RimWorld's Ideology expansion and 1.3 update are out now
You won't believe it
RimWorld's latest expansion is out now, after having been announced just two weeks ago. Called Ideology, it adds customisable belief systems to the scifi colony sim, so your space colonists can become, for example, nudist cannibals who feel it's important to proselytize their nudism and cannibalism to others.
This trailer introduces some more of what's possible:
The belief systems work around a core of "memes" - in the traditional sense, not the keyboard cat sense. A meme is something like, "Tree connection: Trees are the essence of life, and we must be near them." This leads to precepts which shape behaviour. Colonists can also convert their beliefs or attempt to convert others, and you can assign them specific social roles such as "leader" and "moral guide" depending upon their beliefs.
Many of the beliefs also pair with their own rituals, which are player-controlled events like a colourful dance party at which revellers move to loud music, or, uh, a blinding, in which a moral guide inducts new believers by blinding them while others watch.
The full list of additions listed on the expansion's Steam page is mighty. I haven't mentioned the Dryads, small creatures that colonists can gain the ability to command if they first build a relationship with a special Gauranlen tree.
RimWorld is a fantastic management game for the way its peeps interact with one another, helping you to build stories out of fights and fallings out. The Ideology expansion seems like a big new toybox of ways for your colonists to fight and fall out.
Ideology costs £15.49/€16.79, but the free 1.3 update has been released at the same time. The changelog is understandably less exciting than the expansion, but it does include animal pens, breaching raids, and a lot of tweaks.