RimWorld Guides

What a Crit Pick RimWorld guide is

Every guide on this page starts from the same place: the game files. Damage numbers, work speeds, tame chances and market values are read out of the defs rather than remembered from a playthrough, then checked against a colony that actually ran. Where a number is a designer's knob rather than a fact — how often a raid escalates, how much a storyteller pushes — the guide says so instead of dressing an opinion as data.

That matters most for tier lists. A ranked list is only useful if you know the rubric behind it, so each list opens with the one it uses: damage per second at a stated range for weapons, damage taken per hit at a stated armour value for gear, and food-in versus work-out for animals. Change the rubric and the order changes. Saying the rubric out loud is the difference between a ranking you can argue with and a ranking you have to trust.

Where to start

If the colony is new, read the storyteller guide first. Cassandra, Phoebe and Randy are not difficulty settings — they shape when pressure arrives, and picking the wrong one makes every other decision feel harder than it is. After that, the ranged weapon tier list answers the question most new colonies get wrong: what to hand the three colonists who will actually be shooting.

If the colony is established and dying to raids, the melee and armour rankings matter more than another turret. If it is stable and boring, the animal guide and the gravship layouts are where the next hundred hours live.

Versions, mods and when this goes stale

RimWorld changes with every major update and expansion, and a guide that does not name its version is a guide you cannot check. Each page here states the version it was written against and carries a last-updated date. Anything covering Odyssey, gravships or Anomaly content says so in the first paragraph, because a colony without those DLCs will not see half of what is described.

Mod guides are kept separate for the same reason. Modded content — Alpha Animals, Vanilla Expanded and the rest — lives in the mods library, so a vanilla colony never has to guess whether a recommendation applies to the game it is running. The lore pages cover the fiction: glitterworlds, mechanoids, the archotechs and what the game implies rather than states.

How to use the lists above

The tier lists are sortable and searchable — type a weapon, animal or armour name into the filter and the grid narrows as you type. S and A tiers are things worth restructuring a colony around. B and C are fine, situational picks. D and F are usually traps: items that look reasonable in the crafting menu and lose to something cheaper in practice, and the entry explains which cheaper thing.

Found something that no longer matches the game? The contact page is the fastest way to flag it, and corrections get folded into the next pass.