RimWorld Guide: Which Storyteller to Choose and How do they Work?

RimWorld Guide – Storytellers, Which to Choose and How they Work

This RimWorld Guide is from Patch 1.2 but is still applicable to the current version of the game. If there are ever any updates to Zones I will make a new guide to cover them.

[Video Transcript]

Hey everyone, Adam here with another RimWorld guide. People have been asking me “What Storyteller Should I choose” So I decided to make a RimWorld Guide to tell you all about the three different storytellers and what choosing them will actually do to your RimWorld playthrough.

Alright, so let’s get right into it. RimWorld has three default storytellers aside from the tutorial one – Cassandra, Phoebe, and Randy. The choice of storyteller plus difficulty can change your playthrough significantly. The biggest thing that changes between storytellers is the cooldown, or lack thereof, on different types of events. I’m going to go over all three story tellers a bit, then do a quick rundown on who you should choose based on what sort of experience you want to play.

Cassandra Classic
Cassandra is the most consistent storyteller and sends things at you on an increasingly difficult curve. When starting a new game against Cassandra, you have an 11 day cushion before large threats begin to occur. And, if one of the events has not been a raid by day 20, she will send a raid at you.

In RimWorld, there are EIGHT large threats in the game files. These are: Raids, Infestations, Deep Drill Infestations, Manhunter Packs, Defoliator Ships, Psychic Ships, Mass Animal Insanity, and, with the Royalty DLC – mech Clusters.

Once Cassandra has started throwing things at you, she will hit you on and off for about 4 and a half days before giving you a 6 day break. During her ‘ON’ period she will space events out by a minimum of 1.9 days. Cassandra can hit you with 1-2 large events in this time period.

It is important to note that quests and their events do not count towards this timer. So, if you accept a mech cluster through a quest, Cassandra can still hit you with her event during.

Cassandra’s cooldown cycle for miscellaneous events such as pod crashes, meteorites, toxic fallout, etc is the same as her large threats but are on their own timer. So, for instance, you can have a toxic fallout and a raid back to back, having one of the large threat events I mentioned earlier does NOT put miscellaneous events on cooldown.

The last thing I will mention for Cassandra for now is that she has a cooldown on disease events of 9 days. This means she can’t hit you with a disease EVENT in the first nine days of a playthrough. Independent consistant

Phoebe Chillax
Despite the game screen saying Phoebe can hit just as hard as anyone on higher difficulties, she is absolutely the most consistently easy storyteller. This doesn’t mean she can’t be difficult, only that she can’t be as difficult as the other two.
Here are the main differences regarding Phoebe as compared to Cassandra.

Unlike Cassandra’s 11 day cushion, Phoebe’s is 13, giving you two extra days to prepare. Also, Phoebe’s on/off cycle is 8 and 8 compared to Cassandra’s 4.6 and 6. Phoebe’s incident range is also a 1 whereas Cassandra’s is a 2. All you really need to know about these numbers is that Phoebe is much less likely to punish you with difficult events back to back and is actually unable to hit as often as Cassandra.

Phoebe also has three more days added to her minimum disease timer. Unlike Cassandra, who can give you a disease event in 9 days, Phoebe’s is 12.

Lastly, Phoebe does give, on average, more non-royalty quests than Cassandra.

Randy Random
Alright, last but certainly now least – Randy Random. As his information suggests, Randy is definitely random and can make for some crazy and interesting playthroughs. Due to how RNG works, though, you can sometimes have huge chunks of time in which not much happens. Randy CAN be the hardest storyteller in small bursts due to his short cooldowns, but he isn’t consistent at it and you have to get pretty unlucky, for instance, to have a string in which he sends a raid at you every day. But it is possible. Another great example of this is that Randy is the only storyteller capable of hitting your colonist with a disease event on day 1 hour 1.

Basically, how Randy works, is that each category of events are all in the same pool and have their own weight. It is more likely to get a big threat than having a ship chunk fall, for instance, but, given the random chances, sometimes you’re just going to have every event for a season or longer be ship chunks. And, as mentioned, his cooldowns are the lowest of any storyteller.

One final thing I’d like to mention here is population. I won’t go into details on this video, but each storyteller has a population curve. Basically, this determines how likely you are to get into a situation in which you can gain a new colonist. In 1.1, this was changed significantly, but, Randy’s curve is still slightly different than the other two storytellers. Long story short, you are slightly more likely to receive more colonists (and for longer) with Randy than the other two.

Conclusion
Alright, so you’ve had me throw numbers at you but what you really want to know is “Which storyteller should you choose?”

Choose Cassandra if you want a consistent experience in which you are hit with events fairly often but given some time to recover after each cycle. She is sort of your standard experience storyteller.

Choose Phoebe if you want the easiest experience. Although she is consistent like Cassandra, her increased time frames on events and downtimes give you a lot more time to recover and rebuild if something goes badly.

Choose Randy if you want an (almost) entirely random experience. You may get thrown into situations that are impossible to win, even right off the bat, but due to how RNG works it won’t be the norm. Other times, you may sit for seasons at a time only receiving drop pods full of milk and ship chunks. Randy can occasionally be boring in this way, however, you always have to be on your toes and ready for anything. Against Cassandra, for instance, if you’ve had two large events recently, you know you’re going to have a cooldown before another of those happens (unless it is from a quest), Randy might send a new event at you the very next day.

Ending
Alright, and that does it for this RimWorld guide regarding storytellers. Hopefully you now know which storyteller to choose to get the kind of RimWorld experience you prefer.
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.