RimWorld Naked Brutality on Extreme Permadeath Guide

by BLACK_FR

I just finished my custom “Naked Brutality” scenario with several complications for harder challenge. After that I wanted to share my experience and give several tips that can make your gameplay better. Unfortunatelly I played on B18 version so with new 1.0 version not all tips will apply but most of them will. May be I will do update if I dare to make another run on 1.0.

First of all about my custom scenario. I always play on Cassandra extreme permadeath with tribe faction. I think that Cassandra is most challenging one (Randy is too kind in my opinion most of the time).

I used some mods but all of them were quality of life and didn’t affect vanilla balance (cleaning area, cooks can refuel, wildlife tab, quality builder, stack merger, research tree). Only one that  could affect balance is Prepare Carefully. I made pawn without a traits using only 709 points. It’s basically all zero skills with normal interest. The reason behind balance is that if you make pawn without interests than it’s reasonable to get rid of him as soon as you got any other pawn and if you give him some training in any skills than you making your game easier.

I also disabled some incident’s that felt like cheating: Wanderer join, chased refugee, self-tame, farm animal join, resource pod crash. More challenge – more fun, right?

I played on plain temeperate forest with 30-day growing period and reasonably cold winters.

So, let’s begin with tips:

Wealth management
Main thing that you have to understand is that strength of threats is determined mainly by wealth of your colony (https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Raider). So you have to keep it as low as possible. If you are planning to use some item and it’s health is not relevant to it’s usage you can let it deteriorate to reduce it’s value before putting it to a storage (food, meds, some artifact etc). Be aware that precipitation greatly accelerates deterioration, so don’t lose anything important.
Don’t save weapons for trade because of their 20% trade value multplier, just destroy them. If you are making apparel or other item for selling you can delete bill when it’s almost done and store unfinished item without adding value to colony (and finish them when trade caravan arrived). Don’t take in bad colonists, each of pawn adds ~1.5 raider (42 points to raid strength). Don’t make excessive stock, only food should be excessive (after proper deterioration). You can have only dusters as cloth with some tribal headdress for interaction benefit and sell everything else. You have armor and vests for raids that was worn by corpse, 10% multiplier is pretty good. Don’t remove scythers blade before you have trade caravan that will buy it.

Raid defense
Structures
You should mainly focus your attention on preparing for raids. I formulated 3 main stages of base defense: 1) two steel traps at the entrance to main room (it can help with first few raids) 2) walled base with point of entry with 6-8 steel traps 3) adding few turrets inside the base
Because of wealth management I never needed more than 6 turrets for defense (even when I was finishing ship).
Animals
Animals are great help to defense especially in the early game. As I started with 0 skills an animal training the only option are alpacas. They are ok in fights and also give you wool that can make good dusters. You have to have them because you can’t go melee yourself (because of risk of scars or instadeath) and you have to have way to deal with sappers and in-base drops.
Other help
When you research comm console start using friendly help! That way you can defend sometimes not even participating in fights. You just have to “pay” for the help with silver. Also you can heal some of the downed allies to get some reputation back.
You pawns
It’s good to have at least one dedicated melee and all others as shooting masters. Optimal way to train shooting skill is to use on every animal that became mad. You stay at door, shooting with worst possible weapon (at first – 1% short bow, then 1% autopistol) until animal is close enough to attack than hide in a room and repair hits on the door. Repeat until you get day limit. You can also aggro predators that way for double benefit (shooting training and making map safer). At mid game you can acquire better weapons from raider. You should have 1 sniper rifle (or at least bolt-action rifle) for mechanoids kiting. At late game you can craft mingun (best weapon in the game). Don’t forget to let it deteriorate it below 10%.
As armor goes you will need vest and advanced helmets for fighting. You can get power helmets from raiders. If you make them yourself they will cost a lot.
Manhunter packs
Just stay inside base until they rest. You should make your base so that you can do so.
Mechanoids
Kite them to your steel traps entrance or just kill them from afar. Be aware that scyther charge lance shots can be deadly.
Sieges
Kill them from afar using sniper rifle. One way of killing them is to handle boomalope beforehand and then send her to their base to wreck them upon death.

Disease prevention
Plague, malaria and sleeping sickness are deadly for tribal early game. I research penicillin before electricity for that reason. Before you get there collect decent stock of herbal medicine from wildroot and than train you doctors (preferably – several, ideally – all) to 12-14 skill. Try to buy some real medicine. You can do it by performing operations (installing-uninstalling legs and jaws to prisoner, each operation requires 1 medicine). You can do it 1-2 times a day because of learning limit. You can train 2-3 skill needed by beating prisoner with fists and healing him. Be aware that unsuccessful operatin damages body (if you are installing legs) or head (if you are installing jaw) so let relevant part heal a bit before operating again to prevent prisoner death.
In the mid-late game let all pawns be on penicillin all the time (it cost only 2 neirotamine every 5 days which is very easy deal).

Research tree
As tribal first thing to research is complex clothing, then beds, then penicillin and go-juice (for hard raids), then microelecronic basics, then gun turrets, then geothermal generator, then drop pods and chemfuel generator, then miniguns, then components assembly (you shuld start to make advances components early because they cost a lot of work to do), then deep drilling, batteries and scanner, then ship (I skipped intermediate steps to save space). Basically you don’t need anything else but you can research devilstrand, air-conditioning smelter and anti-fire things.

Other tips
-use draft/undraft to change pawn’s joy activty to choose better one
-be ready to go for an AI core. In early game make some pemmican. In late-game make drop pods
-for better logistics use stockpiles to move things as needed (especially useful when you are gathering wildroots)
-for better cover for your pawns and turrets use open doors instead of sandbags. They give better protection
-you can destroy corpses by using grenades (ofc with >10% health to reduce wealth). Before that you will need graves. If you have several animal you can make caravan, drop all goodies and bodies (or some of them) and quickly return
-in early game or in crisis you can micromanage a lot. For example food bar is going 50% slower when pawn is hungry and 75% slower when pawn is urgently hunger. So you can save a lot of food if you forbid all of it and manually order to eat befor starvation begins. Same goes with rest. The only way limit is pawn’s mood.
-have some pekoe at hand to help with mood in time of need
-be attentive to small things that you can forget that can ruin your run (like not checking predators hunger before going mining and so on)
-try to reduce risk for pawns as much as possible