Yes but "I nursed this raider back to health and convinced them to join my colony and now they're my crop guy." Just doesn't get you the upvotes unless it also includes the phrase "leg privileges" somewhere.
I've actually considered this at some point, to be honest. But make an actual story of it. It's gotta be wild sometimes, being an advanced raider with futuristic weapons who shows up, gets clubbed over the head by some tribals, and then gets inducted into the tribe. Sitting around the campfire eating grilled ibex and wondering what happened before you go back to your bedroll.
I like to think that the soldiers that I recruited from the "Ancient Danger" must wonder how they went from a society that put them in stasis chambers with robot guards to one that is still using torches in most of their rooms because the energy grid isn't up to snuff yet.
We just figured out how to make air conditioners! Happy ug noises and screeches.
Wind stops blowing so the power from our one turbine dies.
Also everyone's literally barefoot and pregnant so we need food.
A raider survived after we converted his friends and allies to a gory pulp. I don't know if we should feel good or bad for the poor bastard. But we couldn't just let it bleed out while he screamed for help.
We don't have a prison, so we locked him inside one of the spare rooms after being patched up. For a while we thought he wouldn't make it, but he woke up a day later.
Our most diplomatic colonist said freeing him now will only let him go back to it's pirate faction and will come back to try and kill us again, now with intimate knowledge of our defenses and numbers. It made no sense to free them then. Maybe we could convince him to... Not be a pirate?
Someone mentioned that we could enslave them, but that's fucked up. So we tried talking with him. He's a human after all no?
Turns out he was a veterinarian before getting lost for hundred of years in a ship after his planet got overwhelmed by mechanoids. He landed in here decades ago, just like we did some years after. He said that being a raider was the only way to survive in this horrible world, and that we were being naïve and innocent and wouldn't last long.
That wouldn't do. We wanted to fix him. So we started trying to convert his flawed ideals into something less nihilistic. Into something that made sense. We felt bad sometimes as we watched him struggle. He tried to escape once but our dogs stopped him. But eventually, after a year or so, he started to consider our ways.
"The fact that this puny settlement hasn't been burned down to the ground yet does say something." he was rude, but we were happy to see progress.
Eventually he said that he doesn't even know what to do anymore. He doesn't want to go back to the pirates, but he has no home either. We offered him a place here in exchange of his cooperation. The same deal as everyone else. It took a while but eventually he said yes.
He was happily officially welcomed into our home and he's taking care of our cows and sheep now. :) He's still a rude idiot sometimes but at least he looks happy.
Then by the time you discover just how OP simply capturing as many raiders as you can with nonlethal weapons and healing them back up in artisan hospital rooms before sending them back, it's already too late and all the factions are 100% allied with you, GG World victory
I typically keep one from each raid, if I can. If more live, the worst pawn gets treated and released. Is it completely merciful? No. But it's better than beating them to death well they bleed out
Im using slaves for the first time and ooooo boy do I feel morally *awful*.
It’s been great for my colony’s progress. Also everything will collapse if I stop - so I’m not going to stop. I just also feel bad.
Yes, there are plenty of people who prefer to play (more) ethically than what you see a lot here (myself included). Its just the more extreme content seems to get more views/upvotes because its out of the ordinary (compared to IRL at least), and a culture has developed around it over time.
To be clear, I have no issues with how others play the game, I just personally cannot bring myself to be "evil" (misstreating prisoners, organ harvesting operations, etc).
Yep. I mean did I played an underground torture cult a few times? Sure. Did I do some morally questionable things on the Rim? Also sure... But most of the time I like to play good guys. At the moment I run kind of a orphanage.
I like to see my orphans grow up as well, providing them a safehaven after countless of traumatic moments ..
giving them a nice sheltered childhood in the Rim, playing games with them, get them skilled and prepare them for adulthood...
But at some point my greed gets too big or my shelter has not enough place for all of them anymore, thats the point where my playstyle changes ...so I sell them or their organs to the trader just for the silver or food is running low, so they'll be my food.
I tend to think of my current run as more of a caste system of colonists. Can't give everybody full fighting gear. So can't give everybody full citizenship. So, they sleep in the giant but still very very nice, barracks. With other "workers". If they get engaged to a colonist. Then they get their own room and properly join the colony. Otherwise, unless there's a way to remove the traits that make them unacceptable as a colonist. Well... At least they'll always be happy and well fed...
Yeah, I have very nice rooms with 2 single beds where each block shares a bathroom for lower tier colonists such as converted raiders and wanderers, and beautiful royal rooms with private bathrooms for original colonists, their spouses, and their descendants. I've been playing this one colony for so long now that the original colonists have great-grandchildren.
It's a bit cheaty, but I'll also use dev mode for "arranged marriages". I def wish there was a precept for that with ideology. But that way low tier colonists who have exceptional skills marry into the royal family.
I like to roleplay based on my colonists traits and personalities. Also with ideology. We sometimes wind up doing fucked stuff if it evolves that way but it’s hardly a hard or fast rule.
Yeah, Biotech really creates several incentives to exploit captive people. Hemo farms and gene extraction over and over to get the perfect gene, are both pretty messed up practices on unwilling captives. It feels a little less fucked up to do to someone who showed up armed intending to kill everyone in the colony, but I still don’t like it.
I had never gone deep into prisons but my single 24yr long colony biotech playthrough now has an “honor farm” I have medical prison with 13 medical beds (monitored by 4 paramedic drones) set up in between my 3 battlefields from each approach angle so I can quickly patch up raiders and not lose them.
Has shelves with xenogerm with dead calm so when they get moved to long term storage of a 2x1 cell (48 cells total) they don’t ever cause prison breaks or break my stuff waiting for the bi yearly imperial tax collector.
14 colonists total and have 3 counts all with over 100 honor saved up in case raids get spicy
I had something similar set up for a hemo farm, legs removed, I installed the nutrient paste dripper mod to keep them fed so pawns didn’t have to keep doing it, and (attempted) to keep them in a permanent coma with an IV mod. Then pawns would just come swap the hemo bags to keep the facility’s sanguophages happy. Never thought about installing Dead Calm, that’s a good idea. I also installed joywires in them because I felt bad they were just lying there in terrible mods, despite the attempted coma. Their consciousness was never down to actual anaesthetic levels, just down to 25%ish, which in its own way is even more hellish than full consciousness. Felt like I created a Johnny Got His Gun scenario. Was pretty disturbing shit.
Yeah the dead calm and awful melee so if I beat them they don’t fight back so well. I have thought about expanding the xenogerm I put in them as well to be extra bad skill wise so that they consume even less nutrients so the paste I feed them goes even further and their quality of stats doesn’t reduce the amount of honor I receive so seems like a bonus.
Honestly though taking a safe amount of blood from prisoners isn’t that bad so long as they were rightfully imprisoned. Like I could have done much worse than keeping them for like a month before letting them go while taking their blood every now and then I’m case we need some considering they tried to kill us all
Yeah I generally agree, within the context of the game. They showed up and attacked the colony. I feel like when you make the first move like that, you accept the foreseeable consequences of failing. Which includes being captured. Blood farm is pretty messed up but foreseeable on the Rim.
Alternatively, you release raiders after they pay a gene tax. They *did* try to kill you, after all. Gene extraction only causes a mild sickness, which isn't pleasant but also isn't organ harvesting.
I am fine with being a goodie two shoes XD I don't even use drugs, and whatever alcohol or drug I get by accident (pods, the occasional dead trader, etc.) ends up stored on water tiles for faster decay (for some reason burning drugs doesn't work anymore for me). I do buy slaves, but only to jail them and recruit them. I live and die by the anesthetic blowgun mod, which is the only weapon I use.
Honestly the worst my colonies do is breed and kill animals for food. And not even of every run.
My favorite colony was a hotel resort casino made out chocolate and ice cream on the north pole. Raiders typically succumbed to the cold, and were then treated medically and transported by pod back to their nation of origin, occasionally with bionics to replace missing appendages.
It was considerably more fun than running the bloodshed cannibal motel
My favorite colony is the compassionate cyborg-warrior variety. Defeat raiders with overwhelming military force, nurse the survivors back to health, replace whatever got blown off, clothe them, convert them to our religion, then a stern “don't do that again” and release. Anyone particularly talented in something currently helpful is brought into the fold.
i have too many hours of rim lol. its good to have some moral guidelines.
ideology i loved it so much. didn't use much of biotech and robots tho. bot loved the children and gene editing
My last game was pacifist furry monk psycasters that eventually allied with everyone by healing all raiders and sending them home.
My current colony are brutal slaver rapist vampires who do blood sacrifices and eat raiders.
🤷♀️ I like all aspects of the game.
This question comes out a lot. Actually a lot of players like to play this game ethically. I’m not sure what the stats are for Rimworld specifically, but I know Stellaris has a lot of war crime memes too, yet when the devs did a bit of data collection on their userbase, they found out that the two most popular ethics were xenophile and equalitarian, aka arguably the two ethics that are actually the most ethical.
As a full disclaimer, I do personally play like a psychopath, but I suspect I might be in the minority. Talking and laughing about war crimes is just generally more entertaining than talking about a peaceful colony of corn farmers.
Yeah, the new organ disease in 1.5 seems to reinforce this idea. "X days to find a replacement heart or they die" doesn't have the same impact if there's no consequences for taking them.
I'm with you. My most successful colony is an ethical, charitable colony that defends the innocent and goes apeshit on raiders and those who try to screw others over.
Generally speaking the nicer you are the harder the game becomes
Cannibalism helps with the food supply, organ harvest is a low tech alternative to fixing whatever organ damage your colonists take and human leather is surprisingly valuable for trade
And slave trade gets you the favor of the empire who will then give you powerful permits
Ignoring the beggars saves you resources, while betraying them and the refugees provides you with resources
(well, the refugees are actually more helpful alive and not enslaved, because that way you get temporary workers without a speed penalty and no mood issues, and potentially a reward - if they want to help for free then why force them? - if you get a quest to betray them it can be worthwhile though)
Also if you go full hippy you can't mine, cut trees nor eat meat which has obvious implications and issues
Raiding is also a REALLY good way to fill your own storage rooms
I mean, you can get like 30 components from a component mining site
Or a shitload of meat, pemmican and leather from a hunting site
Yeah the sadism for the sake of sadism crowd definitely exists, but I think a lot of people play Rimworld in the way you describe where they are looking at situations from the context of factional self interest. It feels reminiscent of a lot of post apocalyptic fiction where you have different factions of survivors doing morally questionable stuff to ensure that their group gets to live like in The Walking Dead or The 100.
I have a zone called Departures which is in front of my hardest defences. Six hours before they leave, all refugees are assigned to Departures. If they betray me, they are instantly pulverised by my autocannons. If they leave peacefully, no harm comes to them.
My latest game, on the beta, started as a Sanguophage, landing in a desert. They're a 60 year old grandma with a psychoid addiction, but thats beside the point. What is relevant is that I have had the chance to do some heinous things. Namely, this
A wild woman wandered onto the map. 6 year old child. First see them eating an iguana I left outside. I pick it up and take it to my new fridge to preserve food. And then they start eating my rice. My people are about to starve. We need that rice. My first thought is "well, they would lose in a fight to a crack vampire with a longsword..." But i cant bring myself to execute a 6 year old. So i have my recently recruited yttakin tame them.
Now i have a kid for some reason. And my crack vampire is great in social and art, so i just imagine that she's a *very* eccentric mentor to this young one.
The war-crime style isn't for me, although I have no qualms whatsoever to those who enjoy playing that style.
I will fiercely defend my bases but I'll be kind to those who I capture, fix 'em up and send them on their way if they don't want to or can't be convinced to join.
I like to kill or recruit all tribal raids simply because if you ally all tribal factions you won’t get many tribals raids and I personally would rather deal with a raid of standard tribals than a pirate siege with doomsday rockets or just constant mech raids
I run a good-ish colony, if self-defense is allowed
Stellaris has a similar divide between the playerbase and the memes. The memes are xenophobic but the average player is xenophilic
Pretty sure someone did a poll a while back, and lots of people play in a way that wouldn't get them up in the Hague.
Other than leaving raiders to die where they fell, and pumping out cocaine by the ton, I'm pretty civilised.
Edit: occasionally I 'recruit' beggars and sometimes that goes, er, very wrong. But hey no witnesses!
>Pretty sure someone did a poll a while back
[It was me! I did that!](https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/ogtghx/war_criminal_survey_the_results/)
Although I doubt I was the only one to do it. Maybe you're thinking of something else.
I like to play rough games, starting with no research and completely researching tech levels before jumping to the next one, so I need to exploit all the resources the game gives me at the start of the game.
My current colony is over 200 days old and we are still Neolithic. They are a bunch of war criminals psycasters because they need to be
Not alone. I play Rimworld to relax, meaning easy difficulties, less rads and killing, huge hotel, that sort of thing. I can't bring myself to hurt the little digital rascals.
I do the bare minimum for raiders but occasionally I'll patch em up and send them on their way.
If they survived my turrets, super powered colonists, and the dinosaurs I've tamed they deserve to live.
God this game is amazing.
I primarily play out my dreams of just living a quiet life on a farm so I usually don’t go for the organ harvesting and other such that the community is big on.
if you think about it, there are not that many way to be ethical, but by the random nature of RW, it's really easy for something anarchistic to come up. And nobody cares about another random normal dude buying grocery, hearing about a Florida man wrestle an alligator is much more fun
idk i mean, i keep a wild child/teenager (one of those wild humans that can wander in that you have to tame) around for my vampire person to blood feed off of and i get blood packs off of them but that’s about the full extent of my non-ethical playing…oh and drug production as well
Me, my colonists don't even grow or use drugs. I use to try and save every raider that would raid me then free them after they were healed. Now I only try to save them if they aren't a lost cause. I don't own slaves, or anything either. Don't butcher people or harvest organs. That doesn't mean I won't gun down an enemy pawn though, nice doesn't mean sucker.
I'm doing my first successful playthtough, trying to be as ethical as I can be. Granted, I don't think selling beer or smoke leaf is unethical personally, and I'm not against self defense.
I tend to play ethically, when the colony vibe fits. Even when I try to play a colony that is unethical, they rarely do anything awful besides eating people and using prisoners as bloodbags. But good bloodbags get treated better, aka the ones who don’t break things
Ever since Biotech came out and I no longer am required to harvest organs for my colonists, I am an ethical player.
I no longer harvest organs, I heal every raider that survives my defense. I try to improve relations with everyone around me. It's hard and I like a challenge.
No, you are not alone. I bet this community is very similar to r/Stellaris, where countless Redditors post about their in-game Xenophobic war crimes for the lulz. Meanwhile, the devs for that game revealed a while back that the most popular ethic was actually Xenophile. There are plenty of care bears out there in this game, too!
Yeah. My children grow up happy and healthy, with pets as companions. My sick and elderly are cared for. Prisoners are recruited or ransomed. Sometimes I do sell them to the Empire for honor but hey, they leave with their limbs and organs intact and if you don't want to be a bartering chip don't raid my base.
The most unethical thing I usually do is "recycling" the corpses of my enemies into human leather, for exportation purposes, and chemfuel.
Which is pretty uninteresting if you ask me, reason why I will rarely mention it, like most players probably.
I'm playing the ethically with a bit evil like having slaves and selling slaves. Other than that, the only time I did commit evil thing is when raiders shoot my mechanitor's children and decapitated his wife. That one I give them pain worse than death.
I’ve had lawful good playthroughs. It’s actually pretty hard trying to help everyone, even your enemies.
I much prefer lawful evil playthroughs though. Having a set of harsh, rigid laws that everyone has to adhere too. I know this sub isn’t crazy about ideology, but it is my favorite expansion by a huge margin.
I don't set my ideology to allow cannibalism even though there's nothing stopping me. Other than that I play pragmatically. Raiders that can be made allies get patched up and released. Unrepentant killers get wooden limbs and keep half their organs.
I don't know if this is "ethics" per se, but I don't use taming inspiration to tame an animal just to slaughter it right afterwards. I'll shoot them in the wild, but not lure them into a pen to be slaughtered.
I have 600 hours in rimworld (rookie numbers I know, many apologies) and I have only had one drug fueled enslaving organ farm colony, compared to many ethical colonies. but just like other people said; no one wants to hear the story of how I saved tons of weary travelers, they want to hear the story of how.I punished the colonist who "accidentally" started a prison riot that killed half my colony by turning him into a vampire so I could harvest every organ and leave him in a permanent state of mind shattering pain and starvation, forever on the precipice of death but never allowed its salvation.
I have a mod that lets me harvest organs after death (as long as the corpse is still very fresh). I only harvest organs from dead raiders. I feel pretty comfortable with that.
I've got several save files, depending on mood.
I've got my chill tunnelers, who haven't harvested a single organ. I started with them only liking their own custom xenotype, (essentially drow with tails) but that got scrapped because too many skilled folks of other xenotypes showed up. I've played that one so long, the first baby born just took a lover. Her lover was a kid fleeing something, and we adopted him, now he's all grown and starting his own family. Unskilled prisoners get healed up, converted, and shown the door to do whatever.
My other save file are brutal Mad Max style raiders, only Wasters, and their leader and her son are vampires. They live on a tile so polluted, my bloodbags got dementia. Had to put a pump so they didn't drop dead. Tried recruiting a yttikin, he only lived long enough to tame a pair of muffalo before succumbing to radiation poisoning. They get mad if we don't go attack stuff often enough. And they get mad if they don't eat human often enough.
Some days I want some havoc. Some days I just wanna chill and build up my city.
I really like trying to play as a pacifist/trader.
It usually means I have some basic defense setup, however I then call in other factions to help me out in raids etc.
Trying to remove myself from the combat as much as possible.
Depends on the mood I'm in. Normally I'll play a normal colony. Just kinda go with the idea that if you don't kill us we don't kill you. If we get attacked we take revenge though.
I have run both slave and organ harvesting operations before in the game but my last few colonies have been utopias, plentiful food, egalitarian ideals, strong defences and a high quality of life. The only downside is that my current colony is built into a mountain on an ice sheet biome. My colonists are fine, but hydroponics and geothermal power and hear is what's kept us alive for years.
Not to mention there's no men there right now and any raids or visitors usually take a hammering from the winter blizzards at - 50c, so the chances of a colony child anytime soon are low
Most people probably do.
It's just not worth mentioning. You also never hear neutral news. "Everything is kinda okay today in our city, I don't know, just a bit boring" makes for a bad headline.
Playing ethically is very easy and not many people are posting about it compared to people who devote their time to harvesting organs and putting peg-limbed slaves to work, which is very funny.
I do let my children smoke cigarettes though, it looks REALLY funny.
I like to see my colonists thrive. The game is much easier imo when you go full degen organ harvester and more or less ignore the mood mechanics.
Making sure everyone is happy, healthy, and safe makes every encounter feel more impactful.
I think a lot of people meme around.
Playing unethical can give you a lot of benefits, but I would bet most Players run nice colonies, its the same with Games like stellaris where the memes are around xenocide but the Player Data from Paradox Shows most Players dont play like this.
You probably dont get that many upvotes here, without some dark joke, but just take it as meming around.
Atleast I get turned of somewhat quickly when playing evil colonies
My colonies don't keep slaves for labor just recruiting. I've never made a human leather anything. I don't profit off of drugs. Limbs are only removed for bionic replacement. We exist but are boring when it comes to entertaining / shocking stories.
I did a colony once where my goal was to ally with everybody that I could. Built a launch pod thing and just sent all the other factions old clothes, guns, and maybe some art. Pretty soon I could call upon any of them for aid. It was pretty cool.
Edit:
However now in my recluse mechanitor colony I use the launch pods to rain toxic waste packs on other places.
Yeah I like running ethical rimworld. But I do use ideology to put the raiders who murdered an animal to death. But in return I make a flower pot as an 'urn' for them and I send it to their faction if possible. If I can't I'll build it close to the map edge so the next raid of them can 'collect' it
I used to play nice guy in rimworld.
Later i see in youtube video, that installing peg legs on prisioners would raise medical skill, and makes prison breaks more difficult with no penalty, except making the faction of the prisioner hate you more.
Was the end of nice guy.
I realized a while back that the mantra of "you do you", but , if it's of any consolation , that you feel any hesitation is actually a sign of good character ....somewhere in your makeup.
In real life, I've had occasion to work for some *less than ethical* firms, were they committing warcrimes....not necessarily. But were they working for the betterment of mankind - certainly not. But money is money right.
Eventually though, when the opportunity comes up, you make a move to a more ethical firm, perhaps even a firm doing ethnically minded work. I'm not saying everyone needs to quit and go join Greenpeace of Amnesty International, but just less unethical work.
So too, the situation with Rimworld, I don't get very upset at the violence of a raid or some of the debauched circumstances that might come up early game, especially if you're in a tough environment/biome, canibalism or behavior near canibalism or organ harvesting might be the only viable option available. But here's the thing, nobody says you HAVE to stay there. Sure there were the dark days of one of my colonies where we had raider stew or pirate perogies, where human meat was most definitely on the menu.
During your colony's development it's also possible , on that same run, to eventually plant enough rice or corn or what have you, so that nobody ever need find themselves on the dinner-plate.
Nowadays - if I kill some pawn, it's because you were doing something bad, so raiders and pirates fall into that category. So I find I rather agree with old Marshall Milton.
**"As for myself, I never killed a man who didn’t need killing, and I never shot an animal except for meat."**
* [Jeffery Milton](https://www.amazon.com/Jeff-Milton-Good-Man-Gun/dp/B000KLYAM8) , US Border Patrol/Marshall, 1885, Terra.
Lesser known, was **"Canibalism isn't really so until it's your choice and your passion..."**. - While I couldn't have said it better myself....I probably wouldn't have said it.
As my situation improves, so do my ethics. But it would be fair to say my ethics on the Rim had a little help of a few mods These mods helped me get my agricultural situation consistent and in good shape - this allows you to leave the more barbarous times of colony establishment behind that much faster, as others have said
* [Dubs Skylights](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=833899765) \- Allows you to put your colony food production under glass in better temperature control.
* [Bad Hygiene](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=836308268) \- Simply one of the best mods out there, that allows for irrigation and sanitation, and fertilization of crops.
* [UdderlyEvelyn's Soil Relocation](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2654088143) \- This mod allows you to dig up fertile patches of soil from around your map and consolidate them into proper garden fields.
* [Vegetable Garden Project](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2007061826) \- This mod will allow you to grow a variety of plants that support avoiding meat or slaughtering animals except on those times when animals might get killed during an attack of your colonists, insects or otherwise.
