My crappy 6 pawns. On the 4th year colony with the bare minimum because my researcher is lazy and bad at his job lol

The result of three months of RL time and focused play on a singular colony, God's Cradle is a 15 year super colony born of a single goal: the quest to get the Archonexus ending. This is the third of three colonies - rather than abandon and do the "legitimate" ending of going to the Archonexus Core, I decided to use More Archotech Garbage (Continued) to build the Archonexus Core in my own base.

The result? The stripmining of nearly a hundred maps via Gravship launches, to get the steel, gold and silver necessary to build a massive monument to the Archotech, the machine god, and a base shape like none I've ever constructed before. Leading this settlement is one character who has survived 15 years of in game time, the prophet herself, Astoria. She who has led her people from the ruins of God's Grave - where only the husk of a fallen Archotech core remains - has taken her people to the far north, from the temperate woodlands of home to the the transitonary settlement of God's Quest to this place, gaining technology and understanding as they drew ever close to the god machine itself.

There have been many, many battles for this place, yet the mechanoids that plague other lands oft leave the Steelhearts in peace, perhaps aware that they answer to a far grander, far higher, authority. Ceaseless attacks by insectoids borne planetside by infested starships, pirate raids, and ceaseless assaults from primitive tribals who would rather destroy something they cannot comprehend than seek enlightenment, these are common threats to God's Cradle...yet for all that, the people are not cruel. They are charitable and provide aid to wanderers, have rescued infants and children lost in distant ruins, and do not partake in acts of cannibalism or other atrocities. Even the use of the ripscanner is carefully regulated, retained solely for use upon delusional madmen and raiders alike, and even there, it is seen as a religious necessity - a chance for those misguided souls to undergo a spiritual cleansing, one that tears away their bodies, but leaves their soul tehtered to the high subcore, ready to be born anew into a vessel of steel and silicon.

All 32 colonists are heavily augmented - some are androids via Android Tiers Continued - with bionics and synthetic organs, with the first one received always beign the calling card of the Steelhearts - the replacement of their organic heart with a synthetic one, bringing them closer to the Archotech they worship.

No killboxes or similar are used: instead, this base makes use of armored bunkers, combat mechanoids and soldiers equipped with powered armor and heavy rifles, the bleeding edge of modern warfare.

A critical part of this colony's routine, the Seraph - the colony's eerie, triangular gravship - is a major source of resources; it regularly carries miners to distant mountains, allowing their resources to be extracted to further the development of this sacred cathedral, forever labouring in promise of the Time of Awakening, when the Archotech might rouse from its long slumber and take its most faithful children to the promised land...though the Seraph also takes assault teams, when necessary, to foreign lands, so as to reduce the pressure on God's Cradle, and to remove threats to the common good of all.

A deserter vault, located deep in the mountain. Started by one man and the impid and waster aligned with him- searching for a safe place for their families, now grown into a steadfast bastion against the empire and their cohorts,

Hexagon base is small, efficient, and brutal. There’s only room for four (or eight if couples) colonists at any given time with no plans to expand that.

Mods

This is base game, not Royalty. Combat Extended (not CE Guns, but I get the ammo types and turrets), Dub’s Paint Shop (to paint the power armor), otherwise vanilla.

Colonists

Most of them have a similar loadout to this (every day carry for my team, one has a sniper, three have assault rifles. I use the molotovs a lot in close range, fire is so strong in CE. This image was taken the summer before the main screenshot submission

No Killbox

Most of the time, I step outside the colony walls to take down threats before they get to the main base. If there are mad animals, I can close the north door (which usually remains open) to stay safe. With large raids, they funnel in to the north where my multiple incendiary IED trap sets a lot on fire, before starting to take damage from the heavy auto turret and my colonists.

With sappers, they usually break in on a single wall (not the edge rooms) where I can hit them with mortars (before they get in) and my mobile KPV turret and colonists after they break. I tested a 50-person tribal raid for fun – they broke in above the south solar panels, destroyed walls to south greenhouse and research area, killed one of my four colonists before I was able to repel them.

Normal raid is 3-10 for my wealth/difficulty.

