I've had the most bewildering, delightful moment.

I was testing out a mod I'm making by doing a proper playthrough, using a relatively small mod list. This made the list, because it's delightful and I love it. I used the droid start, because I've done crashlanded for years and it's gotten stale.

We get drifters now and then, and I take them in because I'm feeling charitable and so are a couple of my early recruits due to their ideology. One of them ended up being a child running from raiders. Well, ♥♥♥♥, I HAVE to save that one. So now I have Lloyd, who is tiny but making do with his lot. I put him on recreation all day, he could be a cool dude later on. He was a VERY cool dude later on.

I ended up doing a royalty playthrough, because we kept getting a large number of quickly executed, quickly-paying quests. Raids, monuments, that sort of thing. Only got a prisoner quest like, once. All that honor went straight to Lloyd, because having a royal child is fine by me. The kid already can't do much and I intended to spoil him anyway. He's OUR kid now.

We ended up with a lot of recruits. In particular, we got a sanguophage shuttle crash, and I managed to recruit the sanguophage and both their thralls. Enter Peter, and his thrall Griffith.

So Peter and Griffith already have a nice rapport with each other, and end up as lovers. They achieve pregananan, and by the time I've gotten the Stellarch satisfied for his 12 days, they've given birth. Something went wrong about the birth, though. The usual setup - where you say hey, this is the doctor and he's showing up, and hey, this guy's the father and he's showing up for emotional support - yeah, that wasn't available. I thought this was very wacky, but I played along.

I didn't really pay much attention to the broken childbirth. Someone rescued them when they lost the ability to walk, and they had a healthy birth amidst the background noise of the colony. This would be important later.

A few more raids and one royal transport shuttle later, I highlight the whole lineup of colonists and get them the hell off the planet. Everyone makes it in, because everyone can walk. I didn't notice this. I completely failed to notice that there wasn't, like, a baby intentionally getting loaded onto the shuttle as its own little thing.

By the time the developer credits start rolling, I realize - "Wait, we didn't specifically go evacuate the baby. We just all got on the shuttle. I think we abandoned the kid on the planet." I think very little of this.

A few hours later, I absent-mindedly pull up RimWorld and load the latest save. Realizing I've pulled up the colony just before they got to bail, I go looking for the kid. There's no baby. Wait, it didn't spawn a kid? Where's the kid? That can't be right. So, I go into the messages. I expected a funny error or a stillborn. I wasn't ready for what I got.

"Griffith gave birth to a healthy baby!"

Okay, cool, so they didn't have a stillborn or something. I skim over the stats. Yeah, the loved one wasn't there. I physically drafted him and put him in the room, along with the doctor, because the event didn't quite work right. That doesn't count, so it gets nothing more than a acknowledgement.

"The baby has been given the temporary name HT-5510. You can change it until 1 day after birth."

Wait, "HT-5510" is their name? Silly game, it's using the name generator for a droid- wait.

The baby is literally a battle droid. That's why they were able to walk onto the shuttle. They're a droid. They don't have child phases. They're just manufactured as adults. Why is this child a battle droid?

So amidst everything else going on, I have now a single added delight: "I don't think that's your kid, Peter."

So there it is. The story of how a small, surprising bug worked its way into the run and turned a C-plot hilarious right under my nose, and I almost completely missed it.

11/10 best colony I've run in three years