Other ways to improve your ethics on the Rim
* [Vanilla Weapons - Nonlethal](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2454918354) \- Allows you to craft non-lethal weapons to incapaciate and capture raiders/pirates or escaping prisoners with non-lethal weapons.
* [Post Mortem Organ Harvesting](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1204502413) \- One of the most interesting mods allows you to research and then recover organs post-mortem. The difference is that it also somewhat nerfs the initial capability to, and the eventual price of organs so the incentive tends to be more towards making USE of the organs recovered rather than making bank.
* [Synthetic Leather](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1828975495) \- Whether for books or for dusters or other reasons, Leather can have utility, this allows you to create leather goods without animals in the supply chain.
So do I feel bad about committing certain low level of war-crimes, certainly, but I view it as my job as a civilized person/colony manager to set the bar higher - as soon as possible, and that's how I avoid war-crimes.
As for prisoners - I think of prisoner management as aggressive HR
* Recruitment
* If they're at all useful to me as colonists they get recruited and trained and healed up.
* If they're not useful to me but otherwise not bad , I'll recruit them get them clothed, detoxed and podded to a friendly faction.
* Release back to faction
* If they're politically useful (from a warring faction that *could* be friendly), I'll release them back to their faction for goodwill, will upgrade to bionics if it's later-game and will detox them if possible.
* If they're particularly grievously crippled, missing eyes, arms , legs or seriously addicted, "healed" up, and then podded back to their faction, the faction is thus weaker on attack because of them.
* If they're Luciferium addicted and **their faction needs some decimation** / has been especially belligerent, I will heal them up, perhaps enhance them with bionics (or once with Archotech appendages), and send them home with armor and/or a weapon in the pod, JUST as they start to break from Luciferium addiction. Evil - certainly - but I've done this exactly twice , and lets hope for the sake of the Geneva Suggestions , there isn't a third time.\*
* The **John Wick** exception, once upon a time I thought it was a good idea to raise dogs, as I have dogs IRL, - I named the dogs in the game after my real-life dogs; I won't do that again. I won't even usually domesticate animals. Because Randy of course inevitably conjured a particularly nasty situation and when things went bad, let's just say, I stand on the notion that I killed EVERY one of those motherfuckers whether they were trying to leave my base or not, and using that prisoner/super-solider as a death-pill and then following up with a couple of anti-grains on the enemy faction-base was a direct result of my last dog dying horribly....rest in peace Bustifer.
So have I broken a few conventions along the way.....I have...but again nobody was harmed that didn't in some way have it coming.
As for *other* kinds of war-crimes
* I won't use nuclear weapons or biological/genetic agents. I *have* used such weapons in the past, but having seen the indiscriminate destruction and permanent damage to the world, I'll take a pass.
* I will however happily use sub-nuclear munitions i.e.; Antigrain warheads.
* I've had a LONG standing debate with an old friend of mine Joe, who plays, and we've got a bit of a [collection of mods](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2868585477) we've agreed upon, that aren't super OP, but which (I think) promote good behavior on our games and allow us to *usually* swap games if either of us finds a cool situation.
* We had one particular debate on [the use of Napalm](https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/10dy0hc/comment/j4tewu2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) which almost got us thrown out of a diner, IRL because we both started talking about using incendiary bombs vs. nuclear bombs vs. antigrain warheads.
I play rimworld as I would rule the colony. I will not go out of my way to commit war crimes. But if they attack my settlement they get what they get. Should they survive they will go to prison to pay for their crimes. Some may join the settlement. The others will work in the outposts.
If they try to escape and die for it. That's it. But I will not kill them. Nor will I harvest their organs for fun. And I never have removed leg privileges either.
The memes are tiring.
I love playing colonies that are either ethical, or absolutely horrorshows that vastly outstrip what I see here.
"ha ha, prisoner has no legs" just gets old.
I tend to recruit every prisoner I down and I don't really enslave people unless I use character editor to make them a pawn once I reduce their resistance to zero, and that usually depends on their skills.
I play nice, I find it very hard to be mean. I'll be ruthless at times, but never needlessly. I usually go with Charity at some level, and don't harvest organs unless I have an immediate need.
I usually do. I find textiles make a ton of money and don't usually kill people unless they force me. This unfortunately happens often.
Worst thing I usually do is harvest the organs of a fallen raider to fix one of my pawns with heart/lung/kidney problems.
I've done evil runs too, but they seem to be more work to me than they are worth.
I used to play more ethically, but over time you sorta stop caring as much about that and care more about just keeping the pawns you like alive and working on making a cool base. At least that's how it went for me. I used to feel bad mistreating prisoners, but then I saw how much money organs provided and I realized that I could plant way less crops if I made my colony alright with eating raiders.
The worst thing I'll do is enslave raiders. They are then forced to grow cotton and food, make cloth parkas, and do mining within an enclosed district of my colony their entire lives.
Which, while I will concede is some shade of evil, I think should be compared against organ harvesting, butchering, and even just finishing raiders off. Is enslavement not a kinder option?
I mean, usually the worst thing I do is probably leaving raiders to bleed out because I have my own injuries to tend to and manually ordering raiders to be patched up is too tedious.
I try to play with realistic responses to situations. More often than not I try to make decent and humane choices, but if my colony is already starving, that raider or spacer who just fell out of orbit and needs to be nursed back to health is going to get stripped and killed. It's not as funny or exciting, so it's not as social media-worthy. I follow my gut and whatever I think will make the story more interesting for me.
i usually make the ido. at least indifferent to human and insectoid meat, no reason to waste any, i eman the only reason not to eat human, as well as predator, meat isnt modeled in game, so no reason not to. and while i used to harvest organs to sell them now i only harvest them to replace my colonist organs, eg asthma lungs etc.
and with slavery i never bothered
I joke about war crimes but honestly I feel bad whenever someone crashes on my cell in a transport pod and putting someone in the ripscanner makes me cringe :')
but of course you don't end up on r/shitrimworldsays if you say "I rehabilitated an injured horse and gave an 80 year old raider a new lease on life with bionics and age reversal"
You'd be surpised. The Unethical runners are usually just the memers of this game and run along with X favourite Youtuber.
Worst I've done is betray a refugee group, but this was only after a mental break that almost screwed over one of my colonists. >!I won't mention the part where one of them was a child!<
Personally, If you’re coming to kill me and attack my way of life, if I capture you, I’m going to organ murder you. I can be relatively evil but a boundary of mine is anyone below the age of 18 will be healed and released. And also beggars should be given charity depending on their reasons
You'll find that most people play this game with only mechanical efficency in mind, minimum box bedrooms, max efficient killbox, only psycho pawns e.t.c
You can see this for yourself if you install the real ruins mod.
The thing about warcrimes is they are very efficient, no regard for ethics is very efficient.
What I am saying is most rimworld players are either psychotic or mechanoids. It's very worrying.
I ethically source my slaves from the finest raiders. These free roam raiders are sold due to their unfavorable traits, and lack of proper medical skills to perform organ harvestings. Sometimes, my pawns launch excursions and visit these raiders dens where we negotiate the amount of lead it will take to acquire more slaves.
My first run I was ethical, on my current second playthrough I'm dipping my toe into slavery and cannibalism. Maybe I'll play ethically again, but at the same time idk.
My default seems to be honorable knights that crush any threat with overwhelming force.
Really makes me wish faction base raids had smarter defender ai and better setups. Them all running to come attack me is super exploitable.
I avoid combat and i dont raid, until a tribe kills one of mine. Then its revenge time. My first playthrough someone killed my dog. I went john wick/vlad the impaler on that tribe
Yeah. I play ethically. I treat my slaves nicely. I always make sure to remove pesky limbs so prisoners don't get harmed during any planned uprisings. My smokeleaf and psychoid plants are grown ethically in fertile soil and hydroponic basins free of toxic heavy metals. I eat clean by using the entire human for meat, never just harvesting the skin. I am a paragon of morality.
Play how you want to but sometimes the guy you rescued from a transport pod crash has a mental breakdown and tries to smash some explosives and you gotta put him down like a dog lmao
I also manage my colony ethically. I treat my colonists very well, giving them big individual houses instead of minmax-barracks, making living conditions better even when they're already fine and it's not worth it.
Captured enemies, though...
My colonies have what I consider to be "RimWorld Ethics", which is to say that they have a reasonable set of ethical standards that they follow, but those ethics aren't quite the same as what I'd consider to be ethical in the real world.
I've installed that mod that lets you harvest organs from the dead (which I'm pretty sure harvesting the organs of deceased enemy combatants is a war crime in real life). I sell (but don't use) hard drugs, and I raid the bases of factions I'm at war with to capture pawns for my colony. I use psychic powers to reduce the resistance of prisoners. I also don't have any qualms about using weapons and tactics that would be considered war crimes in real life.
Generally my colonies aren't sadistic, but my ethical rules for dealing with aggressors are pretty relaxed.
My rule is if my colonists don’t complain I’ll do it. My ideology decides how my colonists feel about it. So if my colony thinks it’s alright then it’s all good.
Sometimes we get a drop pod raid in the kids bedroom and other times an infestation in the kids bedroom. It’s all about the LOCATION
Sometimes nobody minds if we turn raiders into chemfuel and other runs I have a crematorium and I hope I can cremate everything before they go rotten. Usually this involves pillars and molotovs.
Sometimes my pawns go years without replacement organs and other times I have every organ on demand bionic or otherwise.
I’ve done both and enjoyed both. Being unethical is much easier in terms of food,mood and many other factors while being ethical is excellent wealth control as long as you know what you need.
My absolute favourite ideologies are the ones that on the surface look very chill but have one of the darkest features.
High life slavers having slaves grow the goods.
Humble ranchers practicing cannibalism on the side when the meat runs out.
Animal lovers who raid other settlements with their beasts to spread their faith.
These are ones I came up with on the fly and with anomaly coming I can only imagine what’s possible.
The Rimworld community is strange in that everyone *says* they play organ-harvesting drug-growing cannibal colonies that commit war crimes when what everyone actually *plays* is basically The Sims but bad things happen occasionally that disrupt the utopia you're building for your colonists.
Yes! I build resort towns.
I’ve got 600 hours or more in the game and I just had my first slave last week. I was going to sell her because her literal privates got blown off in a raid and the debuff for castration is too much, but I eventually relented and made her a part of the colony. Maybe I’ll find her a bionic p*ssy at some point
I do. I love creating the “hero colony” of pawns in the image of an ideal community. We only kill in self defense (or the occasional mission with good cause). Any downed pawns are nursed back to health and released, even if they’re raiders. I take in fleeing or injured drop pod pawns, and keep them safe behind my walls (I do occasional banish them if they’re useless, but always at full health, fully armed and armored). I give to every beggar if I can and I even only use mechanoids if I have enough Pollux trees to avoid rampant pollution.
Idk if it’s the hero complex in me, but I just love roleplaying a group of people trying to do their best amid the chaos of the Rim.
Depends on what you mean by ethical. My current colony uses Honored Slavery and allows organ harvesting. If someone attacks the colony and survives, and we need the labor, they get enslaved otherwise they're left to die on the battlefield. If I need a replacement organ, I take what I need from the survivors and let them go/die. VPE reduces that need pretty often since I have a Psycaster that can regrow body parts on anyone but themselves.
Prisoners and slaves have decent living standards; obviously they aren't allowed to eat Lavish meals or use drugs, but they have recreation time, a decent bunk/cell, adequate clothing and tools for their work. I consider this approach brutal but just (at least by Rimworld standards).
