RimWorldrecently received a new paid DLC, titled Odyssey, which enables players to pilot their own spaceship. It is the fifth expansion forRimWorldand succeeds the Anomaly DLC released in April 2024.
Since first rolling out in 2018,RimWorldhas grown steadily throughout this period, courtesy of the survival sim game’s quality and the back-to-back success of its various expansions. Over the course of Royalty, Ideology, Biotech, and Anomaly DLCs, it has consecutively hit a new peak in terms of concurrent players on Steam.RimWorld’s thriving modding communityis also understood to be a factor behind its continued popularity. The latest DLC, Odyssey, went a step further than its predecessors and allowed the sci-fi title to reach over 85K concurrent players, its highest ever, on Valve’s platform.
On July 11,RimWorldreleased the Odyssey expansionand, in turn, gave players access to the gravship and a plethora of other features. The gravship is a newly added mode of transport that the player can use to travel across the planet and into orbit, opening up opportunities such as scavenging from abandoned satellites and extracting minerals from asteroids. It is a base inside a spaceship and can house multiple rooms for survivors, workshops, and labs. Moreover, in-game resources called gravcores can be used to upgrade the ship. While the base game already involves players getting onboard a spaceship and leaving the planet, there is no gameplay aspect that lets them take control of their spaceship and fly it to different places. This ability can now be unlocked by purchasing the Odyssey DLC for USD 24.99 on PC. Even though PS4 and Xbox One ports ofRimworld’s sci-fi western adventuredo exist, they currently only offer the Royalty and the Ideology DLCs.
Apart from the gravship’s inclusion, Odyssey also brings a bunch of new weapons, quests, and enemies, alongside five biomes, over 40 animals, and a landmarks system. Among the new kinds of regions are glacial plains, glowforest, grasslands, lava fields, and scarlands, posing fresh challenges forRimWorld’s base-building experts. On the other hand, the player’s arsenal was expanded to include a golden revolver, a sawed-off shotgun, and a rifle to take on hunter drones, wasp drones, and more new threats. The Odyssey DLC was rolled out in tandem with the free Update 1.6, which brings gameplay tweaks, performance improvements, and quality-of-life additions for all players.
RimWorld’s Odyssey expansion has only been out for a few days, and it has already hit “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam. In keeping with previous expansions, it has also given a major boost to the game’s player count. What will be interesting to see is how long the Odyssey DLC, which is the most successfulRimWorldDLCplayer count-wise, can sustain this level of engagement.
ABOUT ODYSSEY
Build your own gravship
Build your own gravship and travel across the planet! Land anywhere you want to explore, hunt for treasure, scavenge forgotten gravtech, and bring back souvenirs like a charming hermit crab or a gold-plated charge rifle.
It starts small: just a grav engine, a few rooms, some thrusters, and a tank of chemfuel to get you airborne. But over time, it becomes a home - a mobile colony of bedrooms, labs, hospitals, workshops, and everything else your colonists need.
To expand your ship and go further, you’ll need to collect gravcores. You can recover these glittertech devices from insect-infested caverns, ancient reactors rigged with traps, crashlanded space wrecks, and orbital platforms.
Odyssey is about exploration, adventure, and new ways to play. Live as nomads that move with the seasons, and kidnap raiders by taking off while they’re aboard! Embark on a 100-day journey around the world, and collect one of every animal to build your own zoo. Design the weirdest, ugliest, most gloriously unhinged gravship and see how far it gets you. Or, hunker down inside an asteroid and live as long as you can in space. You can play Odyssey any way you like.
Explore new biomes and landmarks
Odyssey adds several new biomes that change how and where you play.
The newlandmarkssystem combines with these biomes to create endless landscape variation. Landmarks have different features that can affect everything from map generation to plant variety to rare resources like obsidian. Some features even add explorable underground maps - like the insect megahive! No two landmarks are alike.
Survive beyond the atmosphere
Break past the atmosphere and fly into orbit with your gravship!
In space, you’ll land on wrecked orbital platforms, explore derelict satellites, and mine ore-rich asteroids. But look out - rival space scavengers don’t take kindly to competition.
Mechanoid wrecks promise the most advanced gravtech and unique treasures, but murderous machines lurk among the frozen debris.
Space is harsh: no oxygen, sub-zero temperatures, and a single hull breach can be lethal. Airtight walls protect your colonists and their pets from the vacuum of space. Keep the power on, or the oxygen pumps will shut down. Build airlocks with vac barriers to prevent depressurization, and equip spacefaring colonists with vac suits before they exit into the void.
