Beta 18 news and features

We call it Beta 18 now

It appears that RimWorld’s developers finally decided to call this version for what it really is: a beta (not an alpha). This means that we’re getting close to what the final game is going to look like, but it’s still likely to have bugs.

The first stable version of Beta 18 was released on November 18th 2017 (18, yeah, we see what you did there) and can be obtained from an automatic update on Steam.

Get the latest mods for Beta 18

[alert type=”warning”]The Beta 18 may contain bugs that could harm your experience. If you encounter any, please report them on the bugs section of Ludeon Forums.[/alert]

Compatibility issues with Beta 18

Your saved games from Alpha 17 should still be loadable on the Beta 18 release, but some things might be different. If you are using complex mods, it is likely that they will cause some incompatibilities and won’t let you load the game. Very simple mods may still load.

Not ready for the new stuff? This is how you can go back to Alpha 17 on Steam

If you wish to reinstall the previous Alpha 17 version, you can do so via Steam by right-clicking on RimWorld > Properties > Betas tab and on the first drop-down select the “alpha17b” option.

Beta 18 features list

New biomes

A new kind of biome is coming with Beta 18: swamps. Swamp biomes are hard to move through due to choking vegetation, and hard to build in due to swampy terrain. Many new plants have been added in Beta 18 to fill out these and other biomes.

There are 3 new types of swamps found in planets:

• Tropical swamp
• Temperate swamp
• Cold bog

New incidents

Because life in the rim wasn’t hard enough in Alpha 17, now Beta 18 comes with two new and deadlier incidents, and some interesting events for your colonists to attend to:

• Meteorite impact (a meteorite impacts, leaving a lump of mineable ore).
• Tornado.
• Aurora (a beautiful aurora that lights up the night sky, improving mood).
• Peace talks quest.
• World refugee quest.
• Prisoner rescue quest.

Storyful combat

A major rework of melee combat, and a new way to report all combat interactions. Storyful combat generates a combat log that reports each blow, miss, swipe, block and fall in the combat. During or after a fight, you can review the combat log to see what happened, to generate a richer story.

Various research has been split up

• Gun research is now broken into several stages, so making advanced guns like assault rifles takes more research than making simple revolvers.
• Melee weapon research is now broken into several stages.

[columnize]

New furniture

• Bedroll: Portable bed
• Dresser: Passively improves room
• Endtable: Passive improves room
• Various new table sizes

New quest reward: special items

• Psychic emanator
• Vanometric power cell
• Infinite chemreactor
• Techprof subpersona core
• Healer mechanite superdose
• Resurrector mechanite superdose
• Orbital bombardment targeter
• Orbital power beam targeter

Tribal content upgrade

• Ikwa melee weapon
• War mask
• Tribal headdress
• Recurve bow
• Tribal hunter
• Tribal heavy archer
• Tribal berserker

Tribal content upgrade:

• Ikwa melee weapon
• War mask
• Tribal headdress
• Recurve bow
• Tribal hunter
• Tribal heavy archer
• Tribal berserker

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New mental breaks

• Insulting spree. Randomly go around and insult people.
• Targeted insulting spree. Follow around a specific other colonist, insulting them repeatedly.
• Tantrum. Go around randomly smashing furniture, buildings, and damageable items.
• Bedroom tantrum. Go to your own room and randomly smash furniture, buildings, and damageable items.
• Targeted tantrum. Go to destroy a single, specific, randomly-chosen, valuable item or building.
• Sadistic rage. Melee attack prisoners for a while. Fists only. Only occurs when there are prisoners to attack. Does not attack downed prisoners.
• Corpse obsession. Dig up a corpse and drop it on a meeting spot table or in a random high-traffic area. The mental break then ends.
• Catatonic. Collapse on the spot into a downed state with a psychological breakdown. Recover some days later. This can be implemented by a “catatonic breakdown” hediff.
• Jailbreaker. Colonist goes to a random prisoner (who is capable of prison breaking), and upon doing a special “spark jailbreak” action with them, induces an immediate prison break in that prisoner.
• Slaughterer. Slaughter random colony animal(s) periodically.
• Murderous rage. Hunt down a specific colonist or prisoner (randomly chosen) and attempt to kill them by melee attack. Uses melee weapon or fists, as equipped. Keep attacking until the target is dead.
• Run wild. The pawn basically starts acting like an animal. You can tame him to try to get him to rejoin.

New mental inspirations

The mental inspirations work in reverse of mental breaks: they give temporary bonuses to colonists in high moods.

• Work frenzy (1 day): Global work speed 2.5x
• Go frenzy (1 day): Walk speed 1.5x
• Shoot frenzy (3 days): Shooting hit chance improved as though the pawn is 10 skill levels higher.
• Inspired trade
• Inspired recruitment
• Inspired surgery
• Inspired art

Additional Beta 18 features

• World features like lakes, mountain ranges, and bays are now detected and named. Names are displayed in the world view.
• Caves now form sometimes in mountainous maps. Inside there are special cave plants. There can also be dormant insect hives.
• Many new tale types were added. So, the game will record many new types of events, and colonists can make art about them. Art descriptions should be much more diverse.
• Crop blights now appear and spread over time instead of instantly destroying crops
• Spaceship is now bigger and has one more component, the sensor cluster.
• Spaceship quest ending phase: When going to the hidden space ship to finish the game, the game does not end instantly on arrival. The map generates with the ship intact. To take off, first you must power up the ship, which takes some days, during which you must survive raids.
• Space ship construction now requires advanced components, which have their own tech tree and production method
• Split pistol into revolver and autopistol.
• Boomalopes can be milked for chemfuel.
• Added chemfuel generator, which generates electricity from chemfuel.
• Artillery works differently now. There is a type of mortar, which can fire any type of shell, with each shell creating a different effect. The shells are explosive, incendiary, firefoam, and antigrain (a special high-tech warhead).
• Seasonal latitudes: Seasons now more reasonably adjust depending on latitude. Instead of flipping at the equator, there is a seasonless crossover zone.
• Redesigned alert letter types and sounds to be more specific.
• Pawns can now be banished. This is analogous to abandoning pawns in caravans.
• Many many tunings, bugfixes, and redesigns.

Don’t care for words? Here’s the official video with the new features for Beta 18!

This is the newly released video recorded by Tynan, the creator of RimWorld, where he shows the most recent additions to Beta 18: