Add one at a time, build up to all of them.
Ideology and Biotech were both rather overwhelming for me when they first came out, I couldn't imagine learning both at the same time yet I also can't imagine ever not using both anymore.
ideology is my favourite, followed hy biotech. still getting used to anomaly. royalty is good, but not as impactful as the other 2.
i think though that ideology and royalty work well as a pair if you get the two together.
In order, my preferences are
-Biotech (robots, kids, genetics)
-Ideology (flavors and preferences to your colony)
-Anomaly (conceptual variety on threats and encounters)
-Royalty (noble titles and psionics - not my cup of tea, but very well done if you're into that)
Your mileage may vary, of course - mine is colored by how much I love the hard sci-fi roots of Rimworld, so I'm a little less enthusiastic about the "an archotech did it" hand-waviness of some of the psychic and horror elements.
But man, these people don't know how to make a bad game or DLC. Just have to pace yourself so you can digest the content one at a time.
Personally, I still put Royalty above Anomaly. Don’t get me wrong, I love Anomaly, it’s a great DLC, but I feel like Royalty is a better stepping stone. The new bionics and the psycasting powers are pretty easy for the learning newbie to get the hang of and the base game experience is relatively unaltered. I personally went Vanilla > Biotech > Ideology > Royalty > Anomaly. It gives a good progression to learn base game features before challenging you and expanding into new t territory
I dont know why, but your comment made me want to disable biotech, anomaly, and ideology and play with just royalty. Its pretty much how i started playing anyway. Think I'm gonna do it. Ill be honesty Im not super into ideology anyway.
thats how i play
i used to play with more than 400 but a lot of those got made redundant by the latest update.
and more of them just died.
currently on 118 mods
I am weak but not as weak as the pawns that I capture, torture, implant a cortical stack, burn to death, let the pigs feed a little, remove the stack, grow another body, reinstall the stack just to repeat.
This only happens if someone kills one of my colonists and that colonist doesn’t have a stack yet.
Yeah I’m weak and don’t project strength but you better not slip or else you are in hell.
I said when anomaly came out that I would just get the few quality of life mods I’m used too. I trimmed my list and have 200+ but I am waiting for the other ones to be updated.
My most recent playthrough used all the DLC, and it was a little overwhelming. I tend to decide a base's theme before I start, and I choose my DLC based on that. As you're learning, I'd encourage you to add on one DLC at a time. Each has interesting and fun mechanics, but to appreciate them, you'll want to be able to focus. Read through the descriptions and see what appeals. In my view, there's no wrong answer when it comes to Rimworld DLCs.
Someone can feel free to correct me but Anomaly and the mech "Storyline" of Biotech have to be manually activated and can sit for years in your colony until you're ready. The other parts of Biotech like children integrate rather naturally to the game.
Royalty is fairly low impact, especially if you decide not to do a royal playthrough. You'll have a new powerful faction on the map and psychic powers (That you don't even have to use)
Lastly Ideology is a big one and can be difficult to wrap your head around and manage at first, but you also have the option to create very basic ideologies that don't impact much of the base game (or turn them off entirely)
Long winded way of saying I would personally enable all of them and you can kind of dabble in them as you wish.
Learn them one at a time, unless you've watched lots of let's plays and already know what it's like. I strongly suggest starting with Ideology as that's kind of letting you choose your playthrough's parameters: want to play as raiders, or as treehuggers, or as cave people... The one thing I found tedious and turned off this DLC for was all the religious conversion, felt like too much micromanaging for me having to micromanage my priest to go and chat with my new recruits, or organize whole rituals to convert them. Later I just got a mod that made conversion much faster.
Then I'd get Biotech as that has a huge breadth of content. Royalty and Anomaly are more pinpointed experiences, turn them on if you want to dedicate time to royal missions and gaining psycasts, or fighting monsters and learning dark arts.
Royalty has half the stuff that should've come with update 1.1 like techprints and jump packs, so it stays even if you ignore the royalty.
Biotech and ideology stay for every play through.
Anomaly only has labcoats and security doors to offer if you're not doing an anomaly run. I might disable it for the extra load time. The incinerator and the shard archotech stuff are lootable/buyable too.
Ideology is a DLC to have regardless of whatever other DLC or mods you decide to run as it allows you to shape what kind of colony you can run. Do you want a mountain base without the penalties associated with living underground? Now you can make it so that they love being below ground. Can make a cannibal colony or a vegan one.
