RimWorld Guide: Mortars and Mortar Barrels

RimWorld Guide: Mortars and Mortar Barrels

This RimWorld Guide answers all the questions you may have regarding mortars and their 1.3 changes. It answers questions like “Where do I get mortar barrels?”, “Can I make mortar barrels?”, and many more.

[Video Transcript]
Hey everyone, Adam here with a quick RimWorld guide about mortars and their recent RimWorld 1.3 and Ideology changes.

The first and biggest change is that mortars now require a barrel to build. This new item is not craftable by your pawns without using modsbut are instead acquired in other ways.

The first is simply through trade. You’ll find that the new mortar barrel is readily available from lots of traders, but at the hefty base cost of 600 silver. I’ve even seen random visitors walking across my map with multiple barrels in their inventory that I could, umm, liberate them of..

You will also get barrels as occasional quest or raid rewards.
One of the primary ways you will end up acquiring the new barrel, though, is through defeating sieges and mech clusters. Upon defeating an enemy siege you will be able to loot not only the left behind mortars, but some extra barrels.

You might be asking yourself why you’d possibly need so many barrels if you only need a single one per built mortar, well, here comes the big one. Now, a brand new mortar will only be able to fire 20 shots before needing its barrel fully replaced. And this is not like the replacement of the other various defensive structures, no, no simple steel or uranium will do, you have to use a completely new barrel.

Well, that super sucks, right? I was in the same boat and hated this change when I first read it, but, don’t fret, there is a pretty amazing silver lining.

Firstly, mortars cost way less steel to make. Likewise, shell costs have been reduced by 10 steel. And remember, mortar shells are used in other things, namely IEDs. With this change IEDs are much more worthwhile to use.

The biggest benefit of the new mortar, though, is that it is a whopping 60% more accurate. With the old mortars, you only had a 1 in 517 chance of scoring a direct hit. With the new miss radius that has changed to 1 in 316!

I’ve personally tested this quite a bit in real gameplay and the difference is noticeable. Yeah, it sucks you have to get some initial barrels, but, generally, I only need 2-3 mortars now instead of 5-10.

I think the main thing this does is make it so you can no longer stay super small wealth and rush to your first mortars before you get a siege. That strategy is still doable, but it is not quite as viable because you may simply not find a barrel even if you get your research completed.

For those of you that hate this change and want it reverted, have no fear! You can do so even without a mod. To do this, you will go to your storyteller settings, click Custom, then scroll down and change the X next to ‘Classic Mortars’ to a checkmark.

If you are going to do this make sure you choose the correct base difficulty you want to play on inside the ‘Set standard Playstyle’ menu first!

And that does it! Hopefully this rimworld guide has given you all the knowledge you need on the updated mortars for rimworld 1.3 and ideology!

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And, as always, thanks for watching!