for any scenario, any challenge no matter how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. And if you have the willpower to pick up your game from the ashes of a failed colony, you are unstoppable.
Conclusion
In conclusion, keep your wealth in check, be merciful to your victims and put them down yourself, give away your excess production to ensure your future and never leave anyone to tell the tale. If you follow these well, you can just keep getting away with it.

I have been Sam Hyde, and thank you for listening to my ramblings.
146 Comments
Bluur 9 May @ 4:03am 
I dunno why people reading this long shit. I didn't got anything.
Latex Santa 10 Feb @ 9:23am 
@Samir Al-Hayjid
The internet both broke and fixed me.
So I'm feeling that, yeah.
Samir Al-Hayjid  [author] 9 Feb @ 5:07pm 
@LatexSanta

You just listed my three favourite pieces of art. I'm glad you can recognise I'm the bastard child of that incestuous threeway.
Latex Santa 9 Feb @ 7:20am 
This reads like the lovechild of Industrial Society and Its Future, Million Dollar Extreme and Sseth Tzeentach. I love it.
FFF-class Trashero 6 Feb @ 1:07am 
Thank God
NutArchive 30 Dec, 2023 @ 1:33pm 
this is one of the funniest guides I've ever read
infra-dan-accelerator unit 84725 24 Dec, 2023 @ 1:00pm 
i will NEVER give my silver to a bloody tribe that killed my dog
22 Dec, 2023 @ 4:24am 
HE CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT!
TheGamer 23 Nov, 2023 @ 9:50pm 
top ten racism moments
Typhlotion1010101 19 Jul, 2023 @ 5:28pm 
HE CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT!