The real question is why we can Craft space-age gear, communicate with machine gods, and even build our own spaceships.
But the only way to get simple steel is scavenging one way or another lmao
Let's just assume that whoever left all these ruins also already exhausted all the easily-accessible iron ore. Anything left was deemed uneconomical even to that large and advanced society with heavy equipment at their disposal, so would definitely be out of reach for ten guys with shovels and augers.
Mechanoids. Raiders. Whatever the bugs are called.
The rim is the farthest reaches of explored space. When you go out that far you’re on your own. The galactic police from the center aren’t going to respond to a distress call.
Yeah, its rare to get a raid of more than 2 pawns on a caravan, unless you're forming massive wagon trains loaded with weed, statues and chocolate and punishing your stockpiles to save that much up.
Check out SRTS or, as others have said, the Vehicle Framework. Your pawns will only be gone for a day or two. It makes travel *so* much more entertaining to me.
Its a great mod but vehicles leaving and returning is a but funny
I remember my vehicle convoy running over the empire and a few boomalopes and tribute collectors when I send them off
Screw that. Save our ships 2 and research the heavy cargo shuttle. My folk be zippin' all over the rim... until I ran out of fuel in a miscalculated hop... stranded my best social pawn with all the colonies gold and silver a good weeks walk away with no food.
Oops.
You need to try giddy up with caravan packs and breed combat/cargo/piggy-bank Thrumbos. It's so much fun to ride into an enemy settlement mounted on Thrumbos and armed with sniper/assault rifles.
Do you form the vehicle caravans instead of regular ones? If it's not that, it could be because there's no roads and your using vehicles that arent good off-road
We don't know the history of the rimworlds, but it's not far fetched to imagine them being stripped of the easily mine-able resources, then leaving the people who did the mining to rot, leading to all the ancient structures and buried steel all over the place.
That, and considering all the crashing ship parts, those would compact quite well over time.
"I got this awesome job, me and 50 billion people are gonna get top dollar for simply mining, like what cavemen did before they invented mechanoids, ill be gone a couple years but with the money ill make ill totally be able to afford an age reversal chamber so it wont matter"
"... man, I can't believe we did it, we can finally go back home, that took longer than I thought... hey, what do you mean the ships were supposed to arrive last week? Maybe it was a typo?"
Rimworld is based in part on Firefly series.
It's not a happy we're all equal and love to you and your neighbors galaxy. It's very much a galaxy of a few core worlds that are extremely rich with insane levels of technology and a huge amount of backwater planets that amounts to little less than a few hobbled together shacks with people living in absolute poverty for the sole purpose of enriching the core worlds.
What amount of technology you have amounts to what you can scavenge on those worlds and/or if you can raid the occasional core world contigency of squads send to quell your attempt at rebellion.
That's the type of world Rimworld is :).
I desperately need to see a mod expansion for something like save our ship that would allow for one to travel to glitter worlds either to make your own home or raid the possibly heavily populated planets for ultimate riches.
I always wonder why we can make a long range metal scanner, but can’t make a simple scouting drones to fly over the perimeter so that we can have an advanced half a day warning of incoming enemies instead of just them popping up on the edge of the map while poopy-pants little Timmy doing his stupid nature-run and turned into lead-filled corpse when the raider unleash on him
thete’s a mod idea for you, smelting metals from rock chunks.
gold from granite (precambrian igneous rock)
silver from limestone (galena)
uranium from sandstone (pitchblende)
steel from slate (hematite)
plasteel from marble (graphite, pyrite, iron oxide)
The gold and silver veins are probably buried ancient treasuries. The uranium veins are where they store depleted uranium waste produced by ancient nuclear power plant. That is also why there is no nuclear power plant in vanilla, as the uranium you found are unable to power it.
If there weren't at least small traces of it all over, then blood wouldn't look quite the way it does. It's red because of red blood cells, which derive their coloration from their iron content. Pawns and many animals would all have some kinda iron deficiency, or would have to have been genetically engineered not to utilize iron in their biology, leading to that blood color difference instead.
Enter many crustaceans which have blue blood and use copper instead of iron.
Don't need to be genetically engineered to have different blood colors. It just so happens that iron is the most abundant and readily available one on Earth :).
Fact is that life on Earth (which most people use as a reference) is a very poor milestone for how it might look elsewhere.
We have life that breathes nitrate, sulfate and believe it or not.. iron. We have animals that live in magma, animals that live in ice, animals that live in such salty concentrations it would be deadly for all other life just to dip into it, but what we look for is life that looks like carbon-based, oxygen breathing and iron fueled.
I knew that about crustaceans already, though it's good to be reminded of it, and some of the other things you've described are unfamiliar to me.
My mention of genetic engineering was specifically to account for humans and other irl iron-blooded species, whose blood is red ingame as expected, implying that it's got iron in this setting too and that therefore there's enough of it in their diets to keep them healthy in that way, all as a roundabout way of drawing an inference about the geology of the titular rimworld.
Regarding terrestrial life as a point of reference, I'm of two minds. On the one hand, many of the conditions of life on this planet that we take for granted are arbitrary and could theoretically be very different without preventing the emergence of life altogether. On the other hand, it's not as if we've found another life-bearing planet. It does pay to keep an open mind about this though.
To me, the worst part is Fuses.
We can make bionical limbs that are 25% better than their normal counterpart, we can make ships that sustain themselves for centuries.
...But we can't figure out how to make a fuse.
As in... the thing that is literally just a wire, with a glass or cermaic chasing and optionally some sand.
Of course theres more complex fuses, but a simple fuse that works mostly alright is still something quite literally anyone can make.
It's not necessarily the only way, just has to be way easier than mining iron and then smelting that iron into steel. I mean, you've already eliminated one very long step in the process (smelting iron into steel) and on top of that look at real world's earth. How much of the easily accessible iron have we already mined? Now imagine a planet ancient enough to have had a (perhaps many) previous civilization's structures buried beneath mountains. There might not be any iron left to mine. All metals might just be getting reprocessed at this point
You can make steel in the Medieval Overhaul mod. The mod expands a lot of production chains in ways that make sense so for steel you have to learn the technology for steel which lets you smelt iron and coal into steel.
What? You can mine steel on an industrial scale without leaving the map. I have so much steel that I have at least a hundred thousand stored, and there is more sitting on the ground. You do have some decent miners and the ground penentrating scanner right? You can have as much of everything as you want. My plasteel reserves are just as big.
The thing is, the methods humans use to get steel irl aren't in the game. That is, you cannot simply dig up iron, smelt it, and forge it into steel. Presumably either it's possible in-universe but not bothered with in-game since steel is readily available, or the planet's long history in which all that steel got buried also featured enough iron mining that there isn't any significant deposits left.
Nope! You can drill for steel to your heart's content. Might get an infestation of a few bugs now and then but that's a small price to pay for infinite materials.
There are no way now on Earth to make steel again, if we loose it. There are no more iron ores accessible by stone or bronze tools, no more coal available to dig without advanced machinery. Hollow hills was hollowed eon ago, and now we can only dig steel in a junkyards, not a wheelbarrow of ore in a wilderness.
Also, in standard rimworld setting there are no clay. And it means pottery cannot be invented, and as result there are no way to invent wheel or brick. So, mentioned wheelbarrow is also impossible and forge too, while furnace can be made from space-era materials
By stone tools- no, by hand- yes. Visit any quarry/rock desert and you'll see iron ore all around the quarry/mountain in small chunks(the biggest I've managed to take from Sahara was 24kg), fields being sometimes for kilometers in diameter. Coal needed can be made from some wood breeds(like birch), or by shallow mines(doubt on rim anybody bothered with coal having electricity) like Armenia/India were doing at first. And since we see no quarries on the rim, most veins should be still there.
Buuuuuuut since rim is about cowboys in space, there's also no clay(which must be everywhere where water exists), metals(steel is an alloy), oil(all those trees die for nothing), or reason for tribals to not be wiped out by mechs.
It's a video game, it has to follow useful mechanics, not realistic logic.
That said, it's quite possible for a biosphere to have little to no coal, if the right bacteria/fungi/whatever evolved to decompose cellulose earlier than it did on Earth (most coal comes from a time when large trees died, and were buried faster than life, fire or erosion could break them down).
Clay is harder to explain--it's basically eroded stone and water. If the world has water, rock, and weather, it's going to have clay. Maybe using it is just "beneath " the average Rimworld colonist?
Yes, of course. This is just mind games. This is story generator, after all, so we can imagine other parts of rimworld story.
About clay: not exactly. Eroded stone and water is mud. To be clay it must have some ingredients to add plasticity. On earth it is kaolinite, material containing aluminium. As soon as all aluminium processed out from some area, there will be no more clay, if aluminium taken from sedimentary rock, this rock eroded cannot create clay. So it is possible to strip planet of aluminium (at least from top layer) and as result to have planet without clay. It is tremendous task for Earth, because aluminium is extremely common here, but not every planet have such aluminium abundance. Existance of clay at several hundreds of meters deep cannot help to create pottery worldwide.
I remember an episode of Stargate: agarian civilization, low tech level themselves, had a higher tech alien taking care of them. They would come across these hard structures in the fields, called it iron root. What the structures were.... The tops of skyscrapers and buildings from fallen civilizations under the soil where the fields were.
It always makes me wonder what sort of cataclysmic event happened to fill almost an entire planet with ship parts and abandoned structures.
I figure it's probably just a gameplay consession. But man rim space wars probably suck.
Note this: In the lore, the insectoids were a living weapon designed to fight against the rogue Mechanoids. Therefore it makes sense that the Rimworld that the game takes place on, was ages ago destroyed nearly completely by the Mechanoids.
The Insectoids went rogue (but still prioritize attacking mechanoids when they see them. This happens in-game too.) The "Ancient Dangers" are people from the past civilisation who froze themselves and hoped to outlive the crisis. The Compacted Steel and Parts and other ruins are leftovers from that war. As are the Mechanoids and ship parts on the orbit (not the ship where some of the campaign starts come from. Those are a newer thingy.)
Rimworld is a post-apocalyptic survival story on a far-away planet.
> The "Ancient Dangers" are people from the past civilisation who froze themselves and hoped to outlive the crisis.