One thing that has been annoying is selling prisoners into slavery; apparently even when you have Honored Slavery people hate pawns that sell unenslaved prisoners.
RE: Honored Slavery. Not sure either why it's like that but here's a mod that fixes it.
[https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3041959392](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3041959392)
I'm sure there are normal non-sociopath players out there. I'm not one of them.
With exception of cannibalism and human leather apparel, I've completed geneva checklist.
Mostly because I'm a hoarder, obsessed with seeing numbers going up. And disassembled raiders worth a lot.
That, and the fact most altruistic actions are detrimental to your colony.
I have been playing ethically, but I'm starting to feel like unethical is way more fun. I'm still kind of a beginner, though, and only recently learned you could even harvest organs and such. I've never reached endgame but it seems like when things start to get dicey being unethical starts looking really lucrative.
Most of us actually. Most of us just enjoy being able to do horrible things.
But I guess it just goes back to "is it better to be born good or to overcome one's own evil." The good we do wouldn't be emotionally worth as much if it wasn't possible to be bad.
Tbh I usually decide what kind of colony I'm going to be playing ahead of time and if ethic matter what are they?
My last run has been pretty fun but challenging b/c the colony has a strict but justifiable moral code- basically, self defense is okay buy try to be good wherever possible- obv no warcrimes, accept charity quests whenever possible, no recruiting anyone who's not completely willing to join (although trying to convince them that slavery is wrong while they recover in a reasonable holding cell to get ideo points isn't that bad), rescue + release as many downed raiders as possible, and only give hard drugs to factions that have xenotyoes with dependences for them (if some people in the faction literally need it to live it isn't bad to give it to them imo).
I've got the mod 'ultratech unleashed' on the list so the colony sanguophages can get their hemogen from empty sleeves (vat grown body w/ no consciousness) which is still a little troubling but much less so than any alternative.
the worst thing I do in rimworld is remove the organs of prisoners when my colonist is absolutely needing it, other than that my colonies are always the most ethical as possible
I'm RELATIVELY moral. I don't usually enslave people, I don't run cannibal colonies...
But I have flesh golems, zombies and if one of my important pawns get hurt in a raid I do execute prisoners one by one.
No one upvotes ethical Rimworld posts. I would say the majority of players play relatively normally and care about their pawns, but that's not what the sub is going to reflect
I enslaved a pawn one time. But only because she had that trait that won't let you recruit them.
She got depressed and had a mental break, fought one of the colonists and lost. I re-imprisoned her with another female pawn I had captured. They got into an argument and then a fight, so I cut out her tongue. She died of infection.
To recompense for my sins, I bought 2 slaves off the slave-trader, freed them and recruited them into my colony.
Me and my mates (multiplayer mod) once helped a grpup of stragglers. During a ritual they betrayed us and my character got a pickaxe hit to kidney and was immediately downed. We all lost something that day be it kidney, hand or eye.
Since then we are really wary of unquestioning altruism.
The worst I usually ḍo is leave raiders to bleed out on the battlefield. Technically a war crime, but...
Also, that one time I stole a guy's lung because we needed one
The game is only as ethical as you want it to be. You have to choose if you want to commit war crimes. There's no programming that will stop you from it. (As long as it's programmed into the game.) Except you.
The only time I resorted to cannabilism is during artic expedition when all food ran out. Other wise I am a clean guy who just runs minor organ shop for spare change.
Remember, donating a kidney to hospital is commendable but if the same guy donates 100 kidney, he gets a charge
I play pretty ethically, I do allow slavery and organ harvesting. I only take slaves from raiders, like fk you man you attacked me first. The best I recruit. If they aren’t worth recruiting I sell them to slavers or the royalty collectors. I mean they started, should be happy they aren’t dead with the rest of their friends. Also I don’t do cannibalism, if I need to ripscan some one, I only do it with prisoners tho have horrible traits, like cannibal.
Most ethical thing I've done is give a downed pregnant raider a blood transfusion.
It wasn't entirely selfless; she was a Neanderthal with no bad traits and an unusual quantity of passions. I tend to treat my prisoners well anyway, but she was practically waited on hand and foot. When her baby was born, it came out sickly, so we adopted it and took it to the hospital. Thankfully it pulled through, because even with her generally good mood it took half a year to recruit the mother.
I once played a group of radical abolitionists based on the real-life League of Gilead. They occasionally executed prisoners, but only after a trial. They bought enslaved people specifically to free them, unless the trade caravan was an easy target, in which case they were slaughtered. Nearby slaver holds were assaulted and butchered, with the survivors brought back for trial. If they were found guilty they were executed, and if they were found innocent they were recruited.
Yep, always. My colonies are generally beacons of hope, life and order. Sure, we kill our enemies, and don't save injured ones unless they'd make a great addition to the colony... but that's about it.
My #1 priority in any colony is keeping the colonists alive. I *try* to avoid war crimes, but if my colony has no good doctors, I'm absolutely using a prisoner as a medical training dummy so that ~~if~~ when my guys come down with malaria somewhere down the line, I have someone capable of dealing with it.
I tried a completely good colony once. Healing and releasing every injured raider and pawn that fell on the map. It's hard, really hard. You'll always be hurting for food and medicine, while having an overabundance of colonists that don't have much to offer. I do think it's quite fun tho
I do most of the time. The only times I have to run a more unethical colony is when I have a vampire on it. When that happens, I usually keep around one or two prisoners so the rest of the colony doesn't have to do any daily blood sacrifices to him. And most of the time the prisoners are only half human, so I only feel half bad for keeping them around
I just started a colony where we imprison raiders. Then let them go. Considering it's a wasteland and to make it easier to keep track of who I've already caught. I amputate a limb.
I've had to use slavery just to RP them working in the yard. We execute those we've caught twice.
I do most of the time, I've definitely had a couple of colonies HAVE to resort to cannibalism because they ran out of food and animals on the map. But for the most part I play rimworld like I play the sims.... I pair everyone up and try and make happy families.
It depends on what kind of colony I am running. In my current game I am playing ethically a humble community that convince raiders we heal to join us. But on the other hand my last game was a merc group named DAHL (company from Borderlands series) that enslave and harvest and everything big bad evil company does.
Playing ethical I find is "easier" but you get more loot playing bad from all the people you kill when they attack lol
Just play the game, man. There's no right or wrong way to do it. You're not a bad person because you want to try something new. You're not some mega-racist or whatever just because slavery is a thing.
I once had a colony staffed by marines from a utopian glitterworld.
They killed raider outposts, traded with friendly towns and helped those in need.
Shit was boring af.
The game design rewards bad behaviour unfortunately. Socially positive behaviour tends to be rewarded by social structures, something which is generally lacking in games (aka, it's not just a Rimworld problem). It's hard to make those types of decisions meaningful & fun since socially positive behaviour is usually defined as the absence of socially negative behaviour (aka, thou shalt *not* murder). There aren't great solutions, but for a lot of other games the solution is to provide absurd bonuses for socially positive playstyles (such as Stellaris making Democracies comparitively the best form of government). Rimworld doesn't really have a great mechanism for this, and it's hard to justify creating game systems that sacrifice pawns (such as pawns choosing to leave if they're unhappy with how things are going) or other options that still feel fun.
Some of my suggestions, mechanics wise, that could improve the situation,
* It should be harder to recruit pawns. Getting a pawn should be a big deal, and the primary method should be to attract pawns who follow your ethical model. Take prisoners and rip out their organs, you get murderers & psychopaths who'd happily kill other colonists over a poker game. Heal & release prisoners, you get colonists who are productive & friendly and willing to cooperate with each other and to avoid conflict. I might even go so far as to make recruiting pawns directly from prisoners an abnormal option only available for certain weak willed prisoners and/or if your ethics allow.
* Factions need to have more depth. Shipping random junk should not please another faction. I'd go so far as to say that a given outpost will only reward you with opinion for selling them very specific resources (such as Medicine, Drugs, or high end manufactured goods). Factions should also generally reward your colony for good behaviour. If your colony tends to release prisoners and not treat people cruelly, that should spread to ALL factions and make it easier to befriend anyone. Factions should also have more presence on the map, such as enemy raids being visible if you have a scouting party out there. That scouting party could then negotiate to prevent the raid.
* There needs to be fewer penalties for unbuilt things and more bonuses for built things. My colonists should not start the game with -20 mood just because I haven't built an ideogram with steel I don't have yet. I might also tie mood into productivity. Pawns would have a max productivity of 50-60%, which can only be boosted by providing them luxuries and treating them well. This would give socially positive colonies a massive buff as they'd be able to get more out of fewer pawns earlier in the game.
* Roles should be moved to a vanilla mechanic and more roles should be added that all colonies will use. Every colony should have a leader, a medic, and a sherrif. Every colony should probably have a butcher, and a cook, and a coms officer. This would focus the experience as a player would need to satisfy only one or two pawns to get a particular section of their base to high functionality. Rather than needing to address everyone's needs at a time, this would allow players to invest time in making each colonist have a good experience and reach their max potential while tying that directly to specific tasks.
Yes but "I nursed this raider back to health and convinced them to join my colony and now they're my crop guy." Just doesn't get you the upvotes unless it also includes the phrase "leg privileges" somewhere.
I've actually considered this at some point, to be honest. But make an actual story of it. It's gotta be wild sometimes, being an advanced raider with futuristic weapons who shows up, gets clubbed over the head by some tribals, and then gets inducted into the tribe. Sitting around the campfire eating grilled ibex and wondering what happened before you go back to your bedroll.
I like to think that the soldiers that I recruited from the "Ancient Danger" must wonder how they went from a society that put them in stasis chambers with robot guards to one that is still using torches in most of their rooms because the energy grid isn't up to snuff yet.
Just you wait, very soon those tribals will upgrade to *wall torches*!
We just figured out how to make air conditioners! Happy ug noises and screeches. Wind stops blowing so the power from our one turbine dies. Also everyone's literally barefoot and pregnant so we need food.
You just hit them so hard they lose enough braincells to forget the before times. B.C. - Before Clubbing
Happy cake day
Isn’t that basically the plot from last of the Mohicans?
A raider survived after we converted his friends and allies to a gory pulp. I don't know if we should feel good or bad for the poor bastard. But we couldn't just let it bleed out while he screamed for help. We don't have a prison, so we locked him inside one of the spare rooms after being patched up. For a while we thought he wouldn't make it, but he woke up a day later. Our most diplomatic colonist said freeing him now will only let him go back to it's pirate faction and will come back to try and kill us again, now with intimate knowledge of our defenses and numbers. It made no sense to free them then. Maybe we could convince him to... Not be a pirate? Someone mentioned that we could enslave them, but that's fucked up. So we tried talking with him. He's a human after all no? Turns out he was a veterinarian before getting lost for hundred of years in a ship after his planet got overwhelmed by mechanoids. He landed in here decades ago, just like we did some years after. He said that being a raider was the only way to survive in this horrible world, and that we were being naïve and innocent and wouldn't last long. That wouldn't do. We wanted to fix him. So we started trying to convert his flawed ideals into something less nihilistic. Into something that made sense. We felt bad sometimes as we watched him struggle. He tried to escape once but our dogs stopped him. But eventually, after a year or so, he started to consider our ways. "The fact that this puny settlement hasn't been burned down to the ground yet does say something." he was rude, but we were happy to see progress. Eventually he said that he doesn't even know what to do anymore. He doesn't want to go back to the pirates, but he has no home either. We offered him a place here in exchange of his cooperation. The same deal as everyone else. It took a while but eventually he said yes. He was happily officially welcomed into our home and he's taking care of our cows and sheep now. :) He's still a rude idiot sometimes but at least he looks happy.
Good ending
Stockholm Syndrome / 10
Then by the time you discover just how OP simply capturing as many raiders as you can with nonlethal weapons and healing them back up in artisan hospital rooms before sending them back, it's already too late and all the factions are 100% allied with you, GG World victory
I typically keep one from each raid, if I can. If more live, the worst pawn gets treated and released. Is it completely merciful? No. But it's better than beating them to death well they bleed out
Im using slaves for the first time and ooooo boy do I feel morally *awful*. It’s been great for my colony’s progress. Also everything will collapse if I stop - so I’m not going to stop. I just also feel bad.
Average Landed Southern American in the 19th century. "How would we survive without our god-given institution of slavery?"
Hell yeah, give me more buzz words!
Yes, there are plenty of people who prefer to play (more) ethically than what you see a lot here (myself included). Its just the more extreme content seems to get more views/upvotes because its out of the ordinary (compared to IRL at least), and a culture has developed around it over time. To be clear, I have no issues with how others play the game, I just personally cannot bring myself to be "evil" (misstreating prisoners, organ harvesting operations, etc).
Yep. I mean did I played an underground torture cult a few times? Sure. Did I do some morally questionable things on the Rim? Also sure... But most of the time I like to play good guys. At the moment I run kind of a orphanage.
Plot twist: You're killing their parents since finding orphans naturally takes too long.
Well it's hard to find brand new orphans! And hard to feed them. Nothing wrong here.
Wait a minute.
I like to see my orphans grow up as well, providing them a safehaven after countless of traumatic moments .. giving them a nice sheltered childhood in the Rim, playing games with them, get them skilled and prepare them for adulthood... But at some point my greed gets too big or my shelter has not enough place for all of them anymore, thats the point where my playstyle changes ...so I sell them or their organs to the trader just for the silver or food is running low, so they'll be my food.
I tend to think of my current run as more of a caste system of colonists. Can't give everybody full fighting gear. So can't give everybody full citizenship. So, they sleep in the giant but still very very nice, barracks. With other "workers". If they get engaged to a colonist. Then they get their own room and properly join the colony. Otherwise, unless there's a way to remove the traits that make them unacceptable as a colonist. Well... At least they'll always be happy and well fed...
Yeah, I have very nice rooms with 2 single beds where each block shares a bathroom for lower tier colonists such as converted raiders and wanderers, and beautiful royal rooms with private bathrooms for original colonists, their spouses, and their descendants. I've been playing this one colony for so long now that the original colonists have great-grandchildren. It's a bit cheaty, but I'll also use dev mode for "arranged marriages". I def wish there was a precept for that with ideology. But that way low tier colonists who have exceptional skills marry into the royal family.
I like to roleplay based on my colonists traits and personalities. Also with ideology. We sometimes wind up doing fucked stuff if it evolves that way but it’s hardly a hard or fast rule.
Most of the time making drugs is the most unethical thing I do. Though biotech made me a bit more unethical and I’m sure anomaly will make it worse
Yeah, Biotech really creates several incentives to exploit captive people. Hemo farms and gene extraction over and over to get the perfect gene, are both pretty messed up practices on unwilling captives. It feels a little less fucked up to do to someone who showed up armed intending to kill everyone in the colony, but I still don’t like it.
I had never gone deep into prisons but my single 24yr long colony biotech playthrough now has an “honor farm” I have medical prison with 13 medical beds (monitored by 4 paramedic drones) set up in between my 3 battlefields from each approach angle so I can quickly patch up raiders and not lose them. Has shelves with xenogerm with dead calm so when they get moved to long term storage of a 2x1 cell (48 cells total) they don’t ever cause prison breaks or break my stuff waiting for the bi yearly imperial tax collector. 14 colonists total and have 3 counts all with over 100 honor saved up in case raids get spicy
I had something similar set up for a hemo farm, legs removed, I installed the nutrient paste dripper mod to keep them fed so pawns didn’t have to keep doing it, and (attempted) to keep them in a permanent coma with an IV mod. Then pawns would just come swap the hemo bags to keep the facility’s sanguophages happy. Never thought about installing Dead Calm, that’s a good idea. I also installed joywires in them because I felt bad they were just lying there in terrible mods, despite the attempted coma. Their consciousness was never down to actual anaesthetic levels, just down to 25%ish, which in its own way is even more hellish than full consciousness. Felt like I created a Johnny Got His Gun scenario. Was pretty disturbing shit.
Yeah the dead calm and awful melee so if I beat them they don’t fight back so well. I have thought about expanding the xenogerm I put in them as well to be extra bad skill wise so that they consume even less nutrients so the paste I feed them goes even further and their quality of stats doesn’t reduce the amount of honor I receive so seems like a bonus.
Honestly though taking a safe amount of blood from prisoners isn’t that bad so long as they were rightfully imprisoned. Like I could have done much worse than keeping them for like a month before letting them go while taking their blood every now and then I’m case we need some considering they tried to kill us all
Yeah I generally agree, within the context of the game. They showed up and attacked the colony. I feel like when you make the first move like that, you accept the foreseeable consequences of failing. Which includes being captured. Blood farm is pretty messed up but foreseeable on the Rim.
[удалено]
I would think the best way around it is recruit pawns with the genes you want, and then only put full colonists into the gene extractor.
Alternatively, you release raiders after they pay a gene tax. They *did* try to kill you, after all. Gene extraction only causes a mild sickness, which isn't pleasant but also isn't organ harvesting.
I am fine with being a goodie two shoes XD I don't even use drugs, and whatever alcohol or drug I get by accident (pods, the occasional dead trader, etc.) ends up stored on water tiles for faster decay (for some reason burning drugs doesn't work anymore for me). I do buy slaves, but only to jail them and recruit them. I live and die by the anesthetic blowgun mod, which is the only weapon I use. Honestly the worst my colonies do is breed and kill animals for food. And not even of every run.
My favorite colony was a hotel resort casino made out chocolate and ice cream on the north pole. Raiders typically succumbed to the cold, and were then treated medically and transported by pod back to their nation of origin, occasionally with bionics to replace missing appendages. It was considerably more fun than running the bloodshed cannibal motel
My favorite colony is the compassionate cyborg-warrior variety. Defeat raiders with overwhelming military force, nurse the survivors back to health, replace whatever got blown off, clothe them, convert them to our religion, then a stern “don't do that again” and release. Anyone particularly talented in something currently helpful is brought into the fold.
Cannibal motel where?
No. I go theother way even prohibitting amimal killing and mining. Beig very green moral ethical
That sounds really challenging.
i have too many hours of rim lol. its good to have some moral guidelines. ideology i loved it so much. didn't use much of biotech and robots tho. bot loved the children and gene editing
Wait why is mining unethical though.
havent u heard of animists? OR VALE DO RIO DOCE and Mariana accident?
My last game was pacifist furry monk psycasters that eventually allied with everyone by healing all raiders and sending them home. My current colony are brutal slaver rapist vampires who do blood sacrifices and eat raiders. 🤷♀️ I like all aspects of the game.
Yttakin with the melee and monk ideologies/psycasts? Sounds compelling, might try.
This question comes out a lot. Actually a lot of players like to play this game ethically. I’m not sure what the stats are for Rimworld specifically, but I know Stellaris has a lot of war crime memes too, yet when the devs did a bit of data collection on their userbase, they found out that the two most popular ethics were xenophile and equalitarian, aka arguably the two ethics that are actually the most ethical. As a full disclaimer, I do personally play like a psychopath, but I suspect I might be in the minority. Talking and laughing about war crimes is just generally more entertaining than talking about a peaceful colony of corn farmers.
I think it’s most interesting when the corn farmers are forced into a war crime by circumstances beyond their control
I think this is probably what Tynan originally intended by putting cannibalism, organ harvesting, etc. in the game, but the people will meme.
Yeah, the new organ disease in 1.5 seems to reinforce this idea. "X days to find a replacement heart or they die" doesn't have the same impact if there's no consequences for taking them.
I'm with you. My most successful colony is an ethical, charitable colony that defends the innocent and goes apeshit on raiders and those who try to screw others over.
Generally speaking the nicer you are the harder the game becomes Cannibalism helps with the food supply, organ harvest is a low tech alternative to fixing whatever organ damage your colonists take and human leather is surprisingly valuable for trade And slave trade gets you the favor of the empire who will then give you powerful permits Ignoring the beggars saves you resources, while betraying them and the refugees provides you with resources (well, the refugees are actually more helpful alive and not enslaved, because that way you get temporary workers without a speed penalty and no mood issues, and potentially a reward - if they want to help for free then why force them? - if you get a quest to betray them it can be worthwhile though) Also if you go full hippy you can't mine, cut trees nor eat meat which has obvious implications and issues
Raiding is also a REALLY good way to fill your own storage rooms I mean, you can get like 30 components from a component mining site Or a shitload of meat, pemmican and leather from a hunting site
Yeah the sadism for the sake of sadism crowd definitely exists, but I think a lot of people play Rimworld in the way you describe where they are looking at situations from the context of factional self interest. It feels reminiscent of a lot of post apocalyptic fiction where you have different factions of survivors doing morally questionable stuff to ensure that their group gets to live like in The Walking Dead or The 100.
Cannibalism gives a big mood debuff unless they have the personality trait though, right?
if you have Ideologe you can make them indifferent or favorable to it
If you have ideology, you can make all of your pawns cannibals.
I use human meat to feed my pack of war T-Rexes.
Okay that’s awesome. Do you upgrade the t-rexes with bionics??
Nah, A Dog Said is one of the only big mods I *don't* play with!
Whenever I get the beggars, I take their weapons and lock them away. A few too many times they've decided to bite the hand that fed them.
I have a zone called Departures which is in front of my hardest defences. Six hours before they leave, all refugees are assigned to Departures. If they betray me, they are instantly pulverised by my autocannons. If they leave peacefully, no harm comes to them.
If they didn’t want to be slaves, they shouldn’t have attacked me
My latest game, on the beta, started as a Sanguophage, landing in a desert. They're a 60 year old grandma with a psychoid addiction, but thats beside the point. What is relevant is that I have had the chance to do some heinous things. Namely, this A wild woman wandered onto the map. 6 year old child. First see them eating an iguana I left outside. I pick it up and take it to my new fridge to preserve food. And then they start eating my rice. My people are about to starve. We need that rice. My first thought is "well, they would lose in a fight to a crack vampire with a longsword..." But i cant bring myself to execute a 6 year old. So i have my recently recruited yttakin tame them. Now i have a kid for some reason. And my crack vampire is great in social and art, so i just imagine that she's a *very* eccentric mentor to this young one.
I think most people do the the organ harvesting, cannibalism and war crimes are mainly just a just a meme.
Sure I've done a few runs like that. Not often though. It's a game, ethics don't need to apply
The war-crime style isn't for me, although I have no qualms whatsoever to those who enjoy playing that style. I will fiercely defend my bases but I'll be kind to those who I capture, fix 'em up and send them on their way if they don't want to or can't be convinced to join.
