Every RimWorld DLC Explained: From Royalty to Anomaly

Ludeon's colony simulator has grown well past its original scope, with four official expansions stacking new mechanics on top of an already deep game. Each one targets a different slice of life on the rim, from imperial politics to body horror. Below is a rundown of every RimWorld DLC, including release dates, prices, and what they actually bring to a save.

The Four Official Expansions

As of today, RimWorld ships with four paid expansions: Royalty, Ideology, Biotech, and Anomaly. They install side by side and pile their systems into the same colony, so picking them is less about choosing one and more about deciding how much complexity you want to swallow at once.

Royalty

Released: February 24, 2020

Price: $19.99

The first expansion drops a high-tech faction called the Empire onto your map. Stay friendly and you can call in trained imperial soldiers, every one of them carrying a death acidifier that vaporizes their gear if they fall. Cross the Empire and those same troops come back to flatten your base.

Royalty also introduces titles. As colonists earn honor through quests, they climb through ranks that unlock perks and gear. The catch is that higher-ranked pawns get pickier, demanding fancy bedrooms, fine meals, and obedient servants. A baron in a bad mood can become a real problem.

The headline feature is psycasting. Pawns with the right neural implants throw out psychic abilities ranging from short-range teleports to outright mind control. New mech clusters act as a counterweight, packing combat encounters with mortar nests and shielded turrets to break through.

Ideology

Released: July 20, 2021

Price: $19.99

Ideology hands you the steering wheel on your colony's belief system. You build a memetic philosophy from the ground up, setting precepts about food, clothing, drugs, slavery, rituals, and dozens of other touchpoints that all feed into colonist mood and behavior.

Once your faith is locked in, colonists fill social roles like moral guides and group leaders, each with their own bonuses and ritual responsibilities. Rituals themselves range from solemn sacrifices to organized rave parties, and successful ones reward the colony with favor points to spend on relics, blessings, or specialist abilities.

The expansion also opens up new building styles, from cavernous temples to underground archotech tunnels, plus relics scattered across the map that double as quest objectives.

Biotech

Released: October 21, 2022

Price: $24.99

Biotech is the heaviest expansion mechanically, layering three large systems on top of the base game: children, mechanitors, and xenotypes.

Pregnancy and parenting work end to end. Pawns can conceive the old-fashioned way or through artificial insemination, then raise the kid from infant to teenager. Learning, growth moments, and parental bonds all feed into who the adult colonist eventually becomes, which can pay off long-term or backfire spectacularly depending on the upbringing.

Mechanitors turn certain colonists into commanders of small mechanoid armies. Build, repair, and direct labor mechs for farming and hauling, or heavier combat models for raid defense. Each unit eats bandwidth from its mechanitor, so the build is about balancing how many machines one pawn can keep online.

The third pillar is genetics. Using gene extractors and assemblers, you can splice colonists into xenohumans with custom traits, from fire breath to night sight, alongside the metabolic drawbacks that keep them balanced.

Anomaly

Released: April 11, 2024

Price: $24.99

The most recent expansion, Anomaly, pulls the game sideways into cosmic horror. A dormant monolith on your map can be activated, and once it is, increasingly nasty entities start crawling toward your walls.

Threats include flesh beasts, writhing masses of biomass, and Sightstealers, invisible predators that pick off lone colonists in the dark. Containing captured anomalies in special holding cells produces research that pushes the storyline forward, with each escalation unlocking new tools and new dangers in equal measure.

If body horror is not your thing, the monolith can be left alone or even worshiped as the machine god, which softens the tone considerably and turns the DLC content into a more passive backdrop. Either path is supported, so the same expansion fits either a gore-heavy run or a calmer survival save.