Rimworld’sAnomaly 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 alsogives you immediate access to the Monolith,which activates the DLC’s content and some early containmenttools 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, aneldritch book that pawns will interact with unless forbidden,cancause 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 tofind the monolith on any starting map, but it can be difficult to spot. The newly added search tool can be used tofind the ‘Fallen Monolith’.
Be warned that the Monolith willactivateindependently 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 topause 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 entitymoves invisibly and only sends a raid alert when it is close 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 isbest done by your more armed colonists, or by tame mechanoids if you have the Biotech DLC. A late-game solution is to give yournon-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 willexamine contained entities roughly every two days, withstronger entities giving faster and better results.
If your traditional scholar and anomaly researcher are the same person, you’llwant their lab to be close to the containment facilities.
You’ll also want to haveDark Study as a higher work priority than Research.
The new rituals follow the same general rules as the previous rituals but give new results.
Ghouls Are Not Invulnerable
Ghouls are a new type of pawn made byimplanting humans with anomalous shards.They’reunable to use weapons or equipmentand are only useful for combat. Their advantage is that they have afunctionally 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 withoutreinforcement from your better-armed colonistsis awaste of your near-indestructible supersoldiers, so verify you attempt 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’llget 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’llturn completely feral.
Ghouls have the appearance and personality of rotting corpses, so you’ll often want tokeep them out of sight from your mentally fragile colonists.They also only haveone status bar: food.
Ghouls can be packed into barns or broom closets when not in use, orkept in defensive positions around containment cells or exterior walls.
An easy solution to the food needs in the early game is tohave ghouls hunt their own meat. They can heal all mundane injuries, so they’re the only colonists who can safely hunt with melee attacks.
Manuallyorder your ghouls to attack rodents and small wildlifeand eat them until you have a larger supply of meat.A single ghoul can handily kill a turkey or deerbut even three together will struggle against a muffalo or megasloth.
You can alsosave 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 toretain 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 meansyou need it in large quantities. The material itself isharvested 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 bioferriteif 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 isvery important that you have a second-best soldier on standby. Strength in numbers is important, buthaphazard recruiting can pose its own dangers.
The newMetalhorror 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 methodsof making a colony impervious are going to be much less effective against Anomalies.
Other old favourites like intimidating raiders with piles of their slain comrades can end up working against you with anew event that reanimates unburied corpses.
