Rimworld Run Generator

How the generator works

Every roll picks a setting at random, then fills it in: a default start - Crashlanded gives you three pawns, Lost Tribe five, the Rich Explorer and Naked Brutality one, and with Biotech the Mechanitor is one and the Sanguophage two - a story premise to build around, a biome and storyteller that fit the theme, a colony name, the pawns themselves with roles and a few skill passions, an ideoligion if you own the Ideology DLC, and a one-line goal. The start sizes the founding party, and the premise, pawns, names, ideoligion and goal reroll every time, so two rolls of the same setting still play differently. The DLC toggles are a filter - switch off Biotech and you lose the mechanitor and vampire rolls (and their one- and two-pawn starts), switch off Odyssey and the gravship run drops out, switch off Ideology and the worldview line goes quiet. The dropdown locks a theme if you already know what you want; leave it on surprise me and it rolls from everything you can load.

Each roll also names a recommended mod list - a curated, maintained collection that fits the theme, so you can subscribe to one instead of hand-assembling a dozen mods. The quality-of-life stack further down is the base layer most lists already fold in. When you do build your own, the order is: libraries and performance first, then frameworks, then content overhauls, then UI and QoL last. Load order is covered below.

Starts and stories

RimWorld's default scenarios decide how many pawns you wake up with, and the roll respects that. Crashlanded drops three survivors with gear; Lost Tribe gives you five at neolithic tech and a slower research curve; the Rich Explorer strands one well-equipped loner; Naked Brutality strands one with nothing at all. With Biotech in the mix, the Mechanitor starts a single pawn plus a couple of mechs, and the Sanguophage starts a vampire and a human. Whatever the roll lands on, it generates that many founders and shows the count on the sheet.

On top of the start sits a premise - a one-line reason this colony exists. A necromancer who needs a base between rituals; a runner shipped to the prison planet; a coven feeding quietly on the frontier; an adventurer's guild that needs a hall. There are more than 250 of them across the settings, so the story changes even when the setting repeats. Treat it as a seed: a solo premise on a five-pawn start just means the founder brought company, and a premise that cuts against its setting is usually where the most memorable runs come from.

The settings

Nineteen themes the roller draws from. Roll one and a recommended mod list shows up inside the result - a single curated collection that fits the theme, right there with the pawns and the ideoligion. A "better with" tag means the run leans on a DLC for its best version but doesn't hard-require it.

• Crashlanded frontier no DLC — Three survivors, a dropped pod and a map that does not care if you live. The honest default — build, defend, and earn your way off the rock.
• Lost tribe better with Ideology — Spears, no electricity, and the whole tech tree ahead of you. Drag your people from flint to fusion the slow way.
• Medieval kingdom Royalty optional — Castles, smiths and longbows — and not a gun on the planet. Hold the keep and earn a title worth bowing to.
• High fantasy & magic magic · no DLC — Mages, golems and dragons over the ridge. Build a kingdom that runs on spells as much as steel.
• Cyberpunk sprawl high-tech · no DLC — Chrome, corps and a city that never sleeps. Run the streets, jack in, and stay one upgrade ahead of the people who own you.
• Wild west wild west · no DLC — Revolvers, dust and a frontier town with one law. Stake a claim, hold it against the gangs, and ride out the rest.
• Gravship odyssey requires Odyssey — A ship you build plank by plank and fly anywhere. Stop settling — start roaming the planet and the orbit above it.
• Cosmic horror requires Anomaly — The monolith hums and the dark gets hungry. Study what crawled out of containment without losing every mind you brought.
• Mechanitor dawn requires Biotech — One mind, a fleet of machines. Build the mech workforce and the mech army before the raids learn to scale.
• Vampire coven requires Biotech — Deathless, nocturnal, and one sunrise from ash. Feed the coven, work the night, and play the longest game there is.
• Grimdark crusade grimdark · 40k — Faith, armour and an enemy that never stops coming. Hold the line — and remember that conviction is a weapon too.
• Outer rim space opera — Blasters, droids and the edge of known space. Train a force-sensitive, dodge the syndicate, and stay one jump ahead.
• Nuclear wasteland wasteland · no DLC — Rust, rads and what's left after the bombs. Scrape a colony out of the ruins and decide who gets to eat.
• Zombie outbreak outbreak · no DLC — The dead are up and they can smell you. Build a holdout, manage the noise, and never let two crises land at once.
• Monster hunter's lodge beasts - no DLC — Something big lives past the treeline. Track it, trap it, and turn the hide into a wall worth hiding behind.
• Mercenary company guns for hire - no DLC — No cause, just a contract. Take the job, hold the ground, get paid - and spend it before the next war finds you.
• Black-powder line muskets & drums - no DLC — Powder, drill and the bayonet. Form the line, hold it under fire, and bring the volley to a world that shoots back with bows and beam rifles.
• Archotech ascension ultratech - better with Royalty — Chase the tech the dead gods left behind. Bionics, psychic power and archotech relics, all the way to a mind that no longer needs the body.
• The organ trade dark economy - no DLC — Every prisoner is inventory and every guest is a supplier. Run the grimmest, most profitable clinic on the Rim - and try not to think about it.

A faction trick that fits every themed run: in world-gen you can remove the factions that break the fantasy - drop the Outlanders for a medieval planet, thin the spacer factions for a tribal one. The generator can't do that for you, but it's the cheapest immersion fix there is.

The ideoligion roll

Own the Ideology DLC and every roll also hands you a worldview. First it picks fluid or fixed: a fixed ideoligion locks its memes and precepts at game start, while a fluid one starts loose and lets you reform memes and precepts over time as you earn development points. The roll tells you which you got - fluid is the forgiving pick if you're improvising.

Then it rolls a structure and the memes themselves, and how many depends on the type. A fixed ideoligion lets you lock in up to four at creation, so the roll suggests three you can keep or adjust. A fluid one starts with a single meme - and it cannot be a high-impact one - then grows as you spend development points earned from rituals and conversions, so the roll hands you just that opening meme. Structure is mostly cosmetic: it shapes the name, lore, rituals and styles, not the rules. Memes are the actual beliefs, and they drive which precepts you can and can't take: Cannibal makes human meat a delicacy, Tunneler wants you underground, Transhumanist loves implants. The roll keeps them on-theme - it draws from a pool that fits whatever setting came up, so a lost tribe leans on Tree Connection and Animal Personhood while a vampire coven leans on Darkness and Blindsight, not the other way round. The base DLC ships about twenty memes and nine structures.

Mods are where it gets fun, so the generator pulls from them too. Vanilla Ideology Expanded - Memes and Structures adds 36 memes plus structures the base game skips - Eldritch, Serketism, Fire Worship and a merged Shinto-Taoism. Anything the roll takes from a mod is marked VIE so you know you need it installed; untagged memes and structures are vanilla Ideology. VIE needs the Ideology DLC and Vanilla Expanded Framework, and plenty of race and total-conversion mods bundle their own memes on top.

A meme that clashes with the setting - a transhumanist medieval kingdom, or tunnelers who worship the sun - is a feature, not a bug; that tension is half the story. Mod meme rosters shift between versions, so treat the tagged names as examples and check the mod for the current set.

Quality-of-life mods for every run

This is the base layer - the stack that goes under any run and just removes busywork. A full themed collection usually folds most of it in already, so treat this as the list for building your own, or for topping up a collection that's light on QoL. The "why" matters more than the name, so each line says what annoyance it kills.

Libraries & performance load these first

• Harmony — the patching library nearly every mod depends on. Always loads first, above Core.
• HugsLib — a second common library a lot of older mods still need. Cheap to include.
• Vanilla Expanded Framework — the shared engine for the whole Vanilla Expanded series. Run any VE mod, you run this.
• Performance Fish — tick-time and framerate patches that scale with colony size. Needs Prepatcher and Fishery; loads near the top.
• RocketMan — a second performance pass that throttles and caches vanilla calculations. Plays nicely with Performance Fish.
• Mod Manager — search, sort and save mod lists and sanity-check load order before you launch.

