RimWorld Is Still the Gold Standard, and It Is Not Close

Every genre has a reference point. Racing sims have their Forza and Gran Turismo argument, shooters have their eternal Counter-Strike, and colony sims have no argument at all. The measuring stick is RimWorld, it has been RimWorld for a decade, and when we reviewed Going Medieval recently we caught ourselves doing what everyone does: describing another game entirely in terms of this one.

So here is the piece about the measuring stick itself, written from the unhelpfully large number of hours we have poured into it.

What It Actually Is

Three survivors crash on a distant planet. You do not control them directly. You assign work, draw blueprints and set rules, and they interpret those instructions through their own traits, moods, addictions and grudges. The game calls itself a story generator rather than a strategy game, and for once the marketing copy is the accurate description.

The stories are the product. Ask any long-term player about their colonies and you will not hear about victory conditions. You will hear about the wedding that was interrupted by a raid, the beloved labrador that dragged a bleeding colonist to safety, the noble who refused to haul anything for three years and then saved the whole settlement with one psychic scream. The game manufactures anecdotes with industrial efficiency, which is why forums are full of RimWorld stories that read like short fiction.

The Storyteller Is the Genius Part

Difficulty in RimWorld is not a slider, it is a personality. Events are dealt by an AI storyteller, and you choose which one runs your life. Cassandra Classic builds tension on a curve like a screenwriter. Phoebe Chillax spaces the disasters out and lets you actually finish building the dining room. And then there is Randy Random, who does not believe in pacing, and will send two raids and a heat wave in one afternoon and then nothing for a season, because chaos is also a story.

This is the design idea the whole genre quietly absorbed. The drama is scheduled by a dramatist, and the game is honest about it. Half the community plays Randy anyway. We do not recommend it and we also do it, which describes most of our decisions.

From Basic to Bottomless

The part people forget is how small this thing started. Tynan Sylvester left a AAA studio job, prototyped a mercenary game that did not work, and put RimWorld on Kickstarter in 2013 under the working name Eclipse Colony. It raised about 268 thousand dollars, shipped a rough pre-alpha that November, and spent five years in public development before version 1.0 finally landed on 17 October 2018.

The early builds were genuinely basic. A handful of systems, one biome that mattered, placeholder everything. What happened since is one of the great slow burns in games: five major expansions, each adding a full dimension rather than a skin. Royalty brought an empire and psychic powers in 2020. Ideology made belief systems playable in 2021. Biotech added genetics, mechanoids and, memorably, children in 2022. Anomaly turned the whole thing into cosmic horror in 2024, and Odyssey put the colony on the move in 2025. The base game alone runs deeper than most finished franchises. With expansions it is close to bottomless.

The Ecosystem Is the Moat

Here is the number that settles the gold standard question. The Steam Workshop currently lists over 58,000 RimWorld mods. Not downloads. Individual mods.

That catalogue covers everything from one-button quality of life fixes to total conversions that replace the century, the technology and the tone. There are mod collections bigger than retail games, maintained for years by people with the dedication of medieval monks. An entire layer of the community plays a version of RimWorld that Ludeon never shipped and could not have, and the game is built to allow exactly that.

This is what we meant when we said Going Medieval lacks the ecosystem rather than the quality. You can copy mechanics. You cannot copy twelve years of accumulated culture, tooling and folklore. That only grows in one place, slowly, and RimWorld has it in a way nothing else in the genre does.

The Numbers, for the Record

Just under a quarter of a million Steam reviews. Ninety eight percent of them positive, which keeps it in the Overwhelmingly Positive tier that almost nothing at this scale sustains. It lists at $34.99, has never chased a trend, and sits in the same handful of most-played management games year after year without a live service, a battle pass or a marketing budget of note. It also arrived on consoles in 2022, where it works far better than anyone expected a mouse-driven spreadsheet dramaturgy machine to work.

The Honest Caveats

The art is functional. Colonists are essentially expressive capsules, and if you need visual spectacle to stay interested, this will look like a whiteboard exercise. The learning curve is real, the first colony almost always ends in an instructive disaster, and the full expansion set costs considerably more than the base game, though nothing beyond the base game is required. And the community’s darker running joke is accurate: the game absolutely permits you to be a monster, and finding your own line is part of the experience. We keep ours generous and our prisoners well fed, mostly.

Should You Buy It?

If you have any interest in the genre and somehow do not own it, yes, without hedging. Start with the base game on Steam, pick Cassandra on a gentle setting, and accept that the first colony is tuition. Add expansions when the base game starts feeling familiar, which takes longer than you think. Ideology and Biotech are our picks for the biggest change per dollar.

And if you already own it, you did not need this review. You needed permission to start another colony. Granted. Randy is waiting.

Screenshots courtesy of Ludeon Studios.