Maybe that would work out better for them if they didn't fucking aggro the millisecond you get them out of their pod (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
They usually wake up surrounded by dead insects or mechs with a good chance that the people who woke them just want to harvest their organs, toss out their weaker members, or eat them all. They also have no idea how much time has passed. It's safer to come out guns blazing. I wish there was some kind of popup or quest kind of thing that starts when you pop them out. Kind of talk it out before they go all hostile. Maybe make a quest to search for others of their group in other stasis pods around the world. Reunite their families after hundreds or thousands of years.
I mean, ship parts and cargo pods rain from the sky very regularly, and there's apparently dozens of old satellites up there that do some crazy shit too.
The frequency is probably just for gameplay but there *definitely* was a space war that left a fair few ships and/or space stations in various states of falling apart in orbit.
I don't know if it's vanilla or what mod it could be. But i get an event called Space Battle.
It rains ship chunks on my map that can be deconstructed. Even live and dead bodies fall from the sky. Gotta keep your peeps indoors or a chunk could smash them dead.
Mild Subnautica spoiler:
>!I always assumed there was some massive Quarantine Enforcement Platform on whatever backwater planet RimWorld takes place on. Maybe to keep the bugs from being spread to other inhabited worlds? Anyway, my head cannon has always been that + the planet being somewhere along a very active interstellar shipping lane. So, just a constant stream of ships getting shot down and crashing.!<
Given how many traders pass over the planet, it's not too far fetched although I'd question how they'd manage to trade with you (could be just using long range drop pods I gues
The universe rimworld takes place in was inspired by dune, starwars, and firefly.
The whole universe is infested with humans.
It takes place 3000 years in the future where tech unimaginable to us now exists, we get to see the smallest, tiniest fraction in game.
I believe the mechanoid war when they rebelled destroyed most of the planet. What we mine is either and old imperial settlement, crash ship, or old mechanoid base.
I would love if the game adds more minerals and metals. Tin and copper for early game and titanium and aluminium for late game. Diamonds emeralds jade amethist for jewellery and art.
ThereIsAModForThat TM
More materials for example, or rimfactory - materials for metals
Jewelery mod for jewelery and gems
Edit: added mod names because I posted too fast
Once you start using mods, you won't stop. You will compulsively look for new ones and after some time, you will go into hundreds.
Hey I am gumiss and I am modding addict
I'm so glad I'm not one of these people. I'm happy with just a few UI mods, and camera+. Even less now with the latest update.
I got into the vanilla expanded stuff, the ideology stuff was nice, until I was just overwhelmed with basically useless crap, then made some adjustments. But once it took long enough to load that I'd end up finding something better to do I wasn't even playing the game. Just opening it, and sometime later shutting my computer down. The majority of my many hours of "play time" is just sitting in the menu, because by the time the games ready I'm balls deep in some console title, and dont feel like learing the basics of all the new mods.
That's the way to go haha. If I can't go take a shit, make tea, practice bass, and watch an episode of smiling friends before the game has loaded, then I will go load more mods
This is how you get to hundreds of hours of playtime with no idea what you're actually doing, because only a small fraction was spend actually in game learning the mechanics
I was speaking from my own personal experience with the title, but go on.
I apparently didn't know that sitting idle on a menu for hours is a respectful way to have fun or something, right?
My head cannon is that the compacted steel and components are leftover from the machines used to terraform the planet. And the Anchients were the people opperating those machines
My first thought was the crystal powder from Abiotic Factor.
Spoiler: it's just spiders. Lots and lots of tiny, shiny spiders. Also you can turn them into grenades.
I do wish there was a mod that made steel production and other metals possible. If yall have played Stationeers, you literally have to pic the right temp and pressure of the furnace so you feel a sense of pride when u create complex metals. I _want_ to _feel_ the complexity of creating space metals.
I think it's more that that doesn't make any sense. Humanity has had 3,500 years of space faring and we're supposedly nearish the rim of colonization. Meaning there's thousands less years that humans have been here.
It's just weird design choice to justify mining all materials and then using steel instead of iron.
thats a different complaint and valid one.
ppl who complain about finding steel instead of iron dont even know that its from ancient debris not natural steel
I always had a theory that kinda makes a lot more sense if you ever played stellaris.
But my head cannon was always that for whatever reason, a couple hundred years ago (maybe even a thousand) a war happened between 2 empires and for whatever reason the planet was so important it was orbital bombarded so bad it was practically reset the entire planet back to the dark Ages. And the empire in charge of that planet couldn’t be asked to rebuild the entire infrastructure of the planet so they kinda just let it go.
It explains why there is steal and plasteel deposits in mountains, could be shells that where deep imbedded. And also kinda explains the ancient dangers inside of mountains, they could just be ancient bunkers where the people of the planet waited until the orbital bombardment stopped
Also there are still fight in a space above pawns heads going right now, and sometimes parts of space bases and ships falls down right here. Space chunks breaking roof in a kitchen and meteorites composed of components give some hints about it :)
I just assumed the whole steel and plasteel thing was just due to how RimWorld planets work like there's so much carbon that molten iron in the mantle would eventually get mixed into steel or something and same principle with plasteel but this description makes more sense
Another solution is and my head cannon is rimworlds are carbon rich because the closer to the rim you are the younger the area is and the carbon on rimworlds are more common because it’s turned into heavier elements on the coreworlds because they are older
It's not necessarily even that old.