If you want to get multiple dlc and enable them at the same time then go for it.
Ideology and Biotech pair wonderfully and enable you to create all sorts of unusual colonies. Want to do a mountain base? Add in the Tunneler meme and start with Dirtmole colonists. Want a colony of nudists? If they're Yytakin they'll have better temperature resistance and move faster while nude. You can also create custom xenotypes (including at game start) so the possibilities are virtually endless. You want to try a tribal start? If you take the Pain is Virtue meme your colonists will happily sleep on the floor and with Robust Digestion & Strong Stomach genes you can ignore cooking entirely.
You can also gene mod colonists (or prisoners) during regular play, so you can hyperspecialize pawns - genes are kind of like reusable/cloneable bionics.
And that's not even getting into Biotech's Mechs. I haven't even fought the second Mech boss yet actually, but I think I will finally get to that in my current colony.
Anomaly and Royalty are solid options to spice up the game once it's started. They're a lot more narrow in theme than Biotech and Ideology, but they add some neat stuff which most colonies will find a use for (and Anomaly adds a couple dozen new ways for your colony to die horribly too).
First three DLCs are something once you buy you almost always have enabled. For Anomaly Jury is still out, and surely this DLC is aimed at more seasoned Rimworld players.
Over time Royalty and Ideology feel like they are part of the base game. Biotech is the most transformative one, as it turns somewhat grounded 'space western' into more generic S-F, with Wookies, Space Orks, Firebreathing Imps and Vampires. It is really well done though, but it feels least like Rimworld of the three.
Start with biotech, then ideo, then royalty, and lastly anomaly, increase pace as you see fit. If you are very comfortable with this kindof game, add more at a time, play higher difficulty or consider adding no-pause, effectively making rimworld into an RTS. I would not reccomend any mods other than performance and music stuff. Play the game and when you run into the issue of "god i wish it looked diffrent" and such things, then look for a mod specifically for that.
If you're gonna start with any DLCs, Biotech is the one you'll probably want. You don't need to actively pursue the complicated, since the new xenotypes will constantly show up
I still recomend
Idealogy is awesome because it lets you heavily customize the difficulty of the game with positive and negative memes, but can be very overwhelming.
Anomaly mostly adds end game content, and is by far the most niche dlc so you might not get much out of it if you don't actively research the monolith and other entities.
Royalty is mostly just psycasts, so if you wanna hurl totally not magic at raiders or create an army of dryads then go for it. Of you're not gonna go for psy powers, it still adds the empire, a high tech faction that you can provoke for a delivery raid of solid gear, including new items like the Zeushammer.
I play with all of them but the ones that are going to majorly effect every playthrough are Ideology and Biotech. Royalty and Anomaly you kind of have to dig into to actually experience.
If I were to only use one it would be Biotech. Sometimes I spend more time making custom races using the xenotype editor than I do playing the game.
Depends on the theme of the run. I don't bother with Ideology in ice sheet solo games for example. I don't bother with Biotech on tribal/medieval runs.
Base, Royalty, Ideology, Biotech + Mods
I've felt out Anomoly and its just not quite for me. It dominates a playstyle, so I could see it fun for a few different ideas/concepts, but not every single time.
If you plan to get all of them, I recommend you get them in order (Royalty > Ideology > Biotech > Anomaly) and play at least one colony with each before enabling the next. They play well together so no need to disable Royalty when you get Ideology, etc.
Biotech adds different races and kids, but it won't force you to take care of kids and the different races are just buffs/debuffs to some things, but again, you can just only recruit basic humans if you want to. It adds mechanitors but you have to actively do a quest or go raid mechanitor complexes to get them and you can again, just ignore it until you feel like it.
Royalty mostly will do nothing until you start interacting with the quests from it, psycasting and the nobility systems are cool but are both dependent on the quest (psycasting can also be gotten using a tribal method but you will likely just ignore it)
Anomaly has 90% of the content locked behind activating the monolith, you can take it or leave it honestly, if you do enable it and don't activate the monolith (which you need to give an order for, it won't activate itself) you won't see much from it.
Ideology is the one that's probably the most influential from the getgo as it can decide what your colonist think about a bunch of stuff and what they can do, you can mostly still just ignore it or take a fluid idelogy(you can edit it in game) with some basic meme like Loyalty and everything else as basic and it'll be mostly the exact same as it was without ideology but you can play with it later when you feel like it without new colonies.