Greenhouse

Temps get to -30F in winter. I have the heaters hooked to the main power grid, and the sun lamps are on a separate loop, only attached to the four solar panels, batteries, and backup generators. This helps with power spikes in the morning not shutting down my whole base before the solar panels come on (and in winter there’s not much sun).

I have a switch that lets me connect solar panels to the main grid if needed. Each greenhouse has two partially built campfires, so if I get a solar flare in the winter, I can quickly finish building the campfires and that will keep my plants alive and warm until the heaters come back on, this means I am almost never at a loss for food. If I lose my plant food source, there’s always hunting to fall back on, and the Nutrient Paste Dispenser makes a little food go a long way.

40K Mechanicus inspired/Transhuman tundra base with a Valkyrie shaped assault troop carrier gravship. Third run. My favourite so far. Mostly just QoL mods with Layers: Capes and Armor for that 40K look. Rough RP rules were no xenogenes, full bionic replacement.

Welcome to the idyllic settlement of...Wayfarer landing site.

(...which, if there were any justice in the world, would be called Margaritaville, in honor of our 28-year-old, demented, Alzheimer's-afflicted, 3-pawed, multiple-heart-attack-surviving starting labrador retriever.)

• Full map render
• Imgur album (copies below in comments as well for those who can't use imgur)

General stuff:

• Blood and Dust difficulty, Randy Random, tribal start
• All DLCs except for Anomaly
• Seed: shipping
• Coverage: 100%
• Run duration to date: 28 in-game years; ~12y at my starting site, then a long trip in a janky gravship, then ~15y at the present location
• Colonists: 22, plus 2 imprisoned faction members as joy beacons (they spend all their time boning)
• Ideology: Supremacist, Transhumanist, Darkness, Human Primacy. I wanted to do a Glowforest run, but I didn't want to give up my goodies.
• Modlist part 1, part 2. More mods than I usually use, but still a pretty light mod load compared to a lot of what you see on r/rimworld, I think. Heavily weighted toward QoL/UI/automation/making pawns marginally less stupid. I tried out Intimacy, which is more of a major content change than most of what I use; it was pretty cool.

Stuff I learned this run:

• Darkness makes miniguns OP (see here). Except on away missions during the day; then it makes them hilariously inaccurate.
• Due to the details of how the "Combat in Darkness: Preferred" precept works (see here), you don't need to cut down the glowing mushrooms in glowforest to keep the bonus. It took me a while to figure this out.
• Kids are busted - my homegrown melee pawn, Cat, ended up with tough, brawler, and psychically hypersensitive as traits, plus great passions; the others I raised are also great. I had them grow up at 1x speed because I'm a masochist who loves long playtimes, but they were worth the wait.
• It takes a really friggin' long time to get all the genes you want in genepacks that will play nicely together. I spent a lot of this playthrough with that as my main project, and there are still things I ended up giving up and leaving in a suboptimal state. All my cooks have the Poor Cooking gene, because it's on a genepack with my only copies of genes I want on everybody; as a result, they hover around 14-15 skill where everybody else is 20 at everything they do.
• Psycasts are busted, especially Skip. I mean, I knew this, but having every pawn be a psycaster really hammers it in (they also all know Skip, which rules). So many things can be made into non-problems with the right psycast (and the right psycast is so frequently Skip...seriously, I cannot harp on this enough).
• Islands aren't quite as defensively OP as I was hoping - most of them seem to have at least 2 sides of the map pathable. The dream, where there's just a single, easily defensible path of shallow water to your island, must be pretty rare (or I'm pretty unlucky, I visited a bunch of islands/atolls/archipelagos and didn't see any like that).
• If your initial settlement is in glowforest, it gets a sapling anima tree. The tree won't grow without sunlight, but you can meditate at it anyway, and sun lamps will allow it to grow. If you land a gravship in glowforest, though, no anima tree will spawn. I decided this was bullshit, so I devmoded myself one. Sorry not sorry.
• Related: The setup around the anima tree is a compromise between the tree needing light from a sun lamp to grow (and for the anima grass to avoid rotting) and my darkness-loving pawns not wanting to be in bright light. The walls are arranged such that the meditation spots work to meditate at the anima tree, but are in darklight rather than sun lamp light.
• The big circular thing in the bottom-right is bug bait; one of the tiles at the back of the little hallway is the only tile of not-filled-in overhead mountain on the map, which means it's the only place natural infestations can spawn. I learned some new things (nearby regular ceilings matter!) about the infestation spawn rules while troubleshooting this; see this conversation for details. Thanks again, Aelanna!
• Comment thread where I talked about xenotypes, as well as using an ancient stockpile for overflow storage + wastepack disposal. There's video of how sending stuff to the stockpile works in practice.