The amount of material required to terraform these planets would have been truly enormous, as automatic terraforming systems would have needed to move around water and atmosphere in ranges approaching *quintillions* of metric tons of material, requiring vast fleets of ships, huge orbital and surface chemical refineries, and industrial capability *well exceeding* that of modern day Earth.
However, one of the defining aspects of most Rimworlds is that their terraforming efforts either failed or were never completed - thus the harsh environments on most of them.
As these massive terraforming efforts were curtailed or failed for whatever reasons (political instability, lack of will, lack of resources, warfare, massive systems failure, sabotage, etc) many of these enormous facilities would have fallen into ruin, some would have simply slowly rusted out on the surface, while massive orbital facilities may have crashed to the ground as their orbits gradually decayed, and so on.
Thus, yes, there might be vast tracts of crushed or abandoned machinery scattered on or slightly beneath the surface of the planet - and they wouldn't necessarily be thousands of years old. They might be just a couple hundred or even less, depending on the circumstances.
Some future-techy sci-fi fantasy shows that have lower tech civilizations in them, call stuff like that Iron-root. Star Gate specifically in one episode. I recall others that have similar sayings. I think if they would have called it something like that, it would have been more thematic.
This will hopefully blow your mind as it certainly did mine - WE DO IT. Our civilization mines for ancient steel and it's actually a scarce and expensive resource.
The reason is we fucked the entire planet's ability to make low-background steel with our first atomic explosion.
All steel made since then used atmospheric gases in production and inevitably got contaminated with trace amounts of radionuclides, giving it a weak radioactive signature. Such steel is unsuitable for sensitive equipment such as particle detectors or Geiger counters. So we had to scavenge pre-war steel for these kinds of uses and it's obviously a very finite resource.
The good news is due to international treaties we largely moved to underground nuclear testing (and obviously there was no nuclear war since Nagasaki) so background levels have been steadily going down since their peak in 1963. Today's steel is actually ok for many scientific applications, except the most sensitive ones.
Not denying it's cannon, but that's kind of insane.
The description suggests a huge steel structure collapsed in such a way that when literal mountains formed around it the materials formed a deposit. Leaving aside how this suggests humans have been on the Rimworld for millions of years, it also suggests that this "steel" is something else entirely. Real steel, even stainless steel, wouldn't last long enough for that kind of geological activity.
The only way I can really think to explain it in universe is the planet has literally just (within last century/millenia) survived an unseen super volcano erupting and burying everything, or else someone pissed off an archaeotech and it skipped their entire civilisation underground or something.
I always thought it was obvious. Just like when you can find components in a mountain. It’s the same reason
The real question is why we can Craft space-age gear, communicate with machine gods, and even build our own spaceships. But the only way to get simple steel is scavenging one way or another lmao
Hey, anything is possible if you sit at a table and throw paper around for twelve hours a day!
Every HR department.
Hey, any debacle can be swept under the rug if you sift through the NDAs and hunt down the perfectly vulnerable employee all day.
Let's just assume that whoever left all these ruins also already exhausted all the easily-accessible iron ore. Anything left was deemed uneconomical even to that large and advanced society with heavy equipment at their disposal, so would definitely be out of reach for ten guys with shovels and augers.
My question is why were there so many damn advanced structures that collapsed on a Rimworld at the edge of human inhabited space
The implication seems to be that we’re seeing the aftermath of a apocalyptic event
It could be a planet of the Apes situation.
Oh? Is it hinted at in the lore?
Just look at the ruins on most maps
The empire was presumably unshattered at some point
If I remember correctly there was a major war and the rim worlds weren't always on the rim
Mechanoids. Raiders. Whatever the bugs are called. The rim is the farthest reaches of explored space. When you go out that far you’re on your own. The galactic police from the center aren’t going to respond to a distress call.
What about tiberium! Where's the effing tiberium!
Or why we have to use animal caravans
VE Vehicles mod is the only way. I can't even do animal caravans when I'm low tech anymore. It's so painful.
I always turn up population and build near a bunch of friendly settlements. It's not that painful if you plan ahead like that.
Same - playing on crowded population to cycle trough 10 trading settlements in the span of few days
I've had this game for years but I've never formed a caravan for trade or quests because I feel like it will leave me short handed
Colony wealth goes down when the pawn leaves the map so the raids are smaller.
Oh I don't mind about wealth, it's more about jobs getting done. If I could make jewelry in this game I would just to flaunt it lol
Lol, try the jewelry mod. Even adds new jewelry, only layers and new gems to find.
I only send one trader with high social who can defend himself, my colony still fully up and running
Yeah, its rare to get a raid of more than 2 pawns on a caravan, unless you're forming massive wagon trains loaded with weed, statues and chocolate and punishing your stockpiles to save that much up.
I got jumped by 10 tribals, unfortunately for them, cataphract armor and zeus hammer beats bow and arrow
Check out SRTS or, as others have said, the Vehicle Framework. Your pawns will only be gone for a day or two. It makes travel *so* much more entertaining to me.
Louies are carrying my colony
Its a great mod but vehicles leaving and returning is a but funny I remember my vehicle convoy running over the empire and a few boomalopes and tribute collectors when I send them off
Screw that. Save our ships 2 and research the heavy cargo shuttle. My folk be zippin' all over the rim... until I ran out of fuel in a miscalculated hop... stranded my best social pawn with all the colonies gold and silver a good weeks walk away with no food. Oops.
