We may earn a commission when you buy through links in our articles. Learn more.

Joy to the Rimworld: latest update adds the need to please your colonists

rimworld alpha 10 update joy ludeon studios

When firing colonists off to other planets you might think about their basic needs, making sure they have enough food, medicine, and shelter for an alien planet, but forget that the whole business of terraforming a landscape can be pretty dull. 

That’s what the latest Rimworld update addresses: your colonists can now get bored and it’s your job to keep them entertained (and safe from rampant alien attacks).

Developer Tynan Sylvester gives a brief overview of the joy system in this update video:

To keep your colonists happy and productive you’ll need to satisfy their joy need, giving them time off work to reflect and enjoy themselves.

They might do something as simple as going for a walk or meditating, sometimes they’ll sit down at a campfire with other colonists and relax together over a beer. However, if you want to increase the amount of boredom they relieve, and speed up how quickly they do it, then you’ll want to invest in a rec room and fit it with a television, billiards table, and chess set.

Eventually colonists will grow tired of a singular joy source so you need to introduces a variety of sources they can move between.If that doesn’t work you can just buy them chocolate, a surefire why to improve a colonist’s mood.

The new update’s already out and can be updated by downloading the latest build from the Rimworld site.

I’ve included the full change log over the page.

Joy

• New joy need added. Colonists want to have “joy”, which means anything that lets the stop working and enjoy themselves for a while.

• Added joy sources

• Skygazing

• Meditating/praying

• Social relaxation around campfire or table, with or without beer

• Horseshoes game

• Chess

• Billiards

• Television (purchasable)

• Telescope for astronomy (purchasable)

• Added armchair and dining chair

• There are various kinds of joy. Repeated use of the same kind of joy builds up a tolerance, reducing its impact. Colonists will prefer joy sources they are not already tolerant to. Result: it’s beneficial to provide a variety of joy sources.

Outfits system

• New outfits manager system added. You can design ‘outfits’ (restrictions on what a colonist is allowed to a wear) and assign them to colonists in a central interface. Colonists will then independently work to find the best apparel possible given their outfit and the current season. They will automatically switch out damaged apparel for better apparel, or poor-quality apparel for high-quality apparel.

• If the player manually assigns apparel, the colonist will never remove it until the manual assignment is cleared.

Timetable system

• New timetable system added. You can assign each colonist a daily timetable which describes when they should sleep, work, have joy, or decide on their own.

Misc

• Colonists can fall unconscious on their own if over-exhausted.

• Reworked how melee verbs are selected so they’ll be selected with a bit more randomness. e.g. Someone with one scyther blade hand won’t use it exclusively; you’ll need to get them two if you want a true killing machine.

• Beer can now be wielded as a weapon (like wood).

• Passion flames are now displayed subtly on the work overview screen.

• New end credits song from Al!

• Reduced skill degradation rate.

• Day length extended from 24,000 to 30,000 ticks. Days per month reduced from 12 to 10.

• Hunters will now approach and execute downed animals at close range.

• Reworked food search so it smoothly integrates information about food distance, taste, and psychological preference to get the most optimal food source.

• Health tab now displays overall bleeding rate.

• Starvation and blood loss are now staged and affect consciousness as they worsen.

• Reworked how skills generate so there will be more initial skill variation and age affect starting skills more.

• Rebalanced and reformatted plant ecology tunings to lengthen crop cycles and slow wild plant spread. Reworked plant growth in relation to light levels so plants can still grow slowly in dim light (e.g. tundra summers).

• Pain now creates unhappiness.

• String lists are now part of language data and can be translated.

• Butcher table, sculptor’s table, and stonecutter’s table can now be made of various stuffs.

• Trees are no longer sowable. Traders carry wood.

• Characters will now sometimes resist arrest.

• You can now set a minimum skill level on bills.

• Visitors will now carry away wounded guests from their faction.

• Hunted animals will occasionally fight back. Some animals always fight back.

• Doctors now automatically rescue downed colonists.

• Generalized toggle power interaction to ‘switch flicking’ and applied it to power switch toggling and door locking as well as building power on/off.

• Many many other fixes, adjustments, and optimizations.