Cool stuff:

• This is the most obsessively I've ever optimized my pawns. Everyone is fully bionic'd out; most have multiple archotech parts; everyone is running a ~70 complexity/multiple archite gene custom xenotype to make them amazing at whatever they do; all my pawns are at least level 4 psycasters, mostly level 6, with a bunch of bonuses to psy sensitivity; all my melee pawns are tough + robust + strong melee + 20 melee skill + longjump; thrumbomane threads for all; etc.
• Coolest weapons: This persona monosword, or this minigun
• Mechhive run by my away team. Warning: long, unedited gameplay. I make lots of mistakes, and I also pause a ton, so it might not be all that fun to watch. But I think it does show off how bonkers my pawns are. Mechhive fight screenshot. Timestamps from the mechhive video of relevant fights, so you don't have to watch a bunch of boring parts: 1:53 breaking into stabilizer room, 5:02 scythers, 10:26 another stabilizer fight, 38:17 many, many militors
• The Centurions are hostile ones, downed with shock lances and walled in, to serve as permanent free shield generators for my firing positions. They mostly came from the mechanitor quest raids. Their presence makes me constantly count as "in combat," which is in some ways helpful and in others annoying; I often get allies dropping in to "help" me (i.e., lower my TPS).
• Tips for getting the alpha thrumbo ranch going (but don't get too excited, there's an unavoidably large element of "wait and pray to RNGesus for the quest to arrive")
• Margarita (health screen), the dog who started the run with me (and after whom the settlement really should be named), is too...something...to die. She's had both Alzheimer's and dementia for more than a decade; this results in constant notification spam for "confusion." She's had multiple heart attacks. She lost a paw to an infestation years ago. She's 28 years old (labrador retriever life expectancy is 12). I preemptively dug a grave for her by the anima tree after her second heart attack (this was when I decided the colony should be named after her)...but it's still empty.
• Since I wanted everybody to be a psycaster, I did Empire quests to get all my non-tribal pawns up to Praetor (and then I've been slowly leveling them up from there with neuroformers, to avoid higher title requirements). This means I have a bunch of permits, so I can do fun stuff like drop half a dozen aerodrone salvos on a mech cluster. Not particularly efficient (centipedes have a lot of armor), but I had fun.
• A couple more combat recordings: fighting a mech cluster (abusing Skip some more), and a centipede raid (relying on ranged weapons and my base's defenses).

Twelve years. Twenty-four colonists. One tribe that refused to die.

Devilkins Hollow, heart of the Blue Mule Confederation, began as a humble tribal settlement. From its first fires and crude shelters, it has grown into a fortress of survival, knowledge, and stubbornness. Every raid, every animal attack, every disaster only forged them stronger.

Now, on their second map, they have completed all research — at 500% difficulty — and the path to the Archon Nexus ending lies ahead. alittle under 100 mods on a server with a buddy using rimworld Together

This is where my Frostfang Tribe run ended — not in defeat, but because the colony became too large to keep playing.

The turning point was the death of our Jarl, Rothgar. A legend in his 70s, with hundreds of kills.

During a hunt, two Spinosaurus ambushed the party. Rothgar held them off long enough for his great-granddaughter to escape… and was ripped in half.

One day later, his wife — the Shield-Lady of Frostfang — went berserk. No mercy. No retreat.

She slaughtered 456 enemies in her life. and a few colony members before the colony finally brought her down. She died standing, blade raised, rage unspent.

And still — the Frostfangs endured.

The children who watched their elders fall grew into warriors, leaders, and heroes of their own. The halls filled again. The tribe thrived.

Eventually, there were too many pawns, animals, and stories running at once. The TPS died long before the colony did.

So this screenshot isn’t the end. It’s the saga frozen at its peak.

Sometimes a RimWorld run doesn’t end in death — it ends when the story becomes too big to move forward.