RimWorld for New Colonists: Setup, Storytellers, and Your First Eight Steps

RimWorld drops the player onto a frontier planet with no manual, no objectives, and a worrying amount of complexity. The depth is the whole appeal, but it also means a first colony can collapse before its first winter for reasons no one bothered to explain. This guide walks through the choices that matter on the setup screens and the early actions that turn a vulnerable group of strangers into a working settlement.

Picking a Starting Scenario

Every RimWorld run begins with a scenario. The base game ships with four, and DLC adds three more. Each one changes the opening hand of colonists, resources, and tech level, so the choice has real weight even before the map loads.

Crashlanded

The default option and the right pick for a first run. Three colonists, a generous resource stockpile, and mid-tier technology give a comfortable foundation without trivializing anything.

Lost Tribe

A native tribe of five with almost no understanding of technology. The larger headcount sounds appealing until research timers reveal how long it takes to catch up. Skip on the first run.

The Rich Explorer

One pampered colonist and a pile of valuables. The starting gear is generous, the population is not. A single accident can end the campaign.

Naked Brutality

One colonist, no clothes, no supplies, no tools. It is exactly as advertised. Skip.

DLC Scenarios

Royalty, Ideology, and Biotech each add a scenario. All three are interesting in their own way, all three are also harder than the base options. Save them for a second run once the core systems click.

Choosing an AI Storyteller

After the scenario, the game asks for a storyteller. The storyteller controls the pacing and intensity of random events. The choice is not permanent and can be swapped mid-run, but the early personality shapes the rhythm of the first season.

Cassandra Classic

Cassandra runs on an escalating curve. Threats grow in step with the colony, and the late game gets brutal. She is not the relaxed pick the name suggests.

Phoebe Chillax

The friendliest option, and the right call for learning the game. Events still scale, just with breathing room between them.

Randy Random

The community favorite. Chaos dressed up as a storyteller. Randy might leave a colony alone for two in-game years, then send three raids in a single week. Pick him for the stories, not for the survival rate.

Difficulty

Difficulty sits next to the storyteller pick. Strive to Survive is the normal-feeling baseline. Adventure Story is friendlier and a better fit for a first colony.

World and Location

The world generation screen looks intimidating with all its sliders and faction options. Leave it alone for a first save. Default settings produce a perfectly playable planet.

Starting Site

Clicking any tile opens an info panel covering biome, temperature, growing season, terrain, and stone types. The sweet spot for a beginner is a temperate forest with mountains, ideally one rolling granite and marble. Temperate forests have long growing seasons and tolerable winters. Mountains offer natural walls and a near-permanent overhead roof, which trivializes a lot of early defense and weather problems.

Movement difficulty, soil fertility, growing days, and disease frequency all live in that tile info. A bad tile makes the game harder in ways that have nothing to do with skill, so it is worth taking a minute here.

Choose Your Ideoligion

Players with the Ideology DLC will land on the Ideoligion screen. The system controls the cultural and religious behaviour of a colony and can radically reshape playstyle. For a first run, either disable it or pick the "Classic-Like" preset. The mechanic is fun, just not while learning everything else at the same time.

Create Characters

Almost every stat on the character creation screen is up to taste, but a few choices stand out.

Passions to look for (the flame icons next to skills):

• Plants
• Medicine
• Construction at level 5 or higher

A double-flame passion gives a meaningful XP bonus. Spreading those three across the starting roster covers food, healthcare, and building, which is roughly half of the first month's gameplay loop.

Traits to reject:

• Incapable of Dumb Labor
• Incapable of Violence
• Incapable of Hauling
• Serious health conditions like asthma, frailty, or chronic illness

Any of these turn a colonist from an asset into a liability. They are not unplayable in the long run, but a beginner does not need that kind of headache on top of everything else.

The First Eight Steps After Landing

Once the colonists drop onto the map, the game starts ticking. Pause first. The pause button buys time to look around, plan, and queue actions before any hostile event triggers. The following sequence creates a stable opening regardless of the exact scenario.

Step 1: Equip Weapons

Raids can fire on day one, and bringing fists to a rifle fight ends quickly. Click each colonist, right-click a starting weapon on the ground, and confirm. Three armed colonists handle most early threats.

Step 2: Set Work Priorities

Open the Work tab at the bottom of the screen. At minimum, every colonist should have Firefight, Patient, Clean, and Haul enabled. Double-flame passions should also be active for the matching job. Leaving everything enabled for everyone in the very early game is fine, since there is not enough work to specialize yet.

Step 3: Build a Shelter

Walls and roofs come from the Architect menu. A natural cave or carved-out mountainside saves materials and time, but a wooden shack works too. Mark walls, and the colonists handle clearing and roofing automatically. A roof is critical for temperature control and rain protection.

Step 4: Designate Stockpiles

Inside the new walls, open Architect, then Zone, then Stockpile. Drop a zone large enough for the starting pile of resources. Indoor storage slows decay significantly, and on some items stops it outright. Once the zone exists, colonists will start hauling without further input.

Step 5: Add Furniture

Productive colonists are happy colonists, and no one is happy sleeping on dirt. Build, in this order:

• Torches for light and warmth
• A bed for every colonist
• A table and chairs in a dining area
• A chess table or other recreation object

All of these live under the Furniture tab of Architect. If wood runs low, Architect, Orders, Cut Plants marks trees for harvest.

Step 6: Plant a Farm

Hovering over a soil tile shows its fertility. Fertile soil is best for growing zones, but normal soil works. Architect, Zone, Growing Zone places a farm. Two zones of around 20 tiles each is a solid starting capacity. Rice goes in zone one because it grows fast. The second zone should be potatoes or corn for variety and longer storage life.

Step 7: Build Food Storage

Position a small food room next to the farm. Make sure at least one wall borders the outdoors, because that wall is going to host a cooler later when refrigeration becomes feasible. Inside, use shelves rather than a plain stockpile zone. Shelves sit under the Furniture tab. Once placed, click a shelf, hit Storage, Clear All, and then enable only food categories. Other shelves can be configured by copying the settings from the first one. Tidy food storage prevents colonists from dragging meals across the base.

Step 8: Set Up a Kitchen

Build a separate room attached to the food storage. Separation keeps the kitchen sanitary, which prevents the food poisoning chain that wipes out morale during a busy season. Place a fueled stove from the Production tab of Architect. Wood will feed it until electricity goes online. Click the stove, hit Bills, Add Bill, Cook Simple Meal. The default is ten meals, but Do X Times should be swapped to Do Until You Have X. The colonists will now keep a permanent buffer of ten cooked meals on hand without manual intervention.

What Comes After

With the eight-step foundation in place, the basics are covered: defense, shelter, food, and a working colony loop. Everything from here is choice. Research, electricity, defensive walls, animal taming, drug production, and trading caravans are all on the table. A future HolyHosting guide will dig into power and tech progression once these fundamentals feel second nature.