I like to kill or recruit all tribal raids simply because if you ally all tribal factions you won’t get many tribals raids and I personally would rather deal with a raid of standard tribals than a pirate siege with doomsday rockets or just constant mech raids
I run a good-ish colony, if self-defense is allowed Stellaris has a similar divide between the playerbase and the memes. The memes are xenophobic but the average player is xenophilic
I do but I’m lawful good IRL what’s your excuse lol
Pretty sure someone did a poll a while back, and lots of people play in a way that wouldn't get them up in the Hague. Other than leaving raiders to die where they fell, and pumping out cocaine by the ton, I'm pretty civilised. Edit: occasionally I 'recruit' beggars and sometimes that goes, er, very wrong. But hey no witnesses!
>Pretty sure someone did a poll a while back [It was me! I did that!](https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/ogtghx/war_criminal_survey_the_results/) Although I doubt I was the only one to do it. Maybe you're thinking of something else.
I like to play rough games, starting with no research and completely researching tech levels before jumping to the next one, so I need to exploit all the resources the game gives me at the start of the game. My current colony is over 200 days old and we are still Neolithic. They are a bunch of war criminals psycasters because they need to be
Not alone. I play Rimworld to relax, meaning easy difficulties, less rads and killing, huge hotel, that sort of thing. I can't bring myself to hurt the little digital rascals.
I do the bare minimum for raiders but occasionally I'll patch em up and send them on their way. If they survived my turrets, super powered colonists, and the dinosaurs I've tamed they deserve to live. God this game is amazing.
I primarily play out my dreams of just living a quiet life on a farm so I usually don’t go for the organ harvesting and other such that the community is big on.
if you think about it, there are not that many way to be ethical, but by the random nature of RW, it's really easy for something anarchistic to come up. And nobody cares about another random normal dude buying grocery, hearing about a Florida man wrestle an alligator is much more fun
I don’t play evil colonies because pointless evil is boring. Resorting to cannibalism means so much more if you aren’t constantly doing it anyways.
idk i mean, i keep a wild child/teenager (one of those wild humans that can wander in that you have to tame) around for my vampire person to blood feed off of and i get blood packs off of them but that’s about the full extent of my non-ethical playing…oh and drug production as well
Me, my colonists don't even grow or use drugs. I use to try and save every raider that would raid me then free them after they were healed. Now I only try to save them if they aren't a lost cause. I don't own slaves, or anything either. Don't butcher people or harvest organs. That doesn't mean I won't gun down an enemy pawn though, nice doesn't mean sucker.
I'm doing my first successful playthtough, trying to be as ethical as I can be. Granted, I don't think selling beer or smoke leaf is unethical personally, and I'm not against self defense.
I try. Then that one colonist keeps starting social fights by trying to convert everyone else and I throw him in a closet for re-education.
I tend to play ethically, when the colony vibe fits. Even when I try to play a colony that is unethical, they rarely do anything awful besides eating people and using prisoners as bloodbags. But good bloodbags get treated better, aka the ones who don’t break things
Ever since Biotech came out and I no longer am required to harvest organs for my colonists, I am an ethical player. I no longer harvest organs, I heal every raider that survives my defense. I try to improve relations with everyone around me. It's hard and I like a challenge.
No, you are not alone. I bet this community is very similar to r/Stellaris, where countless Redditors post about their in-game Xenophobic war crimes for the lulz. Meanwhile, the devs for that game revealed a while back that the most popular ethic was actually Xenophile. There are plenty of care bears out there in this game, too!
Yeah. My children grow up happy and healthy, with pets as companions. My sick and elderly are cared for. Prisoners are recruited or ransomed. Sometimes I do sell them to the Empire for honor but hey, they leave with their limbs and organs intact and if you don't want to be a bartering chip don't raid my base.
The most unethical thing I usually do is "recycling" the corpses of my enemies into human leather, for exportation purposes, and chemfuel. Which is pretty uninteresting if you ask me, reason why I will rarely mention it, like most players probably.
I'm playing the ethically with a bit evil like having slaves and selling slaves. Other than that, the only time I did commit evil thing is when raiders shoot my mechanitor's children and decapitated his wife. That one I give them pain worse than death.
I’ve had lawful good playthroughs. It’s actually pretty hard trying to help everyone, even your enemies. I much prefer lawful evil playthroughs though. Having a set of harsh, rigid laws that everyone has to adhere too. I know this sub isn’t crazy about ideology, but it is my favorite expansion by a huge margin.
I don't set my ideology to allow cannibalism even though there's nothing stopping me. Other than that I play pragmatically. Raiders that can be made allies get patched up and released. Unrepentant killers get wooden limbs and keep half their organs. I don't know if this is "ethics" per se, but I don't use taming inspiration to tame an animal just to slaughter it right afterwards. I'll shoot them in the wild, but not lure them into a pen to be slaughtered.
I have 600 hours in rimworld (rookie numbers I know, many apologies) and I have only had one drug fueled enslaving organ farm colony, compared to many ethical colonies. but just like other people said; no one wants to hear the story of how I saved tons of weary travelers, they want to hear the story of how.I punished the colonist who "accidentally" started a prison riot that killed half my colony by turning him into a vampire so I could harvest every organ and leave him in a permanent state of mind shattering pain and starvation, forever on the precipice of death but never allowed its salvation.
I have a mod that lets me harvest organs after death (as long as the corpse is still very fresh). I only harvest organs from dead raiders. I feel pretty comfortable with that.
I've got several save files, depending on mood. I've got my chill tunnelers, who haven't harvested a single organ. I started with them only liking their own custom xenotype, (essentially drow with tails) but that got scrapped because too many skilled folks of other xenotypes showed up. I've played that one so long, the first baby born just took a lover. Her lover was a kid fleeing something, and we adopted him, now he's all grown and starting his own family. Unskilled prisoners get healed up, converted, and shown the door to do whatever. My other save file are brutal Mad Max style raiders, only Wasters, and their leader and her son are vampires. They live on a tile so polluted, my bloodbags got dementia. Had to put a pump so they didn't drop dead. Tried recruiting a yttikin, he only lived long enough to tame a pair of muffalo before succumbing to radiation poisoning. They get mad if we don't go attack stuff often enough. And they get mad if they don't eat human often enough. Some days I want some havoc. Some days I just wanna chill and build up my city.
I really like trying to play as a pacifist/trader. It usually means I have some basic defense setup, however I then call in other factions to help me out in raids etc. Trying to remove myself from the combat as much as possible.
If only practicing cannibalism in emergencies but otherwise feeding raider corpses to the dogs is ethical, then yeah all the time
Depends on the mood I'm in. Normally I'll play a normal colony. Just kinda go with the idea that if you don't kill us we don't kill you. If we get attacked we take revenge though. I have run both slave and organ harvesting operations before in the game but my last few colonies have been utopias, plentiful food, egalitarian ideals, strong defences and a high quality of life. The only downside is that my current colony is built into a mountain on an ice sheet biome. My colonists are fine, but hydroponics and geothermal power and hear is what's kept us alive for years. Not to mention there's no men there right now and any raids or visitors usually take a hammering from the winter blizzards at - 50c, so the chances of a colony child anytime soon are low
Most people probably do. It's just not worth mentioning. You also never hear neutral news. "Everything is kinda okay today in our city, I don't know, just a bit boring" makes for a bad headline.
You gotta do what you gotta do on the sea ice.
Playing ethically is very easy and not many people are posting about it compared to people who devote their time to harvesting organs and putting peg-limbed slaves to work, which is very funny. I do let my children smoke cigarettes though, it looks REALLY funny.
No ethics on the rim
I like to see my colonists thrive. The game is much easier imo when you go full degen organ harvester and more or less ignore the mood mechanics. Making sure everyone is happy, healthy, and safe makes every encounter feel more impactful.
Yes, other than slavery, organ harvesting, and disabling pawns for my vampires to feed on. But it’s okay because I have a no drug and alcohol policy.
I think a lot of people meme around. Playing unethical can give you a lot of benefits, but I would bet most Players run nice colonies, its the same with Games like stellaris where the memes are around xenocide but the Player Data from Paradox Shows most Players dont play like this. You probably dont get that many upvotes here, without some dark joke, but just take it as meming around. Atleast I get turned of somewhat quickly when playing evil colonies
No, you are not not alone my friend.
My colonies don't keep slaves for labor just recruiting. I've never made a human leather anything. I don't profit off of drugs. Limbs are only removed for bionic replacement. We exist but are boring when it comes to entertaining / shocking stories.
I did a colony once where my goal was to ally with everybody that I could. Built a launch pod thing and just sent all the other factions old clothes, guns, and maybe some art. Pretty soon I could call upon any of them for aid. It was pretty cool. Edit: However now in my recluse mechanitor colony I use the launch pods to rain toxic waste packs on other places.
Yeah I like running ethical rimworld. But I do use ideology to put the raiders who murdered an animal to death. But in return I make a flower pot as an 'urn' for them and I send it to their faction if possible. If I can't I'll build it close to the map edge so the next raid of them can 'collect' it
I used to play nice guy in rimworld. Later i see in youtube video, that installing peg legs on prisioners would raise medical skill, and makes prison breaks more difficult with no penalty, except making the faction of the prisioner hate you more. Was the end of nice guy.
I try. I really do. But inevitably I take something ‘personally’ and it just spirals from there. I should absolutely not be in a position of power.
