RimWorld is a game of survival, challenging players to turn a handful of stranded colonists into a thriving community. Life on a remote planet is never easy, and colonies will have to contend with pirate raids, disease, hostile wildlife, and adverse weather.
Whether it's scorching desert summers, or frigid tundra winters, temperature can kill off a colony as quickly as any pirate raid or disease outbreak. Extremely high temperatures can even cause crops, furniture, and walls made of flammable materials to spontaneously combust. Therefore, in order to keep their RimWorld colonists safe and happy, players will have to learn to manage the temperature of their people.
Dangerous Temperatures in RimWorld
There are four parts of a RimWorld colony that are commonly affected by adverse temperatures: food, crops, animals, and colonists. Temperatures below 10C will help preserve food in RimWorld, and prevent it spoiling completely below 0C. However, high temperatures will cause food to spoil faster, quickly emptying stores and larders. Similarly, crops will grow slower as the temperature drops, and can stop growing completely if they exceed the minimum or maximum temperature listed for that particular crop. Crops that drop below 0C will start to rapidly die, forcing players to harvest them quickly or lose them for good.
Like crops, colonists and animals also have comfortable temperature ranges. For colonists this is between 16-21C, but this range can be extended by wearing warm RimWorld clothing. Colonists will begin to take mood penalties when above or below their comfortable temperature, which turn to health effects when temperatures get extreme. Very low temperatures cause hypothermia and then frostbite, which must be treated, or the colonist may lose the affected body part. Very high temperatures cause heatstroke, which will increase in severity if the colonist isn't moved into a colder area, eventually leading to unconsciousness and death.
How to Manage Temperature in RimWorld
There are a few different ways that players can manage the temperature for their colonists in RimWorld. The lowest tech methods of managing temperatures are the Passive Cooler and the Campfire. The Passive Cooler only requires Wood, and can keep a small to medium-sized room down at a comfortable 17C as long as the outside temperature isn't extreme. Similarly, a campfire will heat a room to 30C if it isn't dangerously cold outside. Thicker walled rooms will insulate more, and allow Passive Coolers and Campfires to be more effective.
For players who've advanced enough to use higher tech RimWorld materials like Components, there are a few other options for managing temperature. Heaters and Coolers require electricity to operate, but can efficiently heat or cool multiple rooms. Connecting rooms together with Vents will share their temperature automatically, meaning that players in cold or hot biomes will often want to cluster their rooms together to share heat/cold. Coolers can even be used both to cool and heat, as they expel cold air on the side marked by the blue arrow, and hot air on the side marked by the red arrow. This is very useful in colder biomes, as players can use coolers to maintain a freezer in the summer and help warm rooms in the winter.
RimWorld is out now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
