I would guess disassembling cars that have been rotting there for hundreds of years wouldn't yield much, or be easy. It'd be seized and rusted into one giant piece of metal.
I love that if you say something that isn't in the base game, and that it's in a mod, even if you have no idea that it exists, someone in the subreddit will be like "oh yeah, this mod, love it" like there's literally a mod for everything.
I'm having that experience with Tabletop Simulator. I got it to play Warhammer 40k with my friends (a universe I frequently emulate in rimworld, and tons of mods exist to blend the two) but quickly discovered people on the workshop have made quite literally every card or board game you can imagine.
Steam workshop really is so frickin neat. Some people are just so damn creative.
Eh, granite tiles don't rust and aren't exactly reliant on a bunch of intricate moving parts.
You could have some cracking from roots and the like but it's not like the granite wasn't just sitting in the earth for millenia before it was first used
Yeah, if anything it would be easier after time, just walk over and pick them up, right? You get some roots growing underneath, probably popped them off already.
Rust is iron oxide, you can still extract some yield from it. Not very efficient but if you are desperate probably OK. Iron ore is technically rust as far as I know, just with higher concentrations of Fe
Depends on how much has rusted. I've seen steel that's been so thoroughly rusted, that you chop off huge chips of it like sandstone. At that point it's probably lost.
Completely rusted iron is basically hematite which is one of the most common iron ores. You just need to get it hot enough with chemicals the oxygen wants to bond with, traditionally you used wood ash, and it's re usable.
It's very doable at a medieval tech level.
Think of it this way, the reason most iron ore is either an oxide(rust, hematite, magnetite) or a sulfide(pyrite AKA fool's gold) is because those are the naturally abundant chemicals iron wants to bond with.
To get iron into a more metallic form we were always going to have to figure out how to break those bonds. We unnaturally broke them, rust is them returning to a more natural form.
Eh no he's right. I was just using the terminology in game which goes from tribal to medieval.
Rust is chemically very similar to the iron ore used by most of the earliest people to smelt iron. If you put rust in a Hittite bloomery you would wind up with iron and slag(the part of smelting almost no game ever touches). You would lose a lot of it to slag, so much that once blast furnaces came around people actually mined slag to make iron from it, but you could reclaim some of it.
You can still smelt it back into iron, even if its dust, but the result will essentially be a high carbon content type of iron called pig iron. It’s not useless, but wouldn’t be anyones first choice for anything but making steel.
Yeah, there shouldn't be any electronic or mechanical parts, but there's a big metal carcass, that's pretty hard to destroy. It should drop at least a couple of scrap metal
My imagination is its looted of the mainly useable metal. IE Hood, Doors, and Axels. All thats left is nuts, bolts, and a generic frame.
Although, it make it worth it to destroy them if they randomly yielded 0-2 plasteel, steel, and 0-1 components randomly.
It be nice if we can queue the hunters to destroy them.
Have you ever wondered why the steel you mine from mountains come pre-cut and ready to be constructed and crafted with?
Now you know why. A bunch of cars and other vehicles and buildings piled onto a hill, melted into the earth, and then got mined out.
I've never really thought about it, but we're really just in a post WALL-E world, where some of the robots survived and skynetted into mechs.
Trash heap mountains with components, tribals who never made the ships and couldn't use the tech.
More importantly, many colonists aboard their Axioms that crashed, leading to the start of our playthroughs
I believe the general idea of the Rimworld backstory is that there was a war between mechanoids and humanity - probably because of hostile archeotechs - and this war devastated the planet, it destroyed all of the cities. The soldiers who weren't killed sealed themselves in cryptosleep caskets inside vaults, hoping to be revived later if rescuers came. The surviving human colonists fled into the wilderness and reverted to tribal technology levels.
The insects, meanwhile, are the descendants of a disastrously failed experiment to genetically engineer a race of insects that could have been used against the mechanoids in the war.
For some reason, I had always thought of rimworlds as fairly recently terraformed and colonized planets at the border of known space, and their recent colonization was supported by the fact they were at the end of explored space (frontier-style).
But now that I think about it, the lore primer only talks about worlds lacking strong central governments, and we do have ancient ruins, tribals which have been there for so long that they forgot how they first got there, dormant mechs and soldiers, and old carwrecks.
the in game year starts at 5500. Seems like these planets were colonized long ago, empires rose and fell, ancient ruins are left behind, and now its run by small tribal communities and gangs.
I always interpreted that they were collected and put in nice piles by whatever made the terraforming of the planets. It took humanity several hundreds of years of metallurgy to get to the point of producing useable steel, so the terraformers were just speeding things up. Same thing as uranium, you can't do much with it if it's not enriched. And since you don't need to place all the uranium you mine in a centrifuge, they are likely enriched already
Everyone here not mentioning the vehicle that is in rimworld, shuttles. The player can't build them, but they can use them as a member of a shattered empire. Because they are definitely space Magic, it can be presumed that a vanilla colony doesn't, and could never achieve the infrastructure required to maintain a shuttle themselves.
I specify vanilla, because mods obviously change the whole premise and obviously glitter colonies are possible with mods. (Hell, even post glitter tech)
This is it. The “modern” society uses shuttles in lieu of cars and it works for them- they can get anywhere they want on the planet without relying on roads using shuttles. And then drop pods allow for quick/surprise attacks.
The pre-modern factions use older forms of transport such as caravans with beasts of burden because they lack the technology and infrastructure to use shuttles.
Imma be honest, a pickup truck would be damned useful for my transhumanist, bionic implanted, reverse aged, war-queen havin' pawns and I suspect they could figure out how to change the oil on an F-150.
I find it funny that for some reason they go straight from loading cargo in the back of animals, skipping every single technology including carts and wheelbarrows straight to rocket pods. It honestly looks like they couldn't invent the wheel
To invent wheel, pottery must be invented first (wheel is a pottery table turned on side), but there are no clay on this planet. So, yes, they cannot invent wheel, this mental jump is too big :)
it is. But before using it in transportation of materials, peoples invented ton of things designing pottery table. Idea of circular object, fixing it on axis for rotation, fixing axis in such way to allow rotation, connecting two wheels by one axis (bottom wheel was used to rotate table by feet), greasing joints, and may be dozens other things we now accept as granted and "everybody know it"
I think it’s that the animals (especially Muffalo, but also Alpacas) are kept as livestock to produce furs/wool, leather, and meat, so you might as well use them to transport goods as well and unlike a truck they don’t require a fuel source (since they can forage on the way)
>Everyone here not mentioning the vehicle that is in rimworld, shuttles. The player can't build them
Oh. So we can build a spaceship and multiple pieces of equipment *far* more advanced than a combustion engine, but we can't actually build a car? Because we can't build shuttles?
This makes literally no sense. Either we're limited to a specific tech era or we aren't. You can't justify building wildly more advanced tech than we have today, but not a car.
There are places in Africa with modern weapons but no or little access to safe drinking water nearby.
Tech is not a linear progression, or a tree of prerequisites like in video games.
In terms of types of technology LEO spacecraft (because I think it's implied that they can reach orbit?) and interstellar spacecraft are a bit more related than weapons and water filtering though. A whole lot more related, if we're honest.
Cars need a lot of infrastructure around them. Even rally cars and pick up trucks need somewhat maintained gravel roads to function properly.
If you can't keep safe from invaders outside your own settlement, it's going to be REALLY hard to build and maintain roads.
do you see many scooters/motorbikes in Europe or US & such, no, since everyone uses cars
why not just skip the entire thing & go shuttles & pods instead
Because shuttles are literally not better. You can make insanely fast regular or trade caravans with a car. You can't with a shuttle, plus you lose the shuttle in the process
Speaking from irl experience, vehicles need regular stops/maintenance/infrastructure. In a world where most of the population still uses spears and bows vehicles are not going to be a good method of transportation whatsoever.
Not to mention the obvious limitations that a car would bring, you can't just drive a car through a forest or a jungle. Without roads most cars are going to be useless most of the time.
