Sci-fi colony sim RimWorld's latest update finally brings the game into beta, adding features big and small. Alongside three new biomes and a revamped melee combat system is a chance for your colonists to go on a "targeted insulting spree" if they have a mental breakdown, where they "follow around a specific other colonist, insulting them repeatedly". Excellent stuff.
The new additions come in the Beta 18 update, which signals that the game is in its final stretch of development, and there won't be any "major content additions" before a 1.0 release.
The big changes include three new swamp biomes filled with plants, a handful of new 'incidents'—including tornadoes and meteor strikes—and a rework of melee combat. A new combat log will chronicle each strike, miss and block so you can review it after the action.
But the minor changes interest me more. The beta adds a lot of 'mental breaks' including the aforementioned barrage of insults, bedroom tantrums, corpse obsessions (colonists dig up a random corpse and drop it in a high-traffic area) and murderous rages.
It also adds new mental inspirations, basically the opposite of mental breaks. A colonist might work extra hard for a day, walk extra fast or shoot more accurately.
The full list of changes is here, and you can watch the developer go into more details on the changes in the video above.
