RimWorld Guide: Difficulty and Settings Explained

RimWorld Guide – Difficulty Settings Explained

 This RimWorld Guide is from Patch 1.2 but is still applicable to the current version of the game. If a future patch changes this information I will make a new guide on the subject.

[Video Transcript]
Hey everyone, Adam here with another RimWorld guide. People have been asking me “What difficulty should I play?” So I decided to make a RimWorld Guide to tell you all about the six different difficulties that currently exist in Rimworld.

Alright, so let’s get right into it. RimWorld has six different difficulties ranging from Peaceful to Losing is Fun. Each difficulty setting can also be customized to tailor the experience to your liking.

I will go over the parameters for the easiest difficulty, Peaceful, and then show you the differences between that and the other five.

THREATS
The first set of parameters are Threats.

On Peaceful the Threat scale is set to 10% by default. Meaning that if there were any threats, they would only have 10% of the strength of a normal difficulty event.

Major threats such as raids, infestations, mechanoid attacks, and manhunting animals are disabled.

Quests that are offered to you will not have violent conditions such as raids or having to attack into an enemy stronghold.

The normal intro quests such as a single angry animal will not occur either.

Speaking of animals, on peaceful difficulty, you won’t have to worry about predators getting hungry and hunting your colonists.

In addition to this, you’ll always have weather within the listed average temperature of your map, and will not have to worry about things like toxic fallout or volcanic winter.

ECONOMY
The second set of parameters are Economy based.

On Peaceful you’ll be getting 20% more plant harvests and mining yields. You’ll also be researching things 20% faster. You won’t have to worry about traders jacking up their prices and your defensive turrets are 50% cheaper to re-arm.

Lastly, the enemy pawns you down will be 50% less likely to instantly die, allowing you to more easily steal their equipment or imprison them.

GENERAL
There is also a set of general parameters for each difficulty which aren’t able to be categorized by the other two.

On peaceful you’ll be getting a +10 mood boost at all times on all of your colonist so that it’s easier to keep them happy.

Your pawns will also be 70% less likely to get food poisoning than normal, and about the same reduced chance at getting diseases in general.

You also won’t have to worry as much about animals fighting back if you decide to attack a normally aggressive creature.

In addition to this, you don’t have to be as careful with your firearms, as the chance of friendly fire is reduced by 60%.

Lastly, regardless of the map you choose to play on, it will not contain any ancient dangers or bug hives.

PLAYER TOOLS
As far as the ‘player tools’ section goes, those are all readily available regardless of your difficulty. But, if you’re feeling a bit adventurous, you could turn off things like traps in order to increase the difficulty.

ADAPTATION
I will explain adaptation and wealth independent mode in other guide videos, but for now, just know that, by default, the game increases in difficulty relative to your colony’s wealth UNLESS you turn on Wealth-Independent progress mode, which will make it so the game continuously gets harder the longer you survive, regardless of wealth.

OTHER DIFFICULTIES
The other five difficulties after Peaceful are:

Community Builder, which adds in your first major threats like raids, quest threats, etc.

Adventure Story, which opens you up to more animal attacks as well as extreme weather.

Strive to Survive, which is Rimworld’s version of a ‘Normal’ difficulty. Sort of how the game was made to be played, so to say.

Blood and dust, which ratchets the difficulty quite a bit higher than the previous tier.

And finally, Losing is fun, which is Rimworld’s most challenging standard difficulty and quite a bit harder than Blood and Dust.

To see the exact percentages of what changes from one difficulty to the other, simply click the Custom… bubble on the difficulty select screen, then scroll down and click the ‘Set standard playstyle’ button. You can then look through all the various stats below there.

This is also where you can customize, as the name suggests, each individual part of the difficulty.

So, for instance, if you want the hardest raids and events possible you could put the threat slider all the way to 500 percent, which is more than twice as hard as ‘Losing is Fun’. On the flipside of this you could also make it so you have super-fast research and no disease.

Also, you may have noticed the option between ‘Reload anytime mode’ and ‘Commitment mode’. With commitment mode you have a single save file that is constantly updating so you cannot reload your game from a previous state. So, for instance, if you have a raid go very badly and want to reload and try it again to see how you do, you cannot do this with commitment mode and will want to make sure you start your game in ‘Reload anytime mode’ instead.

CONCLUSION
The last thing I wanted to mention, is that you can change the difficulty at any time during the game. To do this just click the icon in the very bottom right of your game, then choose ‘options’. In here, you’ll want to click ‘Storyteller settings’ towards the bottom middle.

Alright, and that does it for this RimWorld guide regarding difficulties. Hopefully you now know which difficulty to choose to get the kind of RimWorld experience you prefer or even how to custom tailor the experience to your playstyle.
If you liked this guide and want to see more, please let me know by subscribing to the channel, liking the video, and commenting down below. And, as always, thanks for watching.