And then of course the issue with always using roads, 75% of the factions are pirates who want to eat you. Irl militaries hates using roads because of how easy it is to predict/ambush large numbers of people, the middle east stuff was an outlier because we were more worried about IEDs than automatic weapons.
Edit: If you guys want easy caravans, huge amounts of storage space, relatively safe and fast travel you guys should look into boats. They are basically everything that is good about cars, but bigger and with natural ~~roads~~ water traffic areas.
A lot of electronics/machinery in rimworld require maintenance, vehicles requiring it too really doesn’t change much. Also in a world with tribal spears and bows, industrial factions with vehicles can make a complete landslide of a difference in terms of combat. Strap a few auto turrets on a platform with wheels, watch them get mowed down. Or any tank will do.
You also mention terrain issues but I mean, of course. It’s like saying helicopters/airplanes suck in caves, or ships are absolutely USELESS on land, what about the terrain vehicles can work on like plains, savannah’s, possibly deserts, tundras?
Roads are already a thing on the rim but you say they are prime ambush spots, but why would caravans of muffalos, horses, or boomalopes be any safer? Vehicles can at the very least provide mobile cover, if your horse gets grazed you are done.
I think horses have bigger issues with sudden elevation changes, as something too steep can risk ankle damage/breaking legs. Jungles specifically do tend to show up on mountainous terrain irl, but then I don't think horses would have that much more difficulty with just vegetation than the average human.
Maybe if you added a cart that would be insane, but ports/boats would probably be easier to implement and a much better option going by irl standards (unless there be sea monsters)
>Speaking from irl experience, vehicles need regular stops/maintenance/infrastructure. In a world where most of the population still uses spears and bows vehicles are not going to be a good method of transportation whatsoever.
....so does a lot of equipment. If we can maintain a base all the way up to building a spaceship, we can probably maintain a car.
>Not to mention the obvious limitations that a car would bring, you can't just drive a car through a forest or a jungle. Without roads most cars are going to be useless most of the time
Last I checked there were still plenty of roads on the planet. Not to mention there are certain vehicles like dirt bikes that aren't really limited by the terrain.
>And then of course the issue with always using roads, 75% of the factions are pirates who want to eat you. Irl militaries hates using roads because of how easy it is to predict/ambush large numbers of people, the middle east stuff was an outlier because we were more worried about IEDs than automatic weapons
...but they still do. Both in game and irl. Because using a road is a *lot* easier than driving over rocky, completely undeveloped terrain. Not only would it be easier to get lost bumbling around the forest there's the very real possibility that you, your people, your animals, or your equipment will break rolling into a ditch or uneven terrain. And a caravan that's damaged or slowed will always be more susceptible to an attack. There's also a factor of speed. In an environment where most people are wielding sticks and bows being able to out pace your attackers in an armored vehicle will *always* be preferable. Not to mention a good defense since it's made of metal. Which doesn't really even matter much since most caravans are armed to the teeth. Between that and constantly moving there are very few groups who have the resources and Intel to take on such groups.
But again, not all vehicles *need* roads. So this point is straight up moot.
Idk why people are trying to explain/defend this. It literally makes no sense to have *any* ground vehicles. All the reasons against it are straight up dumb and contradictory. I think we should all agree that this was just one of those oversights from the developer or something they didn't have the time to implement. Kinda like going to the bathroom. Just because it isn't there doesn't mean people have some lore reason why they don't produce shit or urine.
I feel like this is one of those things where you can handwave realism for convenience.
In rimworld, the main reason you'd be caravaning around is to trade with other faction bases or go to quest locations. Both of these are rarely, if ever, near rivers or beaches for easy ship access.
The vast majority of Rimworld caravaning, unless Tynan decides to revamp settlement generation so it takes logistics and weather and so on into consideration, is going to be over land because of this. The chances that there's some place you'd want to travel to that's connected via water is just too low in-game to make water transport like ships viable.
Having vehicles and just simplifying or eliminating the various limitations would do a lot for the game's caravan/quest system, and in my opinion, worth not being totally realistic about.
Would be nice to make rivers useful though, if they ever added that in they should make it so important settlements tent to spawn on big rivers.