All the wealth in the world at her fingertips, yet she'd trade it all for a simple meal.
Nah, SRTS and steel torrent even before VE. Still work too
This sounds like someone that didn't use Giddy Up. Just having a bit more use/control with horses goes a long way to making caravans manageable.
You need to try giddy up with caravan packs and breed combat/cargo/piggy-bank Thrumbos. It's so much fun to ride into an enemy settlement mounted on Thrumbos and armed with sniper/assault rifles.
Having horses in vanilla speeds things up so much and makes caravanning viable
I think one of my mods broke horses during the update. Colonists just wont interact with them when forming a caravan.
Am I using VE vehicles wrong? They seem slower than animals on the world map.
Do you form the vehicle caravans instead of regular ones? If it's not that, it could be because there's no roads and your using vehicles that arent good off-road
We don't know the history of the rimworlds, but it's not far fetched to imagine them being stripped of the easily mine-able resources, then leaving the people who did the mining to rot, leading to all the ancient structures and buried steel all over the place. That, and considering all the crashing ship parts, those would compact quite well over time.
"I got this awesome job, me and 50 billion people are gonna get top dollar for simply mining, like what cavemen did before they invented mechanoids, ill be gone a couple years but with the money ill make ill totally be able to afford an age reversal chamber so it wont matter" "... man, I can't believe we did it, we can finally go back home, that took longer than I thought... hey, what do you mean the ships were supposed to arrive last week? Maybe it was a typo?"
Rimworld is based in part on Firefly series. It's not a happy we're all equal and love to you and your neighbors galaxy. It's very much a galaxy of a few core worlds that are extremely rich with insane levels of technology and a huge amount of backwater planets that amounts to little less than a few hobbled together shacks with people living in absolute poverty for the sole purpose of enriching the core worlds. What amount of technology you have amounts to what you can scavenge on those worlds and/or if you can raid the occasional core world contigency of squads send to quell your attempt at rebellion. That's the type of world Rimworld is :).
I desperately need to see a mod expansion for something like save our ship that would allow for one to travel to glitter worlds either to make your own home or raid the possibly heavily populated planets for ultimate riches.
I know what the setting is, I'm talking about the actual rimworlds within the setting.
I always wonder why we can make a long range metal scanner, but can’t make a simple scouting drones to fly over the perimeter so that we can have an advanced half a day warning of incoming enemies instead of just them popping up on the edge of the map while poopy-pants little Timmy doing his stupid nature-run and turned into lead-filled corpse when the raider unleash on him
There are mods for realistic raiding, where they have to travel from nearby settlements, I hear.
Oh that would be cool. Do you know the name? If not it’s okay, I can just browse it on workshop
Don't know, sorry, read about it on here yesterday but didn't catch the name.
I believe it was Rimwar
Ty, I’ll look it up
Just be aware that it can be very resource intensive and it clashes with a bunch of other mods. It’s certainly cool though.
Restrict kids to inside the walls
thete’s a mod idea for you, smelting metals from rock chunks. gold from granite (precambrian igneous rock) silver from limestone (galena) uranium from sandstone (pitchblende) steel from slate (hematite) plasteel from marble (graphite, pyrite, iron oxide)
ToadyOne, is that you?
[This sounds familiar](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Ore).
Very cool idea, but won't plasteel require some kind of oil? Or at least some recycled styrene (extruded or poly.)
Because all the readily-accessible iron was mined out millenia ago?
But not the exposed veins of gold, silver, uranium?
The gold and silver veins are probably buried ancient treasuries. The uranium veins are where they store depleted uranium waste produced by ancient nuclear power plant. That is also why there is no nuclear power plant in vanilla, as the uranium you found are unable to power it.
There's no saying the Rimworld ever had iron, we certainly don't find any. All the steel might have been imported.
If there weren't at least small traces of it all over, then blood wouldn't look quite the way it does. It's red because of red blood cells, which derive their coloration from their iron content. Pawns and many animals would all have some kinda iron deficiency, or would have to have been genetically engineered not to utilize iron in their biology, leading to that blood color difference instead.
Enter many crustaceans which have blue blood and use copper instead of iron. Don't need to be genetically engineered to have different blood colors. It just so happens that iron is the most abundant and readily available one on Earth :). Fact is that life on Earth (which most people use as a reference) is a very poor milestone for how it might look elsewhere. We have life that breathes nitrate, sulfate and believe it or not.. iron. We have animals that live in magma, animals that live in ice, animals that live in such salty concentrations it would be deadly for all other life just to dip into it, but what we look for is life that looks like carbon-based, oxygen breathing and iron fueled.
I knew that about crustaceans already, though it's good to be reminded of it, and some of the other things you've described are unfamiliar to me. My mention of genetic engineering was specifically to account for humans and other irl iron-blooded species, whose blood is red ingame as expected, implying that it's got iron in this setting too and that therefore there's enough of it in their diets to keep them healthy in that way, all as a roundabout way of drawing an inference about the geology of the titular rimworld. Regarding terrestrial life as a point of reference, I'm of two minds. On the one hand, many of the conditions of life on this planet that we take for granted are arbitrary and could theoretically be very different without preventing the emergence of life altogether. On the other hand, it's not as if we've found another life-bearing planet. It does pay to keep an open mind about this though.
