Crossposting from Reddit since I wrote a lot there:

Only so many characters to put into the top post, but I'm super proud of this thing and can't help but write a little bit more about it: this colony has been cooking since January, played here and there, and built into what I'm sure is the largest colony I've ever made in RW. This thing is even bigger than the other one I made, and that was, then, the biggest I'd made. There's a trend here towards dummy huge.

For the most part, it has held about 150~ colonists almost continuously, but a lot of these were being sent out to the map since I'd conquered the entire planet courtesy of World Domination, and a lot of those troops ended up coming home. Yes, I've literally conquered the planet - there's no other factions left to send raids. I've got screenshots, and some 300+ outposts populated either by the pawns that WD generates or slaves.

For the general plan of this run, this was meant to be my first real game touching the gene system from Biotech. I'd never actually played with it before (1.6 has been my first time back to RW since Royalty or so?), and figured, hey, let's make a colony where we use that. I'd already made a sort of tech-cathedral last time, so a gene-focused run was the next thing.

But that gave me an idea. See, I'm a BattleTech boy, and when I started spitballing ideas together, I realized that you could make custom xenotypes at game start that had heritable germline traits...and that made me go, "hey, I can make the Clans in this thing!", and the idea that would become the Verdant Citadel was born. For all its cosy vibes and beauty, the place is shockingly dystopian beneath the surface: it has a five part caste system, and all pawns are the result of careful use of the growth vats to expand and enforce that system. We've got a Warrior Caste, a Scientist Caste, a Technician Caste, a Laborer Caste, and even a Merchant Caste; each of these are born with genes that give them massive bonuses to the skills of their given role (and trash skills everywhere else to avoid runaway metabolic costs), leading to a super-specialization of workers.

Indeed, the entire city is actually divided into roughly eight pieces: each caste has one major district, and then there's three extra - a sort of "neutral" city center for everyone, and then the capital hall on the northside and the gargantuan genetic center on the central island.

I legit thought this run would be much harder than it was: most of my colonies in the past have been more generalized in workers, but this one was ultra-specialized since no one can work outside their caste, and to make things even more fun, I generally decided to forego the use of bionics and psychic powers. I expected to get ganked; someone in the system would die and a caste would be unable to keep expanding and that'd lead to a failstate.

Surprise, surprise, the caste system worked frighteningly well: as soon as the growth vats came online, the colony just completely escaped the power curve of the game as I know it. Pawns with virtually flawless stats could be produced at scale: a Warrior-Caste pawn that popped out the vat at age 13 or so would have 15-16~ in shooting and melee, and the other castes were equally specialized. Because of that, there was never a case of having to work around bad pawns or not having someone who could do a job, and since everyone was so specialized, they only ever worked on what they were good at: the Laborer Caste did all the cooking and farming, for example, and never, ever had to stop from doing those jobs so I had a virtually infinite supply of food even as the colony's population exploded. Adding Vanilla Skills Expanded to this mix only made it even stronger, because the pawns could get an expertise skill the moment they came out the vat and basically be the perfect worker, or you could stuff them back in the vat till 16 or so, which'd let you get them out when they're able to be used for ovum harvesting and thus make more embryos faster.

The result is the colony just went through the roof, much, much faster than I ever expected. Like, yikes. Lorewise in BT, the caste system can have serious jank to say the least (massive simplification) but it works REALLY well in this game, and got even better when it came to building this city...because since the city was divided into sections, no one ever had to walk across the entire map to work or rest or eat: everything they needed was always close by, making it more like five bases on the same map rather than one large one. That made building this gargantuan thing possible, and what was originally meant to be an experimental game, then a play of pretend at BattleTech's vatgrown weirdos, ended up taking on a life of its own and building a city so nice to live in that it probably upgraded the planet from Rimworld to Midworld or something.

My Vampire play trough.

The aim was to create a colony where vampires and humans would coexist, whilst using every vampire mod i found.

Now i have a bunch of super overpowered vampires that drop unconscious on the floor once the sun rises and a bunch of humans to protect them from harm during daytime.

They are ruled by three leaders, a vampire, a human and an half-vampire.

So basically just a bunch of red lights and head canon :-)

My medieval anomaly/fantasy biotech psycaster base.

modlist and save game can be found here https://gofile.io/d/4Ihjhz

#RimWorldPorn

Mercenary company start on strive to survive 300% scale 105 Colonists+4 outposts and ~9 vassals. 2 hostile factions destroyed so far. Medieval Overhaul + Progression mods (total 202 active mods)

My biggest colony so far. I tried to move away from the usual square/boxy layouts and instead build more organically, almost like a city builder. The idea was to let the colony grow naturally over time rather than planning everything in a grid from the start.

The map itself was pretty challenging to work with since it’s split by multiple rivers, so a lot of the layout came down to adapting as I expanded. It definitely made planning harder, but also way more fun. Pretty happy with how it turned out in the end.

Timelapse: https://youtu.be/vUu65TvpBsc

After 17 in-game years , this colony evolved from a small survival start into a fully realized ultra-tech civilization. Spanning three separate bases and multiple generations of colonists, the settlement grew into a highly organized, heavily modded powerhouse with custom xenotypes, full augmentations, and legendary gear across the board. At its peak, nearly 40 colonists called this place home before the colony was ultimately refined down to a chosen few to complete the Archo Nexus. What started as a struggle to survive became a story of control, expansion, and finally ascension—marking the end of a months-long journey and one of the most ambitious runs I’ve ever completed.

It's been a week since the last post, I was able to recover the file properly and played last week to finish off what was missing of the colony. I've spent around 240~ hours in this colony, so it feels nice to finally close it off :)

A creative build of an enclosed hotspring-heated Guaranlen grove turned Bed and Breakfast.

My first (and maybe last) medieval colony. It was fun and was quite interesting in comparison to my average high-tech runs. As seen though, I had to call quits as due to whatever issue the game was unplayable (even in old saves) and this was the last picture I could take of it functioning

Started the first colony in March 2022. After starting the second one in December 2022, I took long breaks in between, upgraded my pc for rimworld to play big colonies better.

I plan to continue to 3rd part of the archonexus with the same 3 starting colonists and 2 early recruits from the first colony, while updating the modlist and game to 1,6 from 1,4, cleaning the mess of the modlist and savefile.

Modlist

PC Build

This was an anomaly run on pretty low difficulty, all dlcs (at the time, it was my last big run pre odyssey) and a whole lot of mods. I don't know a lot of specifics anymore since it's been a year that I played this colony. Sadly I couldn't finish building the full cube base due to tps rot. I had a mod that made pawns with 100% cube interest build another cube instead of a cube sculpture, so everyone could have a cube! Of course we sure to gift cubes to our neighbors as well. And they sure loved them!

The base is mostly build out of Steel and Plasteel, the gold look is from the cubic ideo style. I did not mine this much gold lol. I started with three wretches (xenotype that mutates on a regular basis) and aimed to build my genetics lab rather sooner than later to stabilize the mutations. Took me like 4 years to find an actual cube if I remember right

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.