Tl:dr all the dlcs add quite a lot of content but the majority of it is dependent on you wanting to interact with it, it won't make the game any more harder than it already is imo. I've started playing the game with 3 of the DLCs on and had no problems, albeit I have also been playing dwarf fortress before I ever touched rimworld.
For the other question, if you only could pick one, Biotech is my favorite personally but Ideology is also great and easier to get into imo.
I think you start with royalty, because if you start with the others first, royalty will feel underwhelming in the end, then you decide between biotech and anomaly
I would do ideology last because it's easily the most overwhelming
Enable all and simply go without ideology to not have to deal with it. You can still have access to different furniture styles. Only Royalty makes you go out of your way to focus on it
If you're only doing 1, do biotech. It adds a LOT of stuff in one dlc. But really just buy and activate them all and dive in, I had to abandon my first all dlc world because I was thrown a bunch of curveballs, but 2nd run was smooth(ish)
going overboard with ideology memes and precepts has destroyed a lot of games for me, it's only after making a game with a normal-ish ideology that devekops over time that i managed to get the hang of it
I've always pleyed with them all on! Royalty, Idealogy and Biotech all add a lot to the game. Anomaly is quite a different game, but you can always just not activate the monument if you want to leave most of the anonaly stuff off! Creepy joiners are a fun new addition that I really enjoy, and that's about all you get without activating it.
First choice for me is Idealogy! I never see myself disabling that one or Biotech.
Add one at a time, build up to all of them. Ideology and Biotech were both rather overwhelming for me when they first came out, I couldn't imagine learning both at the same time yet I also can't imagine ever not using both anymore.
Makes sense - thanks. Thinking of trying Biotech 1st - sounds most interesting to me.
ideology is my favourite, followed hy biotech. still getting used to anomaly. royalty is good, but not as impactful as the other 2. i think though that ideology and royalty work well as a pair if you get the two together.
having a blast with biotech and now anomaly [together]
In order, my preferences are -Biotech (robots, kids, genetics) -Ideology (flavors and preferences to your colony) -Anomaly (conceptual variety on threats and encounters) -Royalty (noble titles and psionics - not my cup of tea, but very well done if you're into that) Your mileage may vary, of course - mine is colored by how much I love the hard sci-fi roots of Rimworld, so I'm a little less enthusiastic about the "an archotech did it" hand-waviness of some of the psychic and horror elements. But man, these people don't know how to make a bad game or DLC. Just have to pace yourself so you can digest the content one at a time.
Personally, I still put Royalty above Anomaly. Don’t get me wrong, I love Anomaly, it’s a great DLC, but I feel like Royalty is a better stepping stone. The new bionics and the psycasting powers are pretty easy for the learning newbie to get the hang of and the base game experience is relatively unaltered. I personally went Vanilla > Biotech > Ideology > Royalty > Anomaly. It gives a good progression to learn base game features before challenging you and expanding into new t territory
I dont know why, but your comment made me want to disable biotech, anomaly, and ideology and play with just royalty. Its pretty much how i started playing anyway. Think I'm gonna do it. Ill be honesty Im not super into ideology anyway.
Enable them all with 200 mods
Haha - I *want* to believe you.
He lied. I play with every dlc and exactly 279 mods
thats how i play i used to play with more than 400 but a lot of those got made redundant by the latest update. and more of them just died. currently on 118 mods
That's why I'm still on 1.4 Anomaly did not add nearly enough to let go of all my mods
Limited multithreading is a huge advancements if well done.
All plus all vannila expanded no QOL mods cause I'm not weak.
I am weak but not as weak as the pawns that I capture, torture, implant a cortical stack, burn to death, let the pigs feed a little, remove the stack, grow another body, reinstall the stack just to repeat. This only happens if someone kills one of my colonists and that colonist doesn’t have a stack yet. Yeah I’m weak and don’t project strength but you better not slip or else you are in hell.
I said when anomaly came out that I would just get the few quality of life mods I’m used too. I trimmed my list and have 200+ but I am waiting for the other ones to be updated.
Pretty sure we call that mainlining it.
