Integrating Anomaly more with the rest of the game

Now you can mix in some horror without saturating the whole experience

Hi everyone – Ty here.

We’re loving your Anomaly stories! Please keep it up with the duplicated babies, shambler babies, and gray labyrinth baby drama. This expansion explores new ground creatively for RimWorld and it’s been incredibly gratifying to see people having new kinds of stories in the game.

Releases like this bring massive amounts of feedback, which is always incredibly valuable for us to understand how the game is playing and what people want. This time around, many players have said they’d like to be able to mix Anomaly content more into the rest of the game so it feels like less of a self-contained experience, and more like something that integrates into a normal playthrough.

Originally, we had Anomaly throw a ton of content at you guys because we wanted to be sure people would experience all the new stuff and see how much was really there. We may have pushed a bit too far there - Anomaly has tons of content and exposing it all too fast was saturating the experience. This is great for a certain type of intense, focused playthrough, but the game should also support other playstyles.

Today’s update addresses that with some key changes and new features:

• Anomaly content is less dominant by default while the monolith is active. You’ll see more incidents from the base game and other expansions now.

• You can customize how Anomaly-focused you want your playthrough to be. We added sliders to the game settings that let you choose how much you want Anomaly horror events to dominate the game. If you want it to be pure horror when the monolith is active, you can. If you want the horror to be a light sprinkle on top of the rest of your RimWorld, you can do that. You can alter these settings any time in the options menu by opening the storyteller settings (and this is possible on games started in previous versions).

• You don’t need to see every entity on every playthrough. We reduced the number of entities you must interact with before advancing the monolith. You still can wait to see every entity, but it’s your choice now. This spreads the experience further over more playthroughs, if you choose.

• We've updated the Anomaly scenario to start with three researchers and a ghoul (up from two). This gets you into the meat of the game quicker when using this scenario.

We’re making other ongoing minor changes as well - see the full changelog below for details.

We’re still watching and considering other changes, so please keep telling your stories! And thanks for your effort in writing useful and rich feedback.

If you’d like to help test or report bugs, please join the official RimWorld Development Discord.

Join us on Reddit to discuss the update here.

Also, please don't hesitate to review Anomaly on Steam! (Expansions don’t get many reviews since there’s no button prompt in the Steam library.)

Thanks all,
Ty

Changelog

• Added storyteller options to increase or reduce inactive and active presence of Anomaly events.

• Reduced entity codex entry count required for monolith level 3 from 17 -> 12.

• Drastically reduce the chance of getting a faction leader from skip abduction.

• Reduced metal horror infection chance when an infected doctor performs surgery.

• Skulls can now be consumed by harbinger trees.

• Minor optimizations for food searching.

• Added safety checks to RoofCollapserImmediate to prevent out of bounds.

• Reduce revenant flammability to prevent it being trivialized by fire.

• Increase the upper end of blood rain duration for both the incident and psychic ritual.

• Added missing default constructor to PawnRenderNode_Apparel.

• Added some null checks to getting invisible versions of materials.

• Prevent strange signal quest from firing if the monolith has been disrupted.

• Removed awoken corpses from scenario editor.

• Clarify that ghouls created by the ghoul infusion operation aren't hostile.

• Added custom descriptions to the diagnosed (hidden) versions of organ decay and crumbling mind to make them less confusing.

• Remove min threat points for obelisk incidents to allow discovering more incidents with low colony points. Increase the earliest day that they'll occur to compensate.

• Update The Anomaly scenario to start with three (up from two) researchers and a ghoul.

• Clarify Anomaly threat settings tooltip.

• Adjusted active monolith threat frequency calculations to allow for 100% anomaly incidents in all active levels if desired.

• Added a dev tool to force end revenant hypnosis.

• Removed "Simulate not owning X" options to prevent mods from disabling expansions in users' games.

• Reduced entity count required to advance to waking monolith level from 8 to 7 to avoid softlocking in ice sheet biomes.

• Pocket maps count towards the wealth of their parent map.

• Corpses now have a 6 hour window before they'll resurrect in a death pall.

• Improved target highlighting for incinerator and beam verbs.

• Updated player creative rewards content.

Fixes

• Fix: Cultist faction not generating with their preset ideoligion on older saves.

• Fix: Drafted tend only tends one injury.

• Fix: Pawns can teleport into very dangerous labyrinth rooms.

• Fix: Error when trying to debug spawn an unnatural corpse.

• Fix: Corpse unburied mood not being applied if in stockpile.

• Fix: Sightstealers won't attack colony mechs.

• Fix: Shamblers sometimes get stuck in rising state.

• Fix: Strange signal quest not ending if the map is removed.

• Fix: Revenants can be infinitely studied by killing them then taking their spine to a holding platform.

• Fix: Kidnappers won't try to dig their way out if they get stuck.