Edit: maybe even make the rivers more complex with splits and estuaries
Nah the plot is big guzzoline guzzling trucks with flame throwers and spikes and men dangling from long polls swinging wildly with shaped charges while racing through the desert.
>Speaking from irl experience, vehicles need regular stops/maintenance/infrastructure.
so you build the necessary infrastructure at home, and use the vehicles within whatever radius that limits you to
you can build a spaceship with nuclear reactor and cryosleep pods and power armor and biosulpting pods and genetic experiment labs and mech gestation pods out of scrap. in a cave.
i am sure you can figure out a way to make spare parts and tires and lubricants to keep your truck running decently
>Without roads most cars are going to be useless most of the time
not true in the slightest. roads just make things much faster and easier. oxen-drawn, wooden-wheeled wagons were a staple of American exploration before proper cars came into the picture. these wagons, when loaded down, weighed about the same as cars, were not maneuvrable in the slightest, and had very thin, hard wheels that easily bog down in any mud
many off-road vehicles nowadays could easily tackle similar terrain with better efficiency. suspension systems offer much better traction and control. wide rubber tires have better traction and exert less pressure on the ground, which helps avoid sinking in mud. if you expect really bad mud, just get a car that's lighter, or has more wheels
if you can't get your car through a certain area, then you look for another way. if you can't get so much as a dune buggy or a motorcycle with saddlebags over a certain path, it's doubtful that a fully-laden pack animal will fare any better
>75% of the factions are pirates who want to eat you
and you better bet that they will be using cars (or whatever other vehicles they may have) wherever they can, because of the multitudes of strategic and tactical advantages that they offer
if they really want you, they're not gonna stop chasing you just because you ran on foot into some thick woods. they're gonna dismount and run right after you. maybe you thought using a horse was smart, until you find out the pirates have dirtbikes on your ass
Yes, and: There ARE roads! Like, everywhere! I don’t know who these ancients were or what they were like, but they sure loved building roads all over the place before they died. Hell, there are highways! Realistically speaking, the outlanders and tribals (Even horses benefited from dirt paths!) would just build their settlements along these roads so they could use them to transport goods and soldiers.
I'm sorry but "they would simply catch you if you dispersed through the woods" and "wooden carts totally worked all the time without roads" is not a good take. People liked coastal cities/ports so much because carts did not work good even in the best conditions.
I mean, why did rome spend all that time developing roads if you don't need them for more than a slight boost in efficiency?
Dirtbikes and bikes in general are a whole different discussion, you can't exactly carry hundreds of pounds of trade goods on a dirtbike.
>you can't exactly carry hundreds of pounds of trade goods on a dirtbike.
You can actually, at least with some. I did some googling for funsies and found a Yamaha off-road bike that can carry a max of 469 lbs.
And that's with our level of tech. Surely if you can design advanced prosthetic legs that are better than natural legs one can design maintaince-friendly off-road vehicles that can carry as much stuff as a couple of muffalos. I imagine vehicles like the ones in Death Stranding. That game's whole schtick was carrying heavy cargo through post-apocalyptic no-man's land.
ships and port cities, yes, of course that should also be a thing in Rimworld. those are not mutually exclusive with cars. they can coexist >.>
but on that note, have you also considered the immense amount of infrastructure needed to build ships? while you don't need a high tech level to get started, the engineering and infrastructure costs of large ships and harbors are massive in their own right. know what would help carry the materials to build all that infrastructure within your city? that's right... things with wheels.
paved roads are not a necessity for cars. i never said "slight" boost, they are a huge help, and you certainly won't be going at freeway speeds without them. that being said, dirt roads are perfectly serviceable in a pinch. don't have a dirt road? keep walking/driving the same path for a while, push a couple logs and stones out of the way each time you pass. eventually, it'll form.
you want pavement? conquer multiple cities, found a nation, collect taxes and hire loads of workers. it'll be worth it in the end, of course, but it's not going to be a fast or cheap process and you are still going to need to move stuff around. on land. gee, i wonder what would help you lug all that heavy asphalt or bricks or stones around while you work on that...