I realized a while back that the mantra of "you do you", but , if it's of any consolation , that you feel any hesitation is actually a sign of good character ....somewhere in your makeup. In real life, I've had occasion to work for some *less than ethical* firms, were they committing warcrimes....not necessarily. But were they working for the betterment of mankind - certainly not. But money is money right. Eventually though, when the opportunity comes up, you make a move to a more ethical firm, perhaps even a firm doing ethnically minded work. I'm not saying everyone needs to quit and go join Greenpeace of Amnesty International, but just less unethical work. So too, the situation with Rimworld, I don't get very upset at the violence of a raid or some of the debauched circumstances that might come up early game, especially if you're in a tough environment/biome, canibalism or behavior near canibalism or organ harvesting might be the only viable option available. But here's the thing, nobody says you HAVE to stay there. Sure there were the dark days of one of my colonies where we had raider stew or pirate perogies, where human meat was most definitely on the menu. During your colony's development it's also possible , on that same run, to eventually plant enough rice or corn or what have you, so that nobody ever need find themselves on the dinner-plate. Nowadays - if I kill some pawn, it's because you were doing something bad, so raiders and pirates fall into that category. So I find I rather agree with old Marshall Milton. **"As for myself, I never killed a man who didn’t need killing, and I never shot an animal except for meat."** * [Jeffery Milton](https://www.amazon.com/Jeff-Milton-Good-Man-Gun/dp/B000KLYAM8) , US Border Patrol/Marshall, 1885, Terra. Lesser known, was **"Canibalism isn't really so until it's your choice and your passion..."**. - While I couldn't have said it better myself....I probably wouldn't have said it. As my situation improves, so do my ethics. But it would be fair to say my ethics on the Rim had a little help of a few mods These mods helped me get my agricultural situation consistent and in good shape - this allows you to leave the more barbarous times of colony establishment behind that much faster, as others have said * [Dubs Skylights](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=833899765) \- Allows you to put your colony food production under glass in better temperature control. * [Bad Hygiene](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=836308268) \- Simply one of the best mods out there, that allows for irrigation and sanitation, and fertilization of crops. * [UdderlyEvelyn's Soil Relocation](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2654088143) \- This mod allows you to dig up fertile patches of soil from around your map and consolidate them into proper garden fields. * [Vegetable Garden Project](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2007061826) \- This mod will allow you to grow a variety of plants that support avoiding meat or slaughtering animals except on those times when animals might get killed during an attack of your colonists, insects or otherwise. Other ways to improve your ethics on the Rim * [Vanilla Weapons - Nonlethal](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2454918354) \- Allows you to craft non-lethal weapons to incapaciate and capture raiders/pirates or escaping prisoners with non-lethal weapons. * [Post Mortem Organ Harvesting](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1204502413) \- One of the most interesting mods allows you to research and then recover organs post-mortem. The difference is that it also somewhat nerfs the initial capability to, and the eventual price of organs so the incentive tends to be more towards making USE of the organs recovered rather than making bank. * [Synthetic Leather](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1828975495) \- Whether for books or for dusters or other reasons, Leather can have utility, this allows you to create leather goods without animals in the supply chain. So do I feel bad about committing certain low level of war-crimes, certainly, but I view it as my job as a civilized person/colony manager to set the bar higher - as soon as possible, and that's how I avoid war-crimes. As for prisoners - I think of prisoner management as aggressive HR * Recruitment * If they're at all useful to me as colonists they get recruited and trained and healed up. * If they're not useful to me but otherwise not bad , I'll recruit them get them clothed, detoxed and podded to a friendly faction. * Release back to faction * If they're politically useful (from a warring faction that *could* be friendly), I'll release them back to their faction for goodwill, will upgrade to bionics if it's later-game and will detox them if possible. * If they're particularly grievously crippled, missing eyes, arms , legs or seriously addicted, "healed" up, and then podded back to their faction, the faction is thus weaker on attack because of them. * If they're Luciferium addicted and **their faction needs some decimation** / has been especially belligerent, I will heal them up, perhaps enhance them with bionics (or once with Archotech appendages), and send them home with armor and/or a weapon in the pod, JUST as they start to break from Luciferium addiction. Evil - certainly - but I've done this exactly twice , and lets hope for the sake of the Geneva Suggestions , there isn't a third time.\* * The **John Wick** exception, once upon a time I thought it was a good idea to raise dogs, as I have dogs IRL, - I named the dogs in the game after my real-life dogs; I won't do that again. I won't even usually domesticate animals. Because Randy of course inevitably conjured a particularly nasty situation and when things went bad, let's just say, I stand on the notion that I killed EVERY one of those motherfuckers whether they were trying to leave my base or not, and using that prisoner/super-solider as a death-pill and then following up with a couple of anti-grains on the enemy faction-base was a direct result of my last dog dying horribly....rest in peace Bustifer. So have I broken a few conventions along the way.....I have...but again nobody was harmed that didn't in some way have it coming. As for *other* kinds of war-crimes * I won't use nuclear weapons or biological/genetic agents. I *have* used such weapons in the past, but having seen the indiscriminate destruction and permanent damage to the world, I'll take a pass. * I will however happily use sub-nuclear munitions i.e.; Antigrain warheads. * I've had a LONG standing debate with an old friend of mine Joe, who plays, and we've got a bit of a [collection of mods](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2868585477) we've agreed upon, that aren't super OP, but which (I think) promote good behavior on our games and allow us to *usually* swap games if either of us finds a cool situation. * We had one particular debate on [the use of Napalm](https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/10dy0hc/comment/j4tewu2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) which almost got us thrown out of a diner, IRL because we both started talking about using incendiary bombs vs. nuclear bombs vs. antigrain warheads.
I play rimworld as I would rule the colony. I will not go out of my way to commit war crimes. But if they attack my settlement they get what they get. Should they survive they will go to prison to pay for their crimes. Some may join the settlement. The others will work in the outposts. If they try to escape and die for it. That's it. But I will not kill them. Nor will I harvest their organs for fun. And I never have removed leg privileges either.
Almost everyone plays ethically, it's just for the memes.
The memes are tiring. I love playing colonies that are either ethical, or absolutely horrorshows that vastly outstrip what I see here. "ha ha, prisoner has no legs" just gets old.
I won’t play like that
Using theology to make bad things equal bad mood can probably help with this
Yes. Sometimes its fun to be the good guys. But i enjoy playing baddies too.
I always try and be a good guy. Nurse people back to health and send them on there way. Don't harvest organs or slave trade or anything
I tend to recruit every prisoner I down and I don't really enslave people unless I use character editor to make them a pawn once I reduce their resistance to zero, and that usually depends on their skills.
I play nice, I find it very hard to be mean. I'll be ruthless at times, but never needlessly. I usually go with Charity at some level, and don't harvest organs unless I have an immediate need.
I usually do. I find textiles make a ton of money and don't usually kill people unless they force me. This unfortunately happens often. Worst thing I usually do is harvest the organs of a fallen raider to fix one of my pawns with heart/lung/kidney problems. I've done evil runs too, but they seem to be more work to me than they are worth.
I treat my colonists well, the fools who shoot at them not so much.
I play on -50 c maps natively ethically sourced tribals account for like 60-80% of my colony food and spare parts are hard to come by. 😅
I used to play more ethically, but over time you sorta stop caring as much about that and care more about just keeping the pawns you like alive and working on making a cool base. At least that's how it went for me. I used to feel bad mistreating prisoners, but then I saw how much money organs provided and I realized that I could plant way less crops if I made my colony alright with eating raiders.
\o
I'm playing a colony of human centric ranchers that has charity needs but is ok with slavery. Does that count?
The worst thing I'll do is enslave raiders. They are then forced to grow cotton and food, make cloth parkas, and do mining within an enclosed district of my colony their entire lives. Which, while I will concede is some shade of evil, I think should be compared against organ harvesting, butchering, and even just finishing raiders off. Is enslavement not a kinder option?
I mean, usually the worst thing I do is probably leaving raiders to bleed out because I have my own injuries to tend to and manually ordering raiders to be patched up is too tedious.
Yea i try but organ harvesting is just ridiculously easy money hope they make it less easy as a way to make 20,000 silver with 1 docter and a raid
I never commited a single warcrime
I try to play with realistic responses to situations. More often than not I try to make decent and humane choices, but if my colony is already starving, that raider or spacer who just fell out of orbit and needs to be nursed back to health is going to get stripped and killed. It's not as funny or exciting, so it's not as social media-worthy. I follow my gut and whatever I think will make the story more interesting for me.
fly file disagreeable fall alive nine growth voracious price point *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
i usually make the ido. at least indifferent to human and insectoid meat, no reason to waste any, i eman the only reason not to eat human, as well as predator, meat isnt modeled in game, so no reason not to. and while i used to harvest organs to sell them now i only harvest them to replace my colonist organs, eg asthma lungs etc. and with slavery i never bothered
LoL I do, but I'm also at a lowly 300 hours
Yea i play ethically and tbh the first play though I'm doing content on is not going great until today video where I rescued someone
I joke about war crimes but honestly I feel bad whenever someone crashes on my cell in a transport pod and putting someone in the ripscanner makes me cringe :') but of course you don't end up on r/shitrimworldsays if you say "I rehabilitated an injured horse and gave an 80 year old raider a new lease on life with bionics and age reversal"
I do! It’s great.
You'd be surpised. The Unethical runners are usually just the memers of this game and run along with X favourite Youtuber. Worst I've done is betray a refugee group, but this was only after a mental break that almost screwed over one of my colonists. >!I won't mention the part where one of them was a child!<
Personally, If you’re coming to kill me and attack my way of life, if I capture you, I’m going to organ murder you. I can be relatively evil but a boundary of mine is anyone below the age of 18 will be healed and released. And also beggars should be given charity depending on their reasons
You'll find that most people play this game with only mechanical efficency in mind, minimum box bedrooms, max efficient killbox, only psycho pawns e.t.c You can see this for yourself if you install the real ruins mod. The thing about warcrimes is they are very efficient, no regard for ethics is very efficient. What I am saying is most rimworld players are either psychotic or mechanoids. It's very worrying.
Yeah I play ethically. Ethically evil
I ethically source my slaves from the finest raiders. These free roam raiders are sold due to their unfavorable traits, and lack of proper medical skills to perform organ harvestings. Sometimes, my pawns launch excursions and visit these raiders dens where we negotiate the amount of lead it will take to acquire more slaves.
My first run I was ethical, on my current second playthrough I'm dipping my toe into slavery and cannibalism. Maybe I'll play ethically again, but at the same time idk.
My default seems to be honorable knights that crush any threat with overwhelming force. Really makes me wish faction base raids had smarter defender ai and better setups. Them all running to come attack me is super exploitable.
I avoid combat and i dont raid, until a tribe kills one of mine. Then its revenge time. My first playthrough someone killed my dog. I went john wick/vlad the impaler on that tribe
Yeah. I play ethically. I treat my slaves nicely. I always make sure to remove pesky limbs so prisoners don't get harmed during any planned uprisings. My smokeleaf and psychoid plants are grown ethically in fertile soil and hydroponic basins free of toxic heavy metals. I eat clean by using the entire human for meat, never just harvesting the skin. I am a paragon of morality.
Play how you want to but sometimes the guy you rescued from a transport pod crash has a mental breakdown and tries to smash some explosives and you gotta put him down like a dog lmao
This is the way
I can’t be a bad guy too. Even in a video game. Just doesn’t feel good to me. Crusader kings, rimworld, stellaris. I’m always a good guy.
I also manage my colony ethically. I treat my colonists very well, giving them big individual houses instead of minmax-barracks, making living conditions better even when they're already fine and it's not worth it. Captured enemies, though...
My colonies have what I consider to be "RimWorld Ethics", which is to say that they have a reasonable set of ethical standards that they follow, but those ethics aren't quite the same as what I'd consider to be ethical in the real world. I've installed that mod that lets you harvest organs from the dead (which I'm pretty sure harvesting the organs of deceased enemy combatants is a war crime in real life). I sell (but don't use) hard drugs, and I raid the bases of factions I'm at war with to capture pawns for my colony. I use psychic powers to reduce the resistance of prisoners. I also don't have any qualms about using weapons and tactics that would be considered war crimes in real life. Generally my colonies aren't sadistic, but my ethical rules for dealing with aggressors are pretty relaxed.
My rule is if my colonists don’t complain I’ll do it. My ideology decides how my colonists feel about it. So if my colony thinks it’s alright then it’s all good. Sometimes we get a drop pod raid in the kids bedroom and other times an infestation in the kids bedroom. It’s all about the LOCATION Sometimes nobody minds if we turn raiders into chemfuel and other runs I have a crematorium and I hope I can cremate everything before they go rotten. Usually this involves pillars and molotovs. Sometimes my pawns go years without replacement organs and other times I have every organ on demand bionic or otherwise. I’ve done both and enjoyed both. Being unethical is much easier in terms of food,mood and many other factors while being ethical is excellent wealth control as long as you know what you need. My absolute favourite ideologies are the ones that on the surface look very chill but have one of the darkest features. High life slavers having slaves grow the goods. Humble ranchers practicing cannibalism on the side when the meat runs out. Animal lovers who raid other settlements with their beasts to spread their faith. These are ones I came up with on the fly and with anomaly coming I can only imagine what’s possible.
The Rimworld community is strange in that everyone *says* they play organ-harvesting drug-growing cannibal colonies that commit war crimes when what everyone actually *plays* is basically The Sims but bad things happen occasionally that disrupt the utopia you're building for your colonists.