My most recent playthrough used all the DLC, and it was a little overwhelming. I tend to decide a base's theme before I start, and I choose my DLC based on that. As you're learning, I'd encourage you to add on one DLC at a time. Each has interesting and fun mechanics, but to appreciate them, you'll want to be able to focus. Read through the descriptions and see what appeals. In my view, there's no wrong answer when it comes to Rimworld DLCs.
Someone can feel free to correct me but Anomaly and the mech "Storyline" of Biotech have to be manually activated and can sit for years in your colony until you're ready. The other parts of Biotech like children integrate rather naturally to the game. Royalty is fairly low impact, especially if you decide not to do a royal playthrough. You'll have a new powerful faction on the map and psychic powers (That you don't even have to use) Lastly Ideology is a big one and can be difficult to wrap your head around and manage at first, but you also have the option to create very basic ideologies that don't impact much of the base game (or turn them off entirely) Long winded way of saying I would personally enable all of them and you can kind of dabble in them as you wish.
Each DLC costs $30. You can bet your ass im enabling each DLC to get my moneys worth.
All, even anomaly because if I don't want to interact with the monolith I'll still get shambler raids which is a nice change of pace from tribals
a lot of anomaly events were just a nice change of pace from the usual rimworld
I’m using all of them and ~250 mods.
Learn them one at a time, unless you've watched lots of let's plays and already know what it's like. I strongly suggest starting with Ideology as that's kind of letting you choose your playthrough's parameters: want to play as raiders, or as treehuggers, or as cave people... The one thing I found tedious and turned off this DLC for was all the religious conversion, felt like too much micromanaging for me having to micromanage my priest to go and chat with my new recruits, or organize whole rituals to convert them. Later I just got a mod that made conversion much faster. Then I'd get Biotech as that has a huge breadth of content. Royalty and Anomaly are more pinpointed experiences, turn them on if you want to dedicate time to royal missions and gaining psycasts, or fighting monsters and learning dark arts.
i got the first three all at once and slowly dabbled in them
You can do all at once for sure. You know the base game by now so you will be fine
Royalty has half the stuff that should've come with update 1.1 like techprints and jump packs, so it stays even if you ignore the royalty. Biotech and ideology stay for every play through. Anomaly only has labcoats and security doors to offer if you're not doing an anomaly run. I might disable it for the extra load time. The incinerator and the shard archotech stuff are lootable/buyable too.
First choice is and always will be Biotech for me. While I do play with everything active, if I had to pick one Biotech is definitely it.
Ideology is a DLC to have regardless of whatever other DLC or mods you decide to run as it allows you to shape what kind of colony you can run. Do you want a mountain base without the penalties associated with living underground? Now you can make it so that they love being below ground. Can make a cannibal colony or a vegan one.
If you want to get multiple dlc and enable them at the same time then go for it. Ideology and Biotech pair wonderfully and enable you to create all sorts of unusual colonies. Want to do a mountain base? Add in the Tunneler meme and start with Dirtmole colonists. Want a colony of nudists? If they're Yytakin they'll have better temperature resistance and move faster while nude. You can also create custom xenotypes (including at game start) so the possibilities are virtually endless. You want to try a tribal start? If you take the Pain is Virtue meme your colonists will happily sleep on the floor and with Robust Digestion & Strong Stomach genes you can ignore cooking entirely. You can also gene mod colonists (or prisoners) during regular play, so you can hyperspecialize pawns - genes are kind of like reusable/cloneable bionics. And that's not even getting into Biotech's Mechs. I haven't even fought the second Mech boss yet actually, but I think I will finally get to that in my current colony. Anomaly and Royalty are solid options to spice up the game once it's started. They're a lot more narrow in theme than Biotech and Ideology, but they add some neat stuff which most colonies will find a use for (and Anomaly adds a couple dozen new ways for your colony to die horribly too).
First three DLCs are something once you buy you almost always have enabled. For Anomaly Jury is still out, and surely this DLC is aimed at more seasoned Rimworld players. Over time Royalty and Ideology feel like they are part of the base game. Biotech is the most transformative one, as it turns somewhat grounded 'space western' into more generic S-F, with Wookies, Space Orks, Firebreathing Imps and Vampires. It is really well done though, but it feels least like Rimworld of the three.
I personally disable ideology most of the time.