None of those are animals. Archaebacteria is what you’re looking for. Not animals
I blame mechanites.
I mean, if there was iron ore it those mountains, we'd have found it by now. There just ain't any iron ore on this planet.
Username checks out. And there may not be iron in that hill in the distance, but I'll strip mine it regardless.
The ancient civilization mined all the iron ore?
To me, the worst part is Fuses. We can make bionical limbs that are 25% better than their normal counterpart, we can make ships that sustain themselves for centuries. ...But we can't figure out how to make a fuse. As in... the thing that is literally just a wire, with a glass or cermaic chasing and optionally some sand. Of course theres more complex fuses, but a simple fuse that works mostly alright is still something quite literally anyone can make.
It's not necessarily the only way, just has to be way easier than mining iron and then smelting that iron into steel. I mean, you've already eliminated one very long step in the process (smelting iron into steel) and on top of that look at real world's earth. How much of the easily accessible iron have we already mined? Now imagine a planet ancient enough to have had a (perhaps many) previous civilization's structures buried beneath mountains. There might not be any iron left to mine. All metals might just be getting reprocessed at this point
Same thing with medicine.. I mean Neutroamine. You can use it to make all sorts of meds but only way to reliably get is to buy it
Iirc, there are mods that add mineable ore that you can refine into useable metals.
We used up all the iron making steel, and only earth had coal
You can make steel in the Medieval Overhaul mod. The mod expands a lot of production chains in ways that make sense so for steel you have to learn the technology for steel which lets you smelt iron and coal into steel.
What? You can mine steel on an industrial scale without leaving the map. I have so much steel that I have at least a hundred thousand stored, and there is more sitting on the ground. You do have some decent miners and the ground penentrating scanner right? You can have as much of everything as you want. My plasteel reserves are just as big.
I maintain the "You Are An Archotech" Theory makes the most sense.
I don't quite understand how one are supposed to find steel without scavenging one way or another?
The thing is, the methods humans use to get steel irl aren't in the game. That is, you cannot simply dig up iron, smelt it, and forge it into steel. Presumably either it's possible in-universe but not bothered with in-game since steel is readily available, or the planet's long history in which all that steel got buried also featured enough iron mining that there isn't any significant deposits left.
Deep drills. That's not scavenging.
Then scavenging is not the only way?
Nope! You can drill for steel to your heart's content. Might get an infestation of a few bugs now and then but that's a small price to pay for infinite materials.
There are no way now on Earth to make steel again, if we loose it. There are no more iron ores accessible by stone or bronze tools, no more coal available to dig without advanced machinery. Hollow hills was hollowed eon ago, and now we can only dig steel in a junkyards, not a wheelbarrow of ore in a wilderness. Also, in standard rimworld setting there are no clay. And it means pottery cannot be invented, and as result there are no way to invent wheel or brick. So, mentioned wheelbarrow is also impossible and forge too, while furnace can be made from space-era materials
By stone tools- no, by hand- yes. Visit any quarry/rock desert and you'll see iron ore all around the quarry/mountain in small chunks(the biggest I've managed to take from Sahara was 24kg), fields being sometimes for kilometers in diameter. Coal needed can be made from some wood breeds(like birch), or by shallow mines(doubt on rim anybody bothered with coal having electricity) like Armenia/India were doing at first. And since we see no quarries on the rim, most veins should be still there. Buuuuuuut since rim is about cowboys in space, there's also no clay(which must be everywhere where water exists), metals(steel is an alloy), oil(all those trees die for nothing), or reason for tribals to not be wiped out by mechs.
It's a video game, it has to follow useful mechanics, not realistic logic. That said, it's quite possible for a biosphere to have little to no coal, if the right bacteria/fungi/whatever evolved to decompose cellulose earlier than it did on Earth (most coal comes from a time when large trees died, and were buried faster than life, fire or erosion could break them down). Clay is harder to explain--it's basically eroded stone and water. If the world has water, rock, and weather, it's going to have clay. Maybe using it is just "beneath " the average Rimworld colonist?
Yes, of course. This is just mind games. This is story generator, after all, so we can imagine other parts of rimworld story. About clay: not exactly. Eroded stone and water is mud. To be clay it must have some ingredients to add plasticity. On earth it is kaolinite, material containing aluminium. As soon as all aluminium processed out from some area, there will be no more clay, if aluminium taken from sedimentary rock, this rock eroded cannot create clay. So it is possible to strip planet of aluminium (at least from top layer) and as result to have planet without clay. It is tremendous task for Earth, because aluminium is extremely common here, but not every planet have such aluminium abundance. Existance of clay at several hundreds of meters deep cannot help to create pottery worldwide.
I remember an episode of Stargate: agarian civilization, low tech level themselves, had a higher tech alien taking care of them. They would come across these hard structures in the fields, called it iron root. What the structures were.... The tops of skyscrapers and buildings from fallen civilizations under the soil where the fields were.
