Every attempt at Medieval Overhaul I've made has absolutely failed, until this one! Turns out wheat crops and castle fortifications are common tropes for a reason. It was also my first time with the Expert Stairs mod, I love it! I gotta use it in all my playthroughs from now on.

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My best colony so far. 300 mods, losing is fun difficulty.

This is my city I've made so far with the initial inspiration of Frostpunk. Heavy mods (I think 250+?) are used in order to have a fighting chance against the -200 weather.

I wanted to post this as I was finding it quite hard looking for good examples of room layouts for a circular build. I'm quite happy with how many of my rooms have turned out, especially considering its my first time trying non-square builds, and so I'm hoping it might help someone who was like me and looking for some examples.

I am posting this with it being far from completion because I can feel my interest waning, and I'm not sure how much longer I'll keep it going. Its fully functional for my current ~30 pawns, and covers almost all the essentials.

So far, this is my best and longest-running colony!

It came close to destruction four times: a fleshmass heart, a metalhorror infiltration, an early-game siege raid, and a mechanoid cluster. Some parts of the colony are more aesthetic than functional, but I don't really mind; I built it to look good as much as to work well.

The map was slightly edited over time.

Time-lapse: https://youtu.be/qkPvY0pi0MQ

Crossposting from Reddit since I wrote a lot there:

Only so many characters to put into the top post, but I'm super proud of this thing and can't help but write a little bit more about it: this colony has been cooking since January, played here and there, and built into what I'm sure is the largest colony I've ever made in RW. This thing is even bigger than the other one I made, and that was, then, the biggest I'd made. There's a trend here towards dummy huge.

For the most part, it has held about 150~ colonists almost continuously, but a lot of these were being sent out to the map since I'd conquered the entire planet courtesy of World Domination, and a lot of those troops ended up coming home. Yes, I've literally conquered the planet - there's no other factions left to send raids. I've got screenshots, and some 300+ outposts populated either by the pawns that WD generates or slaves.

For the general plan of this run, this was meant to be my first real game touching the gene system from Biotech. I'd never actually played with it before (1.6 has been my first time back to RW since Royalty or so?), and figured, hey, let's make a colony where we use that. I'd already made a sort of tech-cathedral last time, so a gene-focused run was the next thing.

But that gave me an idea. See, I'm a BattleTech boy, and when I started spitballing ideas together, I realized that you could make custom xenotypes at game start that had heritable germline traits...and that made me go, "hey, I can make the Clans in this thing!", and the idea that would become the Verdant Citadel was born. For all its cosy vibes and beauty, the place is shockingly dystopian beneath the surface: it has a five part caste system, and all pawns are the result of careful use of the growth vats to expand and enforce that system. We've got a Warrior Caste, a Scientist Caste, a Technician Caste, a Laborer Caste, and even a Merchant Caste; each of these are born with genes that give them massive bonuses to the skills of their given role (and trash skills everywhere else to avoid runaway metabolic costs), leading to a super-specialization of workers.

Indeed, the entire city is actually divided into roughly eight pieces: each caste has one major district, and then there's three extra - a sort of "neutral" city center for everyone, and then the capital hall on the northside and the gargantuan genetic center on the central island.

I legit thought this run would be much harder than it was: most of my colonies in the past have been more generalized in workers, but this one was ultra-specialized since no one can work outside their caste, and to make things even more fun, I generally decided to forego the use of bionics and psychic powers. I expected to get ganked; someone in the system would die and a caste would be unable to keep expanding and that'd lead to a failstate.

Surprise, surprise, the caste system worked frighteningly well: as soon as the growth vats came online, the colony just completely escaped the power curve of the game as I know it. Pawns with virtually flawless stats could be produced at scale: a Warrior-Caste pawn that popped out the vat at age 13 or so would have 15-16~ in shooting and melee, and the other castes were equally specialized. Because of that, there was never a case of having to work around bad pawns or not having someone who could do a job, and since everyone was so specialized, they only ever worked on what they were good at: the Laborer Caste did all the cooking and farming, for example, and never, ever had to stop from doing those jobs so I had a virtually infinite supply of food even as the colony's population exploded. Adding Vanilla Skills Expanded to this mix only made it even stronger, because the pawns could get an expertise skill the moment they came out the vat and basically be the perfect worker, or you could stuff them back in the vat till 16 or so, which'd let you get them out when they're able to be used for ovum harvesting and thus make more embryos faster.