Cute, terrifying, and intelligent wildlife
Odyssey adds over 40 new animals that can be tamed, trained, traded, and eaten. You might start your game in the grasslands with a single crow that steals your crops, but as your story progresses, your gravship could end up as an aviary filled with swans, peacocks, flamingos, and quail.
Animals can be taught new skills that make them cute and useful. For example, cats and dogs can now nuzzle colonists more often to lift their mood. Predators like wolves and big cats will hunt down specific targets for you. Other pets may dig up minerals or bring back foraged snacks. Even animals that can’t normally be trained - like the humble walrus - can now be upgraded using a sentience catalyst: an ultratech injection that enables the animal to learn new tasks. So now Wally the walrus can fight your enemies.
Some species can do more than just bite and scratch. The mastodon’s deafening trumpet rattles enemies and throws off their aim, while the legendary alpha thrumbo’s roar is said to send attackers fleeing before the first shot is fired.
you’re able to also fish! Different fish appear in different biomes and bodies of water. Colonists can reel in meals like tuna and salmon, as well as other strange catches.
Quests across the planet and beyond
You’ll discover new quests through ancient maps, passing travelers, and mysterious signals.
New weapons, traps, and enemies
A new unique weapon system lets you arm your colonists with special weapons they find - a sawed-off shotgun clears the room in a second, an AI-assisted rifle scope makes the worst shooter accurate, and a fully golden revolver just looks cool.
New gear helps with new threats. Hunter drones chase their targets and explode on contact. Wasp drones jab their prey with paralyzing needles. Ancient sentries patrol ruins with a scattergun to blast apart intruders. The cyclops mechanoid barrages enemies with shield-piercing gamma beams. And deep below, the insect hive queen stirs among her chittering spawn.
The machine hive mind
Far above the planet, the mechhive pulses with hate. Its mechanoids reproduce endlessly, and they will never stop attacking until every human on the planet is dead. When you reach the inhuman mind behind this terror, you face a choice. Will you destroy it and shut down every mechanoid for good - or take control of its power?
Odyssey comes with a brand new album of music by Alistair Lindsay, composer of the RimWorld soundtrack. If you’d like to support Al, the OST will also be available to purchase the same day Odyssey releases.
UPDATE 1.6
Performance improvements: A major part of update 1.6 is performance optimizations, especially for late game colonies that often struggle with performance. We reworked many systems to spread out their workload. The pathfinding system is now fully multithreaded and batched, and the lighting system is also multithreaded to make it much faster. There were lots of optimizations made to caravan foraging calculations, egg-laying pawns, alerts, hauling, animal pen calculations, as well as fixes to several major memory leaks.
We significantly reduced game launch times in version 1.6! For example, on our development machines version 1.5 previously launched in 18.57s with all expansions. Now version 1.6 launches in4.66s- and that’s with an additional expansion!
Note that your startup times and performance improvements may differ from our tests due to bottlenecks unique to your PC or mods.
Better planning: Plans are more versatile than ever. Sketch out your base using 9 colors to differentiate your plans. Use blue for living quarters like rec rooms and bedrooms, orange for production and workshops, red for furniture, and so on. Plans are a lot easier to use too. You can copy and paste plans, rotate them, and give them names to remember what they’re for.
Designator draw styles: Designator tools, like placing walls and floors and giving orders, now have different drawing styles - this changes their pattern when you click and drag them. Previously, there were only rectangles and straight lines. Now, you’re able to choose from shapes like angled lines and filled or empty ovals. Great news for builders who want to add more shape variety to their base! (No more googling pixel circle generators.) Squares are also easy to make - just hold control while drawing with a designator.
Caravan camps and quality-of-life changes: Pitch temporary camps while travelling as a caravan. This creates a playable map for your colonists to eat, stabilize, and regroup when someone’s bleeding out, starving, or sick with the flu. But don’t get comfy - after a few days, enemies will close in.
The caravan tab makes it a lot easier to load or unload items. And in an emergency, you can order your caravan to depart immediately - colonists will get out of there ASAP, leaving behind unpacked items, animals, and even downed friends.
Easier building upgrades: You can now place blueprints over certain buildings to swap materials or upgrade them. This applies to walls, conduits, doors, sandbags, barriers, fences, chairs, and beds. For example, you can place a plasteel wall blueprint over an existing wooden wall - this means you don’t have to manually deconstruct the wall, wait for it to finish, and then place the new wall blueprint down.