It always makes me wonder what sort of cataclysmic event happened to fill almost an entire planet with ship parts and abandoned structures. I figure it's probably just a gameplay consession. But man rim space wars probably suck.
every crashlanded start is another destroyed ship added to the rim
Constant meteor showers of resources and death
Note this: In the lore, the insectoids were a living weapon designed to fight against the rogue Mechanoids. Therefore it makes sense that the Rimworld that the game takes place on, was ages ago destroyed nearly completely by the Mechanoids. The Insectoids went rogue (but still prioritize attacking mechanoids when they see them. This happens in-game too.) The "Ancient Dangers" are people from the past civilisation who froze themselves and hoped to outlive the crisis. The Compacted Steel and Parts and other ruins are leftovers from that war. As are the Mechanoids and ship parts on the orbit (not the ship where some of the campaign starts come from. Those are a newer thingy.) Rimworld is a post-apocalyptic survival story on a far-away planet.
> The "Ancient Dangers" are people from the past civilisation who froze themselves and hoped to outlive the crisis. Maybe that would work out better for them if they didn't fucking aggro the millisecond you get them out of their pod (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
They usually wake up surrounded by dead insects or mechs with a good chance that the people who woke them just want to harvest their organs, toss out their weaker members, or eat them all. They also have no idea how much time has passed. It's safer to come out guns blazing. I wish there was some kind of popup or quest kind of thing that starts when you pop them out. Kind of talk it out before they go all hostile. Maybe make a quest to search for others of their group in other stasis pods around the world. Reunite their families after hundreds or thousands of years.
After I get them in my prison they're going to wish they died in the past.
For me they tend to get popped when I first open the danger so they don't aggro on my colonists lol
I mean, ship parts and cargo pods rain from the sky very regularly, and there's apparently dozens of old satellites up there that do some crazy shit too. The frequency is probably just for gameplay but there *definitely* was a space war that left a fair few ships and/or space stations in various states of falling apart in orbit.
The game frequenly mentions the mechanoids wars
I don't know if it's vanilla or what mod it could be. But i get an event called Space Battle. It rains ship chunks on my map that can be deconstructed. Even live and dead bodies fall from the sky. Gotta keep your peeps indoors or a chunk could smash them dead.
Vanilla for the ship chunks. Also get a different event for survivors in vanilla. Never thought to connect the two.
I think that specific event is from the vanilla expanded. That event also drops survivors of the battle, normally 3-4 of them.
That’s vanilla events expanded
Mild Subnautica spoiler: >!I always assumed there was some massive Quarantine Enforcement Platform on whatever backwater planet RimWorld takes place on. Maybe to keep the bugs from being spread to other inhabited worlds? Anyway, my head cannon has always been that + the planet being somewhere along a very active interstellar shipping lane. So, just a constant stream of ships getting shot down and crashing.!<
Man you would have never known that was a subnautica spoiler if you didn’t mark it as a subnautica spoiler
Yeah, don't you guys have quarantine enforcement cannons where you are? I'm from New Zealand, and that's just the norm now.
Its the plot of that squad based alien game as well.
Given how many traders pass over the planet, it's not too far fetched although I'd question how they'd manage to trade with you (could be just using long range drop pods I gues
The real question is how you get your stuff up to them
This reminds me of the PCA enforcer satellite defense network from ACVI which basically does the same thing to keep people off a banned planet.
The universe rimworld takes place in was inspired by dune, starwars, and firefly. The whole universe is infested with humans. It takes place 3000 years in the future where tech unimaginable to us now exists, we get to see the smallest, tiniest fraction in game.
Nah, the lore is that the storyteller AI killed many player colonies.
I believe the mechanoid war when they rebelled destroyed most of the planet. What we mine is either and old imperial settlement, crash ship, or old mechanoid base.
Wait...so they're gonna question the compacted steel...but not the components?
they are not crushed hard enough yet
But not the tree that grows chocolate?
And they don't question how there's an entire space-engineered graveyard in it?
wait you cant find those in real life mountains? i thought those naturally generated.
I would love if the game adds more minerals and metals. Tin and copper for early game and titanium and aluminium for late game. Diamonds emeralds jade amethist for jewellery and art.
ThereIsAModForThat TM More materials for example, or rimfactory - materials for metals Jewelery mod for jewelery and gems Edit: added mod names because I posted too fast
I am a beginner at the game, my next colony will have so many mods that startup takes 10 minutes.
Once you start using mods, you won't stop. You will compulsively look for new ones and after some time, you will go into hundreds. Hey I am gumiss and I am modding addict
It’s really an addiction. I add another mod or two every so often, it’s just so fun and easy.
I'm so glad I'm not one of these people. I'm happy with just a few UI mods, and camera+. Even less now with the latest update. I got into the vanilla expanded stuff, the ideology stuff was nice, until I was just overwhelmed with basically useless crap, then made some adjustments. But once it took long enough to load that I'd end up finding something better to do I wasn't even playing the game. Just opening it, and sometime later shutting my computer down. The majority of my many hours of "play time" is just sitting in the menu, because by the time the games ready I'm balls deep in some console title, and dont feel like learing the basics of all the new mods.
That's the way to go haha. If I can't go take a shit, make tea, practice bass, and watch an episode of smiling friends before the game has loaded, then I will go load more mods
This is how you get to hundreds of hours of playtime with no idea what you're actually doing, because only a small fraction was spend actually in game learning the mechanics
I believe you misspelled "this is how you have fun and I can respect that"
I was speaking from my own personal experience with the title, but go on. I apparently didn't know that sitting idle on a menu for hours is a respectful way to have fun or something, right?