The result is the colony just went through the roof, much, much faster than I ever expected. Like, yikes. Lorewise in BT, the caste system can have serious jank to say the least (massive simplification) but it works REALLY well in this game, and got even better when it came to building this city...because since the city was divided into sections, no one ever had to walk across the entire map to work or rest or eat: everything they needed was always close by, making it more like five bases on the same map rather than one large one. That made building this gargantuan thing possible, and what was originally meant to be an experimental game, then a play of pretend at BattleTech's vatgrown weirdos, ended up taking on a life of its own and building a city so nice to live in that it probably upgraded the planet from Rimworld to Midworld or something.

My Vampire play trough.

The aim was to create a colony where vampires and humans would coexist, whilst using every vampire mod i found.

Now i have a bunch of super overpowered vampires that drop unconscious on the floor once the sun rises and a bunch of humans to protect them from harm during daytime.

They are ruled by three leaders, a vampire, a human and an half-vampire.

So basically just a bunch of red lights and head canon :-)

My medieval anomaly/fantasy biotech psycaster base.

modlist and save game can be found here https://gofile.io/d/4Ihjhz

#RimWorldPorn

Mercenary company start on strive to survive 300% scale 105 Colonists+4 outposts and ~9 vassals. 2 hostile factions destroyed so far. Medieval Overhaul + Progression mods (total 202 active mods)

My biggest colony so far. I tried to move away from the usual square/boxy layouts and instead build more organically, almost like a city builder. The idea was to let the colony grow naturally over time rather than planning everything in a grid from the start.

The map itself was pretty challenging to work with since it’s split by multiple rivers, so a lot of the layout came down to adapting as I expanded. It definitely made planning harder, but also way more fun. Pretty happy with how it turned out in the end.

Timelapse: https://youtu.be/vUu65TvpBsc

After 17 in-game years , this colony evolved from a small survival start into a fully realized ultra-tech civilization. Spanning three separate bases and multiple generations of colonists, the settlement grew into a highly organized, heavily modded powerhouse with custom xenotypes, full augmentations, and legendary gear across the board. At its peak, nearly 40 colonists called this place home before the colony was ultimately refined down to a chosen few to complete the Archo Nexus. What started as a struggle to survive became a story of control, expansion, and finally ascension—marking the end of a months-long journey and one of the most ambitious runs I’ve ever completed.

It's been a week since the last post, I was able to recover the file properly and played last week to finish off what was missing of the colony. I've spent around 240~ hours in this colony, so it feels nice to finally close it off :)

A creative build of an enclosed hotspring-heated Guaranlen grove turned Bed and Breakfast.

My first (and maybe last) medieval colony. It was fun and was quite interesting in comparison to my average high-tech runs. As seen though, I had to call quits as due to whatever issue the game was unplayable (even in old saves) and this was the last picture I could take of it functioning

Started the first colony in March 2022. After starting the second one in December 2022, I took long breaks in between, upgraded my pc for rimworld to play big colonies better.

I plan to continue to 3rd part of the archonexus with the same 3 starting colonists and 2 early recruits from the first colony, while updating the modlist and game to 1,6 from 1,4, cleaning the mess of the modlist and savefile.

Modlist

PC Build

This was an anomaly run on pretty low difficulty, all dlcs (at the time, it was my last big run pre odyssey) and a whole lot of mods. I don't know a lot of specifics anymore since it's been a year that I played this colony. Sadly I couldn't finish building the full cube base due to tps rot. I had a mod that made pawns with 100% cube interest build another cube instead of a cube sculpture, so everyone could have a cube! Of course we sure to gift cubes to our neighbors as well. And they sure loved them!

The base is mostly build out of Steel and Plasteel, the gold look is from the cubic ideo style. I did not mine this much gold lol. I started with three wretches (xenotype that mutates on a regular basis) and aimed to build my genetics lab rather sooner than later to stabilize the mutations. Took me like 4 years to find an actual cube if I remember right