RimWorld - Ideology

RimWorld - Ideology

What Do You Believe?

With the Ideology expansion, each person in the game gets a belief system.

Belief systems define social roles for leaders, moral guides, and skill specialists. They invoke rituals from gentle festivals to brutal sacrifices. They guide preferences around food, comfort, love, technology, and violence. They venerate specific animals, desire different apparel and tattoos, and give access to different buildings and strategies.

Everything is customizable. Make your own story of pirate nudist cannibals, blind undergrounder mole people, charitable ranching cowboys, machine-obsessed transhumanists, or rustic peaceful tribes who link with curious tree creatures.

You can build mind-bending temples with colorful drug motifs, terrifying sacrificial altars clad in skulls, winding mazes of underground tunnels full of technology, or beautiful orchards with drifting leaves.

You’ll hold unforgettable rituals - sick dance parties with pounding music, bountiful feasts of human flesh, beautiful skylantern festivals, ceremonial blindings, Christmas festivities around the tree, vicious gladiator duels, and more.

As you grow powerful, you’ll hunt for the venerated relics of your belief system in new multi-part quests. Penetrate ancient complexes full of diverse threats. Infiltrate wary tribal villages and hack downed spacedrones while holding off other treasure-hunters. Find the relic in its ancient temple and bring it back to your reliquary to attract wealthy pilgrims to your colony and help you convert even more people to your beliefs.

And when you’re successful and secure, you can seek transcendence beyond reality in the new, epic archonexus endgame.

Ideology makes your story into your story more than ever before.

Memes and Precepts

Each belief system is built around a collection of 1-4 core memes, where each meme represents a core idea in the belief system. By combining memes and changing the details of how they are expressed, you can create a near-infinite variety of different belief systems.

Each meme can give rise to a variety of different precepts. Each precept is a specific rule or guideline which affects a specific behavior or preference. The same meme won’t always imply the same precepts - if you want fine control, you can edit and randomize precepts exactly the way you like.

Conversion

People can convert each other to new beliefs. You can assign wardens to convert prisoners, or use the special abilities of your moral guide.

People will also spontaneously try to convert those around them. Those with proselytizing beliefs will do this much more intensely - which can lead to conflict.

Depending on traits, some people are much easier to convert than others.

You can bring everyone in your colony to one belief system, or try to keep a diversity of beliefs to capture the benefits of all of them.

Social roles

Make use of your favourite colonists’ strengths and skills by assigning them formal social roles. Each belief system defines special roles that believers can take on.

Rituals

Each belief system defines a collection of unique rituals. These player-controlled events are special gatherings that have a variety of impacts depending on how they are carried out. For example, a wild party in a massive dance hall with giant speakers may attract new recruits or lead to the discovery of an ancient complex full of loot. On the other hand, if you throw a party in a field with no music at all, you might not get the same benefits.

Gauranlen Trees

A unique type of tree called the Gauranlen tree will occasionally sprout near your colony. These majestic orange trees have a symbiotic relationship with small creatures called dryads. The tree supports the dryads, and in return the dryads protect the tree. Each tree has a few dryads attached to it.

A colonist can connect with a tree in a special ceremony. By pruning the tree over time, the colonist can strengthen the connection and gain the ability to influence its dryads.

Beliefs matter. If your colonists venerate the trees, they can connect with Gauranlen trees more effectively and influence the dryads more efficiently. Only those who truly respect the trees can control their reproduction. With time, such a tree-connector colony can build an economy and an army from its Gauranlen orchard and the cute, useful, fearsome dryads.

Relic Hunts and Additional Quests

Every belief system holds some special objects as relics. It might be an ancient sword, a skull, a piece of armor, or anything else. Embark on multi-part quests to find and collect the relics that you believe in.

Once you’ve found the ancient temple that holds the relic, you can go there and grab it in a daring raid as you evade and defeat a variety of security systems. Take it home and install it in a reliquary. The relic will help you turn others to your beliefs, and also attract pilgrims who will bring gifts.

Ideology also adds some new quests not related to the relics.

Styles and New Buildings

Each belief system is associated with different aesthetic styles. Styles affect how many things look - rituals, furniture, floors, apparel, and art. Your colonists will enjoy being around things that match the styles of their belief system, and some may reject styles of other beliefs.

One belief system can mix-and-match several of these together. Make the morbid pirates or techno-Buddhists you dream of.

Styles affect apparel in many ways. Animalist believers may shape their recon armor helmets as terrifying animal faces. Morbid death-worshippers will use skull helmets. Spikecore pirates will wear dusters with spiked shoulders. There are many, many visual variations, so every colony will dress different.

Styles also affect the artwork your colony produces. Statues will display the iconography of their creators’ belief systems.

Belief systems also unlock new buildings and buildables. Many of the buildings are used to support rituals while the buildables have specific functions.

New Apparel

Beyond styles, belief systems can make people want to wear specific items of apparel. Some of these can be specific to certain social roles as well - a priest or moral leader may need to wear a special hat or robe.

Colonists also want new tattoos and beards and hairstyles related to their beliefs. They can visit a styling station to recolor garments using dyes harvested from the new tinctoria crop, change tattoos, or restyle their beard and hair.

Slaves

You can enslave prisoners or purchase slaves from traders. Slaves will work on most tasks like colonists, at the cost of reduced work speed.

Every belief system has an attitude towards slavery - some find the practice abhorrent, while others accept and even demand slaves as part of their beliefs.

You can arm your slaves and command them directly in combat. But watch out - slaves will rebel if they get the opportunity or they are not sufficiently suppressed. Your wardens can suppress slaves by periodically threatening them. You can use structures like terror statues and gibbet cages to passively suppress slaves. You can also make slaves wear special collars and body straps to keep them under control.

Archonexus Endgame

As your colony grows wealthy, you’ll have the opportunity to sell the whole thing and start anew with your favorite colonists and animals. In return, you’ll receive a piece of a map that leads to the archonexus - a conduit through which an ancient machine superintelligence is said to affect the physical world.

This quest acts like a partial game reset where you will start over with your selected colonists and animals. You can keep your favorite characters while moving to a new colony in a new place and progressing on an epic quest.

Each new colony appears next to an ancient archotech structure of increasing psychic influence. Study each structure to unlock further pieces of the map. Unlock three pieces, and you can locate the archonexus itself, invoke its power, and transcend physical reality through the mind of the machine god.