The more people you have in your colony, the easier it is to survive. If you start your game as a rich explorer, you have to do cooking, mining, building, hauling, and researching alone. Moreover, that colonist must be capable of doing all these tasks. That’s why bigger colony will make everything go easier and faster (talk about defending your base from enemies…). However, here’s how to get more people in your RimWorld colony.
You need to prepare for more people
If you are unprepared when someone joins your colony, you may face some problems. Once you start a new game, build at least one additional bed in case you get more people in your colony. We recommend to always have a few empty rooms prepared for new colonists.
So, how to prepare properly? Build a few empty beds, which, in the best case scenario, should be in separate rooms. Also make sure that you have a small prison (prison is just a small room with a prisoner bed in it), because many colonies consist of ex-prisoners. Don’t hesitate to build a couple medical beds too – then you’ll be sure these are empty when needed most.
How to get more people come to your colony?
Basically there are 7 ways of getting more people in your colony. You can raise that number by using mods, but let’s stick to the base game for now.
Capture downed enemies
If you still haven’t been attacked by raiders – you will. Raids occur pretty often in RimWorld and you have to be ready to defend by using guns, melee weapons, turrets etc. However, not all enemies die instantly while fighting – they can be downed if injuries aren’t deadly.
Do you see an enemy lying on the ground with a yellow “!” blinking above him? All you need to do is choose any colonist, click on that enemy with your right mouse button and click “Capture” as in the picture below. Make sure you have a bed for prisoners, otherwise you’ll not be able to capture anyone.
Once you have your prisoner, click on him, choose a “Prisoner” tab, check “Recruit” and just wait. If you have any colonist assigned to “Warden”, he will chat with prisoners and try to convince them to join your colony. You can also change prisoner settings, like quality of meals you feed them, regular or herbal medicine for healing them etc. The effectiveness of recruiting depends on “Social” skill. After all, that’s the most popular answer to “how to get more people in my colony?”
Buy slaves
Buying slaves is a very quick and easy way to get more people in RimWorld. But you need to wait for pirate merchants, because they are only ones who can offer slaves. Actually, slaves are pretty expensive and costs depend on their skills.
Once you buy a slave, he immediately joins your colony and acts just like a normal colonist. Be aware that the bigger is your colony, the lower is the chance to buy slaves.
Crashed transport pod
This event is pretty rare, especially if your colony is already big. You can either rescue or capture people from crashed transport pods. But be aware that these survivors can be hostile, friendly or even in relationship with someone from your colony.
Take a look at this picture below. There are two transport crashes next to each other (triggered using dev mode) and you can see that one of these names is red and other – blue. Blue one is from faction with neutral goodwill while red one is from hostile faction (-80 goodwill). In this case, we can capture both of them, but only Norris can be rescued friendly.
Capturing a survivor will convert him into a prisoner, who can be recruited later. Rescued (not captured) survivor can choose either to join your colony or leave with increased goodwill between your and his factions.
Defend wanderer from attackers
Sometimes you may receive a message that someone is running from raiders or mad animals and asking for your help. If you decline it, that person won’t show up in your area. If you accept it – that person will immediately join your colony, but you’ll need to defend not only him, but also your colony from whoever/whatever is chasing him.
Wanderer joins
That’s the easiest way to get more colonists in RimWorld. Once in a while, you can get a message “Wanderer joins”. In that case, you don’t need to do anything – it’s just a random person immediately joining your colony.
Wanderers can be either unrelated to anyone or in relationship with someone from your colony.
Capture visitors or traders
If you’re desperate for more colonists, you can make a bit rude, but effective move – capturing visitors. Visitors will be passing by your colony regularly and caravans will visit you to trade. Just choose your colonist, click “Try to arrest” and hope for the best. But remember, relations with the faction you’re attacking will drop and capturing will get messy if you try to do that in a large caravan group. Even in game it doesn’t feel right.
Ancient danger
Finding an ancient danger is not very hard – many generated areas have it. Usually ancient dangers hide mechanoids, hives and valuable items, but you also can find people in cryptosleep caskets. They may be hostile, so get ready for attack before opening them. Take a look at our example below: there were 4 cryptocaskets and 4 hostile people equipped with guns jumped out after opening one of them. You can capture these people if you can down them without killing first.
Randy Random is perfect for a large colony
You may be aware of main differences between three storytellers, but did you know that they also control the amount of people in your colony? There are a few specific lines inside game code, which explains the exact information we are interested in:
These lines tell us that Randy Random create more possibilities to get more people in your colony if there’s less than 4 colonists and he will lower this possibility when your colony grows. However, once you have 50 colonists, Randy will start creating various disasters to reduce that “critical” number.
We recommend choosing Randy Random for large colonies, because “critical” line for other storytellers is only 18 colonists.
Don’t be picky
If you have a chance to capture someone – do it. Even if he doesn’t do dumb labour or can’t heal allies as you would want. But remember, that this colonist can do other tasks, making some free time for other, more valuable colonists. Even if that prisoner would be useless as colonist – you can sell him as a slave, or harvest his organs.
That’s how to get more people come to your colony in RimWorld. There are many ways of doing that and it’s up to you (or your conscience) on choosing the best one.