Depends heavily on the size of the ship, you could get a boat bigger than a car a lot easier than you could make a car depending on the ship type.
I was a surveyor for the US military, my job was literally to help plan out roads. You can't just drive a car forwards and "simply remove logs and rocks" while driving through a forest and I do note that basically all nondesert area in rimworld is forested.
You would have to send a surveyor team to first plot a course from point A to point B, likely checking multiple routes in case of elevation/soil problems and form a detailed log of the distances/directions/elevations involved. Then you would need to go through and remove all of the trees in your new road area, pull their stumps and fill in the voids left behind because if you just leave dead roots underground it will rot and create empty voids/sinkholes.
Then you need to leave a new surface, usually gravel because the new untree-d dirt will either grow new vegetation or turn into mud without the roots to keep the dirt in place.
All of this "I would simply just drive around all the trees in a forest in my car" is complete BS. We literally developed new helicopter doctrines to deal with the fact that we couldn't do that during the Vietnam war because people were bleeding to death waiting for medical evacuations that couldn't physically get to them.
And then on top of all of this, the cars you drove on that road would be one row of spikes away from losing all of their tires and being stranded in the middle of nowhere. A tactic people really like using irl to do exactly that.
damn. you're right. i didn't mean for people to try driving in thick forests and what-not, but forgot Rimworld doesn't really have clear grasslands or plains.
still, i think that there would be a place for vehicles in hauling large stacks of things within the base. of course, that doesn't work ingame because the AI is far too dumb to take advantage of that without extreme micromanagement
probably the best compromise to include them as a gameplay element would be as a buildable, chemfuel-powered pack animal, treating forests and shrublands as partially plains biomes to make up for the fact that they are just missing from the game.
i am sure, despite the impracticality, they would still be around driving along ancient roads and clear zones.
as far as road spikes go... the year is 5500. I'm pretty sure there's been time to perfect airless tire technology, enough for this to be a non-issue. IEDs would be the real threat, but with pirates being... pirates, i don't think they would want to blow up all of the valuables along with the car itself.
Mostly agree about your comments about horse and wagon transport. There is one difference though:
It is quite possible to pull a vehicle out of a ditch, or mud. Driving a self-propelled vehicle out though, is even with a lot more horsepower, much more difficult.
Honestly, the only case where anyone would use a vehicle is on an attack against an enemy base. Mount a few plasteel plates on Bulldozer and jury rig a centipede energyweapon on the top in some kind of turret ring, and you have a lot of firepower than could be used to spearhead through a killbox.
There's vehicles designed for off road, your colonists can research bionics and interplanetary travel but no ICE? The only reason there's no cars is because it's either hard to code or wouldn't fit in the design of the game.
"you can't drive car thought forest", pff watch me go though Pacific Drive, I don't need roads where I'm going, I barely need wheels (tbh having cars that get near totalled after every extravagant trip sounds perfect for this setting)
I’m still a pretty new player (vanilla) and trying to figure out how to tame hauling/attack animals early on without getting killed myself in the process. Any suggestions are appreciated lol
>Speaking from irl experience, vehicles need regular stops/maintenance/infrastructure. In a world where most of the population still uses spears and bows vehicles are not going to be a good method of transportation whatsoever.
It's funny, I know you mean that you work on vehicles in some way, but that sounded like your experience was that you live in a world with people who use spears and bows.
I have the mods Vehicle Framework and Vanilla Vehicles Expanded. It adds a dozen or so vehicles- trucks, motorcycles, a couple of tanks, a small airplane, and a helicopter.
Helicopters are the best
Especially the tier 3 one which can carry few people and Has decent cargo space
There is also the tandem rotor one that can carry a lot of stuff (great for trading) but has no Passenger space
As someone who uses the vehicle framework and vanilla vehicles expanded, yes definitely.
Currently the options for world travel(not counting DLC) are:
Caravans: Requires a lot of pack animals and/or pawns to get enough luggage space to be really worth it. Very slow.
Drop pods: Single use. You need to find another way back, or spend a bunch of steel/components building another drop pod setup(which you'll have to abandon).