Search bar improvements: The in-game search bar (bottom right corner magnifying glass, or hotkey “Z”) is better at finding things. It’ll look at your colonists’ gear and any containers, and you can use it on the world map. We’ve also added a search bar to the save / load menu to find that old favorite savegame “asjkdsjkdfs2_final_final2_dying”.
Map generation: We’ve reworked how map features behave to make the world feel more organic and varied. Rivers now curve more naturally and carve walkable banks when running through rock - larger rivers even form canyons. They also better match their angle on the world map and can generate with fertile riverbank terrain for farming.
We’ve made rocks more interesting! Coasts and mountains come in more diverse shapes, and the world map now shows where features like caves are in the tile inspect pane.
We’ve also added smaller environmental flair like cypress trees that grow in mud and marsh, and glow pods that always spawn by insect hives for nasty ambiance.
Flying animals: Chickens, ducks, and geese can now fly! Flying makes them faster, lets them soar over obstacles like fences, and means they can land or leave from just about anywhere.
Scaria rework: Scaria got scarier! Infected animals now look the part - mangy, red, and covered in sores. You really don’t want to get close, because wounds from scaria-infected creatures cause “scaria infections” - these behave like a normal infection, but cause full blown scaria upon reaching 100%. Humans turn too.
Room changes: Colonists are happy with mediocre bedrooms, and they’re less upset by awful ones. Medical beds contribute less toward a room becoming a hospital due to situations where barracks could become hospitals from a single bed. Some production buildings now get their best work done when they’re in the right room (e.g. research benches in labs). This makes it more rewarding to build reasonable-looking bases with purpose-specific rooms, instead of stuffing everything into one big hell-chamber.
Armor and weapon changes: We’ve rebalanced some combat gear to make things more useful and less clunky. Plate armor benefits more from high-end materials. Advanced armors don’t slow you down as much. Flak jackets and pants offer better sharp protection, while flak vests no longer cover the shoulders.
Some ranged weapons are deadlier. Sniper rifles fire faster and hit more often. Charge lances reach further. Revolvers and miniguns are more accurate. Pila hit harder and faster. Charge rifles deal more damage and reach further. LMGs shoot faster with a small damage boost.
UI improvements: On the world map, there’s a “Jump to…” gizmo that shows your colonies, caravans, and quest locations so you don’t have to spin the globe to find them. There are also special colored borders for world objects: green for active maps and yellow for anything you type in the search bar. You can rename bills and use the new “make default” button for policies. Plus many minor but convenient UI improvements.
New art: Water is more beautiful - it reflects the sky and ripples when walked through. There are also new desiccated corpses for big birds and filth textures for sandbags.
Quality of life: Tons of little QOL changes! Quests joiners now show their best skill before you accept them so it’s not a total dice roll. Colonists always prioritize burying people in sarcophagi over graves, and they won’t burn your medical supplies by default if you have a “burn drugs” bill. They’ll also move items out of the way before building doors. Plus, steam geysers are easy to spot when placing a geothermal generator.
Miscellaneous: We’ve got a bunch more small things for 1.6 that are covered in the full changelog. Among these changes are paintable bridges, the ability to dress other people (like prisoners), and toggles on special trees to stop them from being accidentally cut down.
RimWorld
WHERE TO PLAY
RIMWORLD IS A STORY GENERATORIt’s designed to co-author tragic, twisted, and triumphant stories about imprisoned pirates, desperate colonists, starvation and survival. It works by controlling the “random” events that the world throws at you. Every thunderstorm, pirate raid, and travelling salesman is a card dealt into your story by the AI Storyteller. There are several storytellers to choose from. Randy Random does crazy stuff, Cassandra Classic goes for rising tension, and Phoebe Chillax likes to relax.BUILD. DEFEND. EXPLOREThe game generates a whole planet from pole to equator. You choose whether to land your crash pods in a cold northern tundra, a parched desert flat, a temperate forest, or a steaming equatorial jungle. Different areas have different animals, plants, diseases, temperatures, rainfall, mineral resources, and terrain. The challenges of surviving in a disease-infested, choking jungle are very different from those in a parched desert wasteland or a frozen tundra with a two-month growing season.ENDLESS COLONIST INTERACTIONYour colonists are not professional settlers – they’re crash-landed survivors from a passenger liner destroyed in orbit. you may end up with a nobleman, an accountant, and a housewife. You’ll acquire more colonists by capturing them in combat and turning them to your side. So your colony will always be a motley crew.
