RimWorld Odyssey brings flying bases, new biomes, unique pets, and space exploration
By Marco Wutz
Ludeon Studios has announced RimWorld Odyssey, the next DLC for the popular colony sim on PC, following the reveal of its key art as a teaser. Turns out that our guesses for the expansion’s content based on that artwork wasn’t too far off: It’s all about exploration.
Odyssey empowers players to build their own ship for planetary travel — these vessels start on the smaller side, essentially being an engine and a cockpit, but can be enlarged to become your flying base. Naturally, the resources for ship construction will be hard to come by for your colony, so prepare for adventures into insect-infested caves, old shipwrecks, and other locations.
Fresh biomes like the mushroom-rich glowforest, war-torn scarlands, bountiful grasslands, cold glacial plains, and scorching lava fields provide additional variety, opportunity, and challenge. In combination with the new landmarks system, Odyssey will bring unprecedented variation to its maps. Landmarks are special modifiers that can change up a biome with elements like valleys, islands, abandoned colonies, and ancient structures — if you want to go full vault-dweller or build a paradise on a tropical archipelago off the coast, Odyssey will enable that.
More than 40 new animals add to the variety the world has to offer. What’s more, pets will get additional skills that make them more than just adorable mouths to feed — they can help with hunting, mining, lifting the mood of colonists, or debuffing foes in combat. You can even train previously untameable animals with the new sentience catalyst. Fishing, of course, is on the menu as well to support this theme of variety.
But the planet is not the limit anymore: Thanks to your ship, you’ll be able to explore the planet’s orbit and board space stations or mine asteroids — but remember: Space is lethal, more so than the surface.
An array of brand-new quests will prompt players to explore these new frontiers, while additions to the weapon and gear arsenal, available traps, and enemy types further widen the possibilities.
Update 1.6 for RimWorld will be released alongside Odyssey later this year and bring welcome performance improvements. Pathfinding, for example, will be multithreaded and batches, which should greatly increase performance in later stages of the game with big colonies.
Free for all players, this update will introduce temporary caravan camps to improve the traveling experience, allow birds to actually fly, rebalance several aspects of the game, and bring tons of quality-of-life improvements to elements like building and UI.
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