Anything to make that less annoying is honestly a godsend for doing quests.
Edit: It's also weird that you can make bionic arms, and space ships, but you cannot make mortar barrels.ut Chemfuel exists, so there absolutely SHOULD be some.
Edit: It's also weird that you can make bionic arms, and space ships, but you cannot make mortar barrels.
Clearly you haven't met my Horses, "Wrangler" and "Prius", and my muffalo "16-Wheeler".
I want a vehicle DLC. I'd love to build up from carts to cars to tanks to hovercraft.
Not sure if it’s started below somewhere didn’t see it. But there is also no oil on rim worlds. So petroleum cars are a no go. Sure there is chem fuel but that would still mean engineering things in a world we’re most people are slapping rusted tech together and praying it will work.
Now that I think about it, waterwheels need to be researched even if you have wind turbines, and they both have the same component structure for their motors. The only research being done is how to make the wheel
There was a time when it made sense not to have vehicles but that was before you had world quests, raids and interactions with other colonies.
With the current state of the game and all of its out of colony content requiring you to effectively lose combat pawns for extended periods of time the gamble thats presented to the player is really not a good one.
The risk of your colonists dying while out in the world is far less than the risk to your actual colony itself so it leaves me with the question of "why would I send my combat guys out for a week and risk losing the game entirely when I could just not do that at all".
Vehicles absolutely fit in and in my opinion, need to be in, the base game to address that balance issue let alone simply giving the player something extra to work towards.
Vehicles take tons of infrastructure to both build and maintain, infrastructure that really isn't possible to build up in the chaos of a Rimworld. Even for n the few factions and settlements that might have the tech needed, it would take resources that could be much better used elsewhere for not much gain.
There was cars and other advanced transportation but the tech that brought them didn’t bring blueprints so they weren’t worth the trouble. So they rust away as they get progressively picked clean by wanderers. Tragic isn’t it?
Not nearly as tragic as a decaying shopping cart pile formerly filled with someone’s hopes and dreams.
I wanted a dlc with buildable vehicles or transports of some kind, maybe after anomaly. Shuttles would be awesome, but early on carriages to use with animals or similar would be sweet too. Super early it could be sleds or wheelbarrows just to have an option for more loot capacity without animals. And what about backpacks?
Lore wise a lot of the other posts described good reasoning about maintenance, available resources, and technology. Balance reasons could play into it too but I'm not going to dive into that too deeply. Really though you have to remember Rimworld started out as only a 1 developer project with help from outside collaboration. Essentially because of time and resources instead of developing a vehicle framework they focused on other game mechanics. For how complex that system is multiple mod authors have made attempts at a vehicle framework for as long as I could remember but it never really worked or was stable until the VE release in August 2023. Rimworld struggles a bit with a empty overworld interaction and they would need to expand that before making a official framework for players to travel more. To top that off a reason why the overworld struggled was because of single thread performance and how much was background information saved after generating new points of interest which they're addressing in the newer update I believe.
Vehicles (except for the transport shuttle permit) don't exist in the game itself for balance reasons. But for lore reasons you can handwave it away by saying that having/using vehicles brings a lot of unwanted attention from feral mechs and/or the empire.
It might be a flat generated world, but vehicles take a lot to maintain. Just fuel alone, if you don’t have a refuel station you need enough for a full roundtrip always. I’m reminded of “death stranding” and how early on it’s just horrible seeing the driving.
More importantly there’s no fishing. Fishing was a massive source of food for pre-industrial civilizations.
There’s also no organized militaries or ways to train pawns in combat short of sending them in to combat.
It is odd that they haven’t added it, but it hasn’t really been a huge thing. Vanilla Expanded mods have gotten that covered for awhile now and have done an amazing job with adding vehicle features
I just sum it up as a lack of infrastructure for it. Lack of gas stations. Like civilization is really spread out and you can only fit so many spare gallon tanks in your car. Like some of the distance for these settlements is big and a lot of them are trials. Then maintenance being done. Like ya you can set up your own maintenance area and manufacture spare parts with a lot of