Here are a few tips and tricks to help you get started in Rimworld’s Anomaly DLC.
Rimworld's Anomaly DLC is the hardest to grasp from the outset and this is by design: The structure of the content is meant to follow the narrative path of a horror movie where your colony encounters the unknown and has no existing tools for dealing with it.
The mystery and horror can be intimidating to begin with, and some people will prefer to go in with at least some foreknowledge of what to expect. The trailers and preview material are heavily focused on the endgame monstrosities players will face and a bit of advice can help you get far enough to discover them.
Don't Activate The Monolith Straight Away
The Anomaly's starting scenario involves three colonists (one ghoulified) and a surplus of early to midgame resources, and also gives you immediate access to the Monolith, which activates the DLC's content and some early containment tools for imprisoning creatures.
We do not recommend activating the Monolith straight away as jumping into this alternate start with no foreknowledge of the new mechanics is a speedrunning strategy for getting your colonists killed as quickly as possible.
The Tome, an eldritch book that pawns will interact with unless forbidden, can cause them to immediately suffer mental breaks and summon eldritch invaders, which are best handled once your colony is settled in.
Anomaly content can still appear before the monolith's activation, but at a much slower pace so you're not overwhelmed. Once you feel adequately prepared, you'll be able to find the monolith on any starting map, but it can be difficult to spot. The newly added search tool can be used to find the 'Fallen Monolith'.
Be warned that the Monolith will activate independently once enough time has passed. In the Anomaly scenario, you have about one week to prepare from the start of the game.
Never Wander Off Alone
Default Rimworld settings prompt the game to pause and signal an alert when any hostile creature enters the map. However, even before the more advanced threats start appearing (analogous to the drop pod raids and infestations of the vanilla game), the low-level sightstealer entity moves invisibly and only sends a raid alert when it is enough to attack a colonist.
These threats can make it hard to keep your colonists safe. Hauling in loose supplies found at the edge of the map or cutting trees far from your base is best done by your more armed colonists, or by tame mechanoids if you have the Biotech DLC. A late-game solution is to give your non-combat pawns jump packs, so they can quickly escape from ambushes.
Mechanitors make good risk-takers in general. They're normally wearing your best armour and can order their militor drones to escort them when leaving the base.
Keep them safe in the early game, and their mechanoid army will be able to fend off most endgame threats.
Research And Rituals Are The Key To Progression
Anomaly introduces a parallel research tree that uses alternative mechanics to sitting at a science bench until your character invents modern rocketry. The new research process is heavily tied to the progress of your colony. Researchers will examine contained entities roughly every two days, with stronger entities giving faster and better results.
If your traditional scholar and anomaly researcher are the same person, you'll want their lab to be to the containment facilities .
You'll also want to have Dark Study as a higher work priority than Research.
The new rituals follow the same general rules as the previous rituals but give new results.
- When you encounter a siege raid, rain blood to drive them insane.
- When you need new test subjects for research, use void provocation to discover a new entity type.
- When your bioferrite supply is low, summon some fleshbeasts to capture and farm.
Ghouls Are Not Invulnerable
Ghouls are a new type of pawn made by implanting humans with anomalous shards. They're unable to use weapons or equipment and are only useful for combat. Their advantage is that they have a functionally unlimited healing factor.
Where human colonists need to worry about medical treatment and recovery time after a battle, ghouls are only incapacitated if they die. Using Ghouls in low numbers or without reinforcement from your better-armed colonists is a waste of your near-indestructible supersoldiers, so make sure you try to keep them alive.
The technology to create more ghouls and revive them is more expensive than keeping them undead in the first place.
Ghouls Are Only Mostly Tame
Especially if you start with the Anomaly Scenario, you'll get a tamed ghoul before you have a sustainable food supply for the rest of your colony.
They don't feel pain or suffer sanity damage , but if they ever run out of raw meat they'll turn completely feral .
Ghouls have the appearance and personality of rotting corpses, so you'll often want to keep them out of sight from your mentally fragile colonists. They also only have one status bar: food.
Ghouls can be packed into barns or broom ts when not in use, or kept in defensive position s around containment cells or exterior walls.
An easy solution to the food needs in the early game is to have ghouls hunt their own meat. They can heal all mundane injuries, so they're the only colonists who can safely hunt with melee attacks.
Manually order your ghouls to attack rodents and small wildlife and eat them until you have a larger supply of meat. A single ghoul can handily kill a turkey or deer but even three together will struggle against a muffalo or megasloth.
You can also save raider corpses as emergency ghoul rations.
They suffer no penalties for eating the bodies raw, so your other colonists won't get the mood penalties for butchering and cooking human flesh.
In the later game, you'll struggle to feed large populations of ghouls. It is better to retain fewer upgraded ghouls, especially if living in a temperate biome where huntable animals migrate for winter.
You Need Lots Of Bioferrite
Bioferrite is a new resource that you'll be using for almost everything anomaly-related, and this means you need it in large quantities. The material itself is harvested from the anomalies, meaning early on you'll be making do with a few captive Shamblers or Sightstealers and hoping that steel doors are enough to block escapes.
Extracting bioferrite agitates the entities, making them harder to contain. This favours the use of bioferrite extractors on your weaker anomalies, which will struggle to break out and pose minimal threat if they do escape. Stronger entities can produce more bioferrite if you're confident in the strength of your containment.
A bioferrite extractor can be linked to four containment units in a single room.
Four shamblers in a shared prison can roughly match the output the stronger devourer that is better kept in an isolated cell.
Manage Your Growth Carefully
When your best soldier has a parasite burst out of their chest, instantly downing them, it is very important that you have a second-best soldier on standby. Strength in numbers is important, but haphazard recruiting can pose its own dangers.
The new Metalhorror parasites are more likely to be present in new recruits. Be careful about who you accept into the colony and how well you quarantine them. Medical testing can identify infected colonists, but will cause the parasites to burst out and start fighting.
Keep an eye open for telltale splotches of gray goo. If you have everyone isolated to their quarters, this will make it easy to identify who is infected.
Prepare for a fight where you won't be able to use the infected colonists.
Old Cheese Methods Are Less Effective
Traditional methods of making a colony impervious are going to be much less effective against Anomalies.
- Building in extreme climates won't save you. These non-human entities have a strong tolerance to heat or cold.
- Burrowing into caves is more of a liability than ever. If infestations occur near your containment cells you might end up with several game-ending threats at once.
- Natural barriers like rivers and oceans are less effective. Mechanoids can now swim, and no amount of external defences will protect you from a metalhorror parasite or sinkhole opening inside your walls.
- Breaking into an ancient danger in search of advanced technology and recruitable colonists is now harder. Anomalous creatures can appear inside them, posing a different type of threat to the insects, soldiers and mechanoids that used to defend them.
- Fleshbeasts can overcome traps. While soldiers can be tricked into spike traps, fleshbeasts will burst into smaller creatures that jump past your first line of traps.
Other old favourites like intimidating raiders with piles of their slain comrades can end up working against you with a new event that reanimates unburied corpses .