• Fix: Ideology members count does not increase on prison release until save/reload.

• Fix: Crash trying to use psychic slaughter on escaping entity in niche circumstances.

• Fix: Resurrection serum fails to draw mote after pawn is devoured.

• Fix: Typo "burner charges" -> "burner charge".

• Fix: Twisted meat is allowed in hoppers by default.

• Fix: Pawn growth points and vatGrowTicks aren't copied when a child is duplicated.

• Fix: Abductor obelisk duplicating pawns.

• Fix: ShipJob error with null ship.

• Fix: Removing an ideology role via meme does not recalculate disabled work types.

• Fix: Recipes not setting random styles correctly.

• Fix: HediffComp.NotifyPawnKilled passing in instigator rather than target.

• Fix: Error trying to duplicate pawn in some circumstances.

• Fix: Duplicates have royalty title of original.

• Fix: Typo in dreadmeld discovery message.

• Fix: Head apparel is using the body mesh set instead of the head mesh set.

• Fix: Icons in FloatMenuOption do not scale with text size.

• Fix: Duplicate translation entries for crawling inspect strings.

• Fix: Duplicated pawns will be the mother of the child if the original was the mother.

• Fix: Messages about cube withdrawal for gone temp pawns.

• Fix: Errors while mouse cursor holds a jumppack jump order while pawn is flying.

• Fix: Rare edge case where a worshipful village spawns without a terminal due to lack of room size.

• Fix: Inconsistencies with shambler tending rules.

• Fix: Raised shamblers getting bestowing ceremony quests.

• Fix: Revenant hypnosis not wearing off in specific circumstances.

• Fix: Typo in hate chant letter.

• Fix: Peeking with an incinerator could sometimes set the shooter on fire.

• Fix: Babies could have void curiosity.

• Fix: Containment tooltip flickering when changing.

• Fix: Situational pathfinding error when studying.

• Fix: Temp quest pawn corpses counting as colonist corpses after save/load

• Fix: Error on taking ghoul on caravan regarding drug policy.

• Fix: Ghoul tried to be a part of a marriage ceremony.

• Fix: Harbinger stump descriptions mention wood.

• Fix: Error with psychic harmonizer.

• Fix: Analysis projects would throw an error if attempted after finishing event.

• Fix: Conversion warning from prisoner guest tab.

• Fix: Refueling campfire canceling dance party.

• Fix: Nociospheres sending unstable letters after already departing.

• Fix: Books in scenario parts not being initialized.

• Fix: Colonists unable to take items in containers into portals.

• Fix: Bioferrite not showing up in ingredients list for ceremonial hood.

• Fix: Typos in backstory.

• Fix: Carry to biosculptor pod job fails on colonist prisoners.

• Fix: Starting animal edit interface not displaying correctly on large UI scales.

• Fix: Performance drop calculating containment strength for outdoor holding spot/platform.

• Fix: Analyzable gizmo disabled if no research bench available.

• Fix: Void provocation unable to fire harbinger tree sprout incident.

• Fix: Error when rendering belt node with null wornGraphicData.

• Fix: Duplicates' unborn babies not inheriting source unborn baby's xenogenes.

• Fix: Caravan ambushes ending despite colonists having death refusal.

• Fix: Prisoners getting both “monster by bed” and “imprisoned with entity” mood debuffs.

• Fix: Creepjoiners can be enslaved without responding.

• Fix: Returning from labyrinth not using the correct map when selecting the return cell.

• Fix: Revenant causing permanent stun.

• Fix: Shard inhibitors can be rotated.

• Fix: Desiccated deer artwork had incorrect scaling for North/South directions.

• Fix: Colored text broken in mod config for some translations.

• Fix: Error when targeting empty colonist bar entry.

• Fix: Monolith spawning too close to geysers in rare circumstances.

• Fix: Player shamblers show up in the schedule tab.

• Fix: Able to order monolith activation when there is no path.

• Fix: Cubes enthralling pawns on different maps/caravans.

• Fix: Nociosphere not returning to its original location on activity activation.

• Fix: Metalhorrors not emerging once enough of your colonists are infected.

• Fix: Deathless pawns dying without correct injuries from failed surgery.

• Fix: Child shamblers can arrive with children disabled in storyteller settings.

• Fix: Child ghouls causing errors on attempting to get body graphic.

• Fix: Chaos skipping into a fogged area doesn't clear fog.

• Fix: Incinerators with shield belts cause "shield user has ranged weapon" alert.

• Fix: Error when wastepack infestation occurs near map edge, attempting to spawn outside of map.

• Fix: Custom xenotypes lose their custom icon when duplicated with obelisk.

• Fix: Gender typo in creepjoiner letter.

• Fix: Text formatting for nociosphere gizmo inconsistent.

That’s the entirety of the patch notes on April 18 for Rimworld on Steam PC.

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