RimWorld Alpha 11 - Sappers and Traps released news

It’s here! This update includes clever new AI strategies including sappers who blast and dig around your defences and raiders who burn crops. I’ve also added a number of incidents, including several long-term atmospheric conditions like volcanic winter and toxic fallout. There is also an array of new traps for players to use, dozens of other new features and hundreds of fixes and small improvements. A full change list is at the end of this post.

If you own the game, you can get Alpha 11 by re-downloading from the link you used before (it is a permanent link and always has the newest version). You should also get an update email from us. Anyone still having trouble should start at this thread. There may be a delay of some hours before your download count resets or your email arrives.

Also note that this build will not load old savegames or old worlds, so please don’t try to load these in the new version. They’ll probably just crash the game.

Change list:

AI

• Added new raid type: sappers.
• Sappers attempt to dig or blast their way around your hardest defensive point. The circumvent ‘killbox’-like strategies.
• Enemies now flee things that are about to explode
• Enemies remember trap positions that their faction has encountered before, and avoid them.
• Raiders opportunistically ignite crops on fire.
• Pawns can now do ‘job override’ checks to see if a new job should start before ending their current job. These are now used liberally to have pawns respond faster and more intelligently to changing conditions (especially in combat).
• Pawns check for job override when taking damage. It will no longer be possible to bug out the centipede enemy and kill him at close range while he tries to take a firing position.
• Enemies no longer take unpowered player turrets as primary targets.
• Pawns choose sky-gaze, wander, eating and other positions by traversing the region graphic instead of by random coordinate scattering, which solves problems with them taking long paths around long walls.

Traps

• Added deadfall trap: A simple rearmable trap that falls on enemies and damages them.
• Added IED trap: An artillery shell connected to a trigger that detonates after a short delay.
• Added incendiary IED trap: Like IED, but sets fires.

New incidents

• New incident: Toxic fallout. A toxic cloud that lasts for days or weeks. It kills plants, rots food, and slowly poisons people outside. Toxic buildup in characters leads to vomiting, dementia, and eventually death.
• New incident: Volcanic winter. Lasts weeks or months and significantly reduces temperatures and light levels, leading to poorer harvests.
• New incident: Manhunter pack. A pack of deadly wargs arrives and stalks the local area for a while before moving on. Fight them or hide inside from them.
• New incident: Chased refugee. A refugee radios and offers to join the colony if you’ll fight the raiders on his tail.
• New incident: Psychic soothe. The opposite of a psychic drone.

Allowed areas

• Assign colonists to allowed areas.
• Every item and location outside the allowed area is considered forbidden.

Storyteller changes

• Storytellers will never entirely disallow events because of population.
• Randy’s event chances are affected by population (somewhat).
• Re-tuned storyteller population intent based on new output tables for smoother population gain with higher maximum and better recovery at small populations

Ice sheet

• Ice sheet biome is now playable (though perhaps not survivable).

Misc

• Added strip designator to reduce stripping micromanagement.
• You can toggle allowing sowing in a growing zone.
• Doors can be held open.
• Door locking is now door forbidding (it’s clearer).
• Added copy/paste functionality for storage zone/building settings.
• World data now saves into map file to prevent game state confusion with multiple saves on one world.
• Added new joy activity: build snowman.
• You can now remove floors to reveal the terrain underneath.
• You can now perform surgery on guests. Violating surgery will anger their faction.
• Guests are smarter and no longer walk out of the colony bleeding.
• Added new hairs donated by Shinzy.
• Slave trader changed to pirate merchant, can still show up to buy slaves even when your population is high (though they may not carry any).
• Hundreds more bugfixes, tuning changes, optimizations, and other small improvements.