Control & information

• RimHUD — every pawn's needs, mood and health on one resizable panel. No more clicking tab to tab.
• Allow Tool — mass forbid/unforbid, haul-urgently, strip and 'finish off' in one drag. Saves a thousand clicks a raid.
• Fluffy's Work Tab — granular, drag-to-order work priorities instead of the four-level vanilla grid.
• Numbers — a spreadsheet view of the whole colony — skills, gear, mood, health — sortable at a glance.
• Better Pawn Control — saved restriction and assignment presets so you can flip to 'defend' or 'work' in one tap.
• CM Color Coded Mood Bar — colours the mood bar so a pawn sliding toward a break is obvious before it happens.

Hauling, chores & building

• Pick Up And Haul — pawns fill their inventory and haul in bulk instead of one item per trip. The biggest chore fix.
• Common Sense — smarter chore logic: clean before cooking, don't eat without a table, fill stockpiles sensibly.
• Replace Stuff — rebuild walls and furniture in place and upgrade materials without tearing the room down first.
• Quality Builder — routes builds to your best crafter when quality matters, so your throne isn't 'awful'.
• Dubs Mint Menus — searchable, filterable build and bills menus. Find the thing instead of scrolling the list.
• Wall Light — lights that sit inside walls, so lighting a room doesn't eat floor tiles. Used every base.

Camera, speed & comfort

• Camera+ — zoom further out and closer in, with smooth controls. Essential once a colony sprawls.
• Smart Speed — a faster game speed and tuning for the existing ones, for the long mid-game grind.
• Interaction Bubbles — speech bubbles over pawns. Pure flavour, but it's where half the stories come from.
• Map Reroll — reroll the starting map and stockpile until the spot fits, before you commit.

About the mod lists

Each roll names one recommended mod list rather than a pile of single mods, because assembling mods - frameworks, QoL, a working load order - is real effort, and one bad pick can break a save. A curated, maintained collection sorts that in one subscribe. The picks are spread across curators on purpose: the official Vanilla Expanded collection for the vanilla-plus starts, dedicated themed packs for the big universes - a 40K Chaos stack, an Ultimate Star Wars set, Darkwood's Fallout overhaul, a 1.6 zombie pack, a horror pack for the Anomaly run - and RatKnight's playthrough lists for the niche themes like the wild west, mercs, the napoleonic line, archotech ascension and the organ trade, where the list is built around a run you can watch before you commit.

Collections are built around one playthrough and target a specific game version, so check the version and the load order before you trust one. The standing rule still holds: when a collection and a big overhaul both touch the same thing, run one, not both.

DLCs & load order, briefly

RimWorld is on the 1.6 update with five expansions, and each toggle changes what a roll can hand you. Ideology adds the whole ideoligion line - structure and memes, fluid or fixed; switch it off and no worldview is generated. Biotech adds the mechanitor and vampire runs and their starts (the one-pawn Mechanitor and two-pawn Sanguophage). Anomaly adds the cosmic-horror run. Odyssey adds the gravship run. Royalty isn't required by any run - it only flags the medieval, grimdark and archotech rolls as "best with Royalty" when you don't own it. The toggles are a filter on what gets rolled, so the generator never hands you a run you can't load; turn one off and the runs built on it drop out of the pool.

Load order is the other thing that decides whether a list works. The reliable order, top to bottom: Harmony, then performance prep (Prepatcher and Fishery if you use Performance Fish), then Core and your DLCs, then frameworks like Vanilla Expanded Framework, then big content overhauls, then faction and content mods, then patches, then UI and QoL last. The rule of thumb is parent before child - a framework loads before anything that depends on it. When two mods both want to be near the top, Performance Fish wins; when the game throws red errors on launch, load order is the first thing to check.

If a generated list and an overhaul disagree - Medieval Overhaul versus the "transition" pack is the classic - run one, not both. Two mods solving the same problem is the most common source of a broken start.

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