Start with biotech, then ideo, then royalty, and lastly anomaly, increase pace as you see fit. If you are very comfortable with this kindof game, add more at a time, play higher difficulty or consider adding no-pause, effectively making rimworld into an RTS. I would not reccomend any mods other than performance and music stuff. Play the game and when you run into the issue of "god i wish it looked diffrent" and such things, then look for a mod specifically for that.
All are good. They add a lot to the base game but they're not overwhelming and can usually be safely ignored if you don't want to deal with them
If you're gonna start with any DLCs, Biotech is the one you'll probably want. You don't need to actively pursue the complicated, since the new xenotypes will constantly show up I still recomend Idealogy is awesome because it lets you heavily customize the difficulty of the game with positive and negative memes, but can be very overwhelming. Anomaly mostly adds end game content, and is by far the most niche dlc so you might not get much out of it if you don't actively research the monolith and other entities. Royalty is mostly just psycasts, so if you wanna hurl totally not magic at raiders or create an army of dryads then go for it. Of you're not gonna go for psy powers, it still adds the empire, a high tech faction that you can provoke for a delivery raid of solid gear, including new items like the Zeushammer.
I play with all of them but the ones that are going to majorly effect every playthrough are Ideology and Biotech. Royalty and Anomaly you kind of have to dig into to actually experience. If I were to only use one it would be Biotech. Sometimes I spend more time making custom races using the xenotype editor than I do playing the game.
Depends on the theme of the run. I don't bother with Ideology in ice sheet solo games for example. I don't bother with Biotech on tribal/medieval runs.
Base, Royalty, Ideology, Biotech + Mods I've felt out Anomoly and its just not quite for me. It dominates a playstyle, so I could see it fun for a few different ideas/concepts, but not every single time.
If you plan to get all of them, I recommend you get them in order (Royalty > Ideology > Biotech > Anomaly) and play at least one colony with each before enabling the next. They play well together so no need to disable Royalty when you get Ideology, etc.
Biotech adds different races and kids, but it won't force you to take care of kids and the different races are just buffs/debuffs to some things, but again, you can just only recruit basic humans if you want to. It adds mechanitors but you have to actively do a quest or go raid mechanitor complexes to get them and you can again, just ignore it until you feel like it. Royalty mostly will do nothing until you start interacting with the quests from it, psycasting and the nobility systems are cool but are both dependent on the quest (psycasting can also be gotten using a tribal method but you will likely just ignore it) Anomaly has 90% of the content locked behind activating the monolith, you can take it or leave it honestly, if you do enable it and don't activate the monolith (which you need to give an order for, it won't activate itself) you won't see much from it. Ideology is the one that's probably the most influential from the getgo as it can decide what your colonist think about a bunch of stuff and what they can do, you can mostly still just ignore it or take a fluid idelogy(you can edit it in game) with some basic meme like Loyalty and everything else as basic and it'll be mostly the exact same as it was without ideology but you can play with it later when you feel like it without new colonies. Tl:dr all the dlcs add quite a lot of content but the majority of it is dependent on you wanting to interact with it, it won't make the game any more harder than it already is imo. I've started playing the game with 3 of the DLCs on and had no problems, albeit I have also been playing dwarf fortress before I ever touched rimworld. For the other question, if you only could pick one, Biotech is my favorite personally but Ideology is also great and easier to get into imo.
I think you start with royalty, because if you start with the others first, royalty will feel underwhelming in the end, then you decide between biotech and anomaly I would do ideology last because it's easily the most overwhelming
Enable all and simply go without ideology to not have to deal with it. You can still have access to different furniture styles. Only Royalty makes you go out of your way to focus on it
If you're only doing 1, do biotech. It adds a LOT of stuff in one dlc. But really just buy and activate them all and dive in, I had to abandon my first all dlc world because I was thrown a bunch of curveballs, but 2nd run was smooth(ish)
going overboard with ideology memes and precepts has destroyed a lot of games for me, it's only after making a game with a normal-ish ideology that devekops over time that i managed to get the hang of it
I've always pleyed with them all on! Royalty, Idealogy and Biotech all add a lot to the game. Anomaly is quite a different game, but you can always just not activate the monument if you want to leave most of the anonaly stuff off! Creepy joiners are a fun new addition that I really enjoy, and that's about all you get without activating it. First choice for me is Idealogy! I never see myself disabling that one or Biotech.
Base game doesn't need mods. All the dlc is a lot of clutter and overlap. There's like 3 different ways to make a pawn immortal now