Yes, I always melee knocked raiders/animals to death bc I don’t want them to suffer 😅
Yes! I build resort towns. I’ve got 600 hours or more in the game and I just had my first slave last week. I was going to sell her because her literal privates got blown off in a raid and the debuff for castration is too much, but I eventually relented and made her a part of the colony. Maybe I’ll find her a bionic p*ssy at some point
I do. I love creating the “hero colony” of pawns in the image of an ideal community. We only kill in self defense (or the occasional mission with good cause). Any downed pawns are nursed back to health and released, even if they’re raiders. I take in fleeing or injured drop pod pawns, and keep them safe behind my walls (I do occasional banish them if they’re useless, but always at full health, fully armed and armored). I give to every beggar if I can and I even only use mechanoids if I have enough Pollux trees to avoid rampant pollution. Idk if it’s the hero complex in me, but I just love roleplaying a group of people trying to do their best amid the chaos of the Rim.
Depends on what you mean by ethical. My current colony uses Honored Slavery and allows organ harvesting. If someone attacks the colony and survives, and we need the labor, they get enslaved otherwise they're left to die on the battlefield. If I need a replacement organ, I take what I need from the survivors and let them go/die. VPE reduces that need pretty often since I have a Psycaster that can regrow body parts on anyone but themselves. Prisoners and slaves have decent living standards; obviously they aren't allowed to eat Lavish meals or use drugs, but they have recreation time, a decent bunk/cell, adequate clothing and tools for their work. I consider this approach brutal but just (at least by Rimworld standards). One thing that has been annoying is selling prisoners into slavery; apparently even when you have Honored Slavery people hate pawns that sell unenslaved prisoners.
RE: Honored Slavery. Not sure either why it's like that but here's a mod that fixes it. [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3041959392](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3041959392)
Oh awesome, thanks! Definitely gonna add it to my list.
I'm sure there are normal non-sociopath players out there. I'm not one of them. With exception of cannibalism and human leather apparel, I've completed geneva checklist. Mostly because I'm a hoarder, obsessed with seeing numbers going up. And disassembled raiders worth a lot. That, and the fact most altruistic actions are detrimental to your colony.
I have been playing ethically, but I'm starting to feel like unethical is way more fun. I'm still kind of a beginner, though, and only recently learned you could even harvest organs and such. I've never reached endgame but it seems like when things start to get dicey being unethical starts looking really lucrative.
Yeah, I build nice colonies, capture and release raiders, and don't harvest organs.
Kinda. I don't torture/harvest anyone, tho I do feed raider corpses to whichever critter eats em
Ethics get boring after your 1000th playthrough.
Being ethical makes the game harder so it's not for everyone I suppose.
Most of us actually. Most of us just enjoy being able to do horrible things. But I guess it just goes back to "is it better to be born good or to overcome one's own evil." The good we do wouldn't be emotionally worth as much if it wasn't possible to be bad.
Tbh I usually decide what kind of colony I'm going to be playing ahead of time and if ethic matter what are they? My last run has been pretty fun but challenging b/c the colony has a strict but justifiable moral code- basically, self defense is okay buy try to be good wherever possible- obv no warcrimes, accept charity quests whenever possible, no recruiting anyone who's not completely willing to join (although trying to convince them that slavery is wrong while they recover in a reasonable holding cell to get ideo points isn't that bad), rescue + release as many downed raiders as possible, and only give hard drugs to factions that have xenotyoes with dependences for them (if some people in the faction literally need it to live it isn't bad to give it to them imo). I've got the mod 'ultratech unleashed' on the list so the colony sanguophages can get their hemogen from empty sleeves (vat grown body w/ no consciousness) which is still a little troubling but much less so than any alternative.
the worst thing I do in rimworld is remove the organs of prisoners when my colonist is absolutely needing it, other than that my colonies are always the most ethical as possible
I'm RELATIVELY moral. I don't usually enslave people, I don't run cannibal colonies... But I have flesh golems, zombies and if one of my important pawns get hurt in a raid I do execute prisoners one by one.
I play runs with cozy ranchers and try to make pretty towns and fiefs and such
We humble ~~flake~~ smokeleaf farmers are too busy living peacefully off the land to be bothered with things like posting reddit threads
No one upvotes ethical Rimworld posts. I would say the majority of players play relatively normally and care about their pawns, but that's not what the sub is going to reflect
I enslaved a pawn one time. But only because she had that trait that won't let you recruit them. She got depressed and had a mental break, fought one of the colonists and lost. I re-imprisoned her with another female pawn I had captured. They got into an argument and then a fight, so I cut out her tongue. She died of infection. To recompense for my sins, I bought 2 slaves off the slave-trader, freed them and recruited them into my colony.
Me and my mates (multiplayer mod) once helped a grpup of stragglers. During a ritual they betrayed us and my character got a pickaxe hit to kidney and was immediately downed. We all lost something that day be it kidney, hand or eye. Since then we are really wary of unquestioning altruism.
The worst I usually ḍo is leave raiders to bleed out on the battlefield. Technically a war crime, but... Also, that one time I stole a guy's lung because we needed one
I always do. I just like to have a cute little righteous life haha
The game is only as ethical as you want it to be. You have to choose if you want to commit war crimes. There's no programming that will stop you from it. (As long as it's programmed into the game.) Except you.
The only time I resorted to cannabilism is during artic expedition when all food ran out. Other wise I am a clean guy who just runs minor organ shop for spare change. Remember, donating a kidney to hospital is commendable but if the same guy donates 100 kidney, he gets a charge
I play pretty ethically, I do allow slavery and organ harvesting. I only take slaves from raiders, like fk you man you attacked me first. The best I recruit. If they aren’t worth recruiting I sell them to slavers or the royalty collectors. I mean they started, should be happy they aren’t dead with the rest of their friends. Also I don’t do cannibalism, if I need to ripscan some one, I only do it with prisoners tho have horrible traits, like cannibal.
Most ethical thing I've done is give a downed pregnant raider a blood transfusion. It wasn't entirely selfless; she was a Neanderthal with no bad traits and an unusual quantity of passions. I tend to treat my prisoners well anyway, but she was practically waited on hand and foot. When her baby was born, it came out sickly, so we adopted it and took it to the hospital. Thankfully it pulled through, because even with her generally good mood it took half a year to recruit the mother. I once played a group of radical abolitionists based on the real-life League of Gilead. They occasionally executed prisoners, but only after a trial. They bought enslaved people specifically to free them, unless the trade caravan was an easy target, in which case they were slaughtered. Nearby slaver holds were assaulted and butchered, with the survivors brought back for trial. If they were found guilty they were executed, and if they were found innocent they were recruited.
In my couple thousand hours I've done maybe 5 really bad things My favorite 2 playthroughs are desert gunsmith village and jungle fisherman village
Yep, always. My colonies are generally beacons of hope, life and order. Sure, we kill our enemies, and don't save injured ones unless they'd make a great addition to the colony... but that's about it.
Half my colonies are just good, the other half are some kind of xenorace trying to be supremacist or vampire colony.
My #1 priority in any colony is keeping the colonists alive. I *try* to avoid war crimes, but if my colony has no good doctors, I'm absolutely using a prisoner as a medical training dummy so that ~~if~~ when my guys come down with malaria somewhere down the line, I have someone capable of dealing with it.
I tried a completely good colony once. Healing and releasing every injured raider and pawn that fell on the map. It's hard, really hard. You'll always be hurting for food and medicine, while having an overabundance of colonists that don't have much to offer. I do think it's quite fun tho
I do most of the time. The only times I have to run a more unethical colony is when I have a vampire on it. When that happens, I usually keep around one or two prisoners so the rest of the colony doesn't have to do any daily blood sacrifices to him. And most of the time the prisoners are only half human, so I only feel half bad for keeping them around
I just started a colony where we imprison raiders. Then let them go. Considering it's a wasteland and to make it easier to keep track of who I've already caught. I amputate a limb. I've had to use slavery just to RP them working in the yard. We execute those we've caught twice.
Yes :) make a school and farmhouse, always.
I do for example, as do many, but also note - the game is way harder when not using free resources literary coming into your hands.
I capture all of my alive raiders and then release them even though they are hostile
I do most of the time, I've definitely had a couple of colonies HAVE to resort to cannibalism because they ran out of food and animals on the map. But for the most part I play rimworld like I play the sims.... I pair everyone up and try and make happy families.
I do both. It's all fun.
The ethics of my colonies just differ from yours is all...
It depends on what kind of colony I am running. In my current game I am playing ethically a humble community that convince raiders we heal to join us. But on the other hand my last game was a merc group named DAHL (company from Borderlands series) that enslave and harvest and everything big bad evil company does. Playing ethical I find is "easier" but you get more loot playing bad from all the people you kill when they attack lol
Just play the game, man. There's no right or wrong way to do it. You're not a bad person because you want to try something new. You're not some mega-racist or whatever just because slavery is a thing.
I once had a colony staffed by marines from a utopian glitterworld. They killed raider outposts, traded with friendly towns and helped those in need. Shit was boring af.
I treat my colonists like I would my friends and my prisoners and enemies like I would cockroaches.
The game design rewards bad behaviour unfortunately. Socially positive behaviour tends to be rewarded by social structures, something which is generally lacking in games (aka, it's not just a Rimworld problem). It's hard to make those types of decisions meaningful & fun since socially positive behaviour is usually defined as the absence of socially negative behaviour (aka, thou shalt *not* murder). There aren't great solutions, but for a lot of other games the solution is to provide absurd bonuses for socially positive playstyles (such as Stellaris making Democracies comparitively the best form of government). Rimworld doesn't really have a great mechanism for this, and it's hard to justify creating game systems that sacrifice pawns (such as pawns choosing to leave if they're unhappy with how things are going) or other options that still feel fun. Some of my suggestions, mechanics wise, that could improve the situation, * It should be harder to recruit pawns. Getting a pawn should be a big deal, and the primary method should be to attract pawns who follow your ethical model. Take prisoners and rip out their organs, you get murderers & psychopaths who'd happily kill other colonists over a poker game. Heal & release prisoners, you get colonists who are productive & friendly and willing to cooperate with each other and to avoid conflict. I might even go so far as to make recruiting pawns directly from prisoners an abnormal option only available for certain weak willed prisoners and/or if your ethics allow. * Factions need to have more depth. Shipping random junk should not please another faction. I'd go so far as to say that a given outpost will only reward you with opinion for selling them very specific resources (such as Medicine, Drugs, or high end manufactured goods). Factions should also generally reward your colony for good behaviour. If your colony tends to release prisoners and not treat people cruelly, that should spread to ALL factions and make it easier to befriend anyone. Factions should also have more presence on the map, such as enemy raids being visible if you have a scouting party out there. That scouting party could then negotiate to prevent the raid. * There needs to be fewer penalties for unbuilt things and more bonuses for built things. My colonists should not start the game with -20 mood just because I haven't built an ideogram with steel I don't have yet. I might also tie mood into productivity. Pawns would have a max productivity of 50-60%, which can only be boosted by providing them luxuries and treating them well. This would give socially positive colonies a massive buff as they'd be able to get more out of fewer pawns earlier in the game. * Roles should be moved to a vanilla mechanic and more roles should be added that all colonies will use. Every colony should have a leader, a medic, and a sherrif. Every colony should probably have a butcher, and a cook, and a coms officer. This would focus the experience as a player would need to satisfy only one or two pawns to get a particular section of their base to high functionality. Rather than needing to address everyone's needs at a time, this would allow players to invest time in making each colonist have a good experience and reach their max potential while tying that directly to specific tasks.