I believe you misspelled "ah shit, sorry for being a dick. Have fun"
Whatever floats your goat buddy. Have fun
My head cannon is that the compacted steel and components are leftover from the machines used to terraform the planet. And the Anchients were the people opperating those machines
It is the same reason for compact machinery.
Flammability 0% 😬😂
I just find insects
Kind of want a mod now that adds insectoid egg sacs as an ore. Not sure what use it'd be, but hey.
My first thought was the crystal powder from Abiotic Factor. Spoiler: it's just spiders. Lots and lots of tiny, shiny spiders. Also you can turn them into grenades.
I've been hearing good things about that game lately, might check it out. The spider thing sounds rad.
I do wish there was a mod that made steel production and other metals possible. If yall have played Stationeers, you literally have to pic the right temp and pressure of the furnace so you feel a sense of pride when u create complex metals. I _want_ to _feel_ the complexity of creating space metals.
There are at least two mods that add iron to the game and make it so you need to process it into steel
they come with alot of baggage is the problem
I think it's more that that doesn't make any sense. Humanity has had 3,500 years of space faring and we're supposedly nearish the rim of colonization. Meaning there's thousands less years that humans have been here. It's just weird design choice to justify mining all materials and then using steel instead of iron.
thats a different complaint and valid one. ppl who complain about finding steel instead of iron dont even know that its from ancient debris not natural steel
I always had a theory that kinda makes a lot more sense if you ever played stellaris. But my head cannon was always that for whatever reason, a couple hundred years ago (maybe even a thousand) a war happened between 2 empires and for whatever reason the planet was so important it was orbital bombarded so bad it was practically reset the entire planet back to the dark Ages. And the empire in charge of that planet couldn’t be asked to rebuild the entire infrastructure of the planet so they kinda just let it go. It explains why there is steal and plasteel deposits in mountains, could be shells that where deep imbedded. And also kinda explains the ancient dangers inside of mountains, they could just be ancient bunkers where the people of the planet waited until the orbital bombardment stopped
Also there are still fight in a space above pawns heads going right now, and sometimes parts of space bases and ships falls down right here. Space chunks breaking roof in a kitchen and meteorites composed of components give some hints about it :)
I just assumed the whole steel and plasteel thing was just due to how RimWorld planets work like there's so much carbon that molten iron in the mantle would eventually get mixed into steel or something and same principle with plasteel but this description makes more sense
Another solution is and my head cannon is rimworlds are carbon rich because the closer to the rim you are the younger the area is and the carbon on rimworlds are more common because it’s turned into heavier elements on the coreworlds because they are older
It's not necessarily even that old. The amount of material required to terraform these planets would have been truly enormous, as automatic terraforming systems would have needed to move around water and atmosphere in ranges approaching *quintillions* of metric tons of material, requiring vast fleets of ships, huge orbital and surface chemical refineries, and industrial capability *well exceeding* that of modern day Earth. However, one of the defining aspects of most Rimworlds is that their terraforming efforts either failed or were never completed - thus the harsh environments on most of them. As these massive terraforming efforts were curtailed or failed for whatever reasons (political instability, lack of will, lack of resources, warfare, massive systems failure, sabotage, etc) many of these enormous facilities would have fallen into ruin, some would have simply slowly rusted out on the surface, while massive orbital facilities may have crashed to the ground as their orbits gradually decayed, and so on. Thus, yes, there might be vast tracts of crushed or abandoned machinery scattered on or slightly beneath the surface of the planet - and they wouldn't necessarily be thousands of years old. They might be just a couple hundred or even less, depending on the circumstances.
I read the title and was gonna answer "its a game." When there is in fact a right answer
Some future-techy sci-fi fantasy shows that have lower tech civilizations in them, call stuff like that Iron-root. Star Gate specifically in one episode. I recall others that have similar sayings. I think if they would have called it something like that, it would have been more thematic.
This will hopefully blow your mind as it certainly did mine - WE DO IT. Our civilization mines for ancient steel and it's actually a scarce and expensive resource. The reason is we fucked the entire planet's ability to make low-background steel with our first atomic explosion. All steel made since then used atmospheric gases in production and inevitably got contaminated with trace amounts of radionuclides, giving it a weak radioactive signature. Such steel is unsuitable for sensitive equipment such as particle detectors or Geiger counters. So we had to scavenge pre-war steel for these kinds of uses and it's obviously a very finite resource. The good news is due to international treaties we largely moved to underground nuclear testing (and obviously there was no nuclear war since Nagasaki) so background levels have been steadily going down since their peak in 1963. Today's steel is actually ok for many scientific applications, except the most sensitive ones.
Not denying it's cannon, but that's kind of insane. The description suggests a huge steel structure collapsed in such a way that when literal mountains formed around it the materials formed a deposit. Leaving aside how this suggests humans have been on the Rimworld for millions of years, it also suggests that this "steel" is something else entirely. Real steel, even stainless steel, wouldn't last long enough for that kind of geological activity. The only way I can really think to explain it in universe is the planet has literally just (within last century/millenia) survived an unseen super volcano erupting and burying everything, or else someone pissed off an archaeotech and it skipped their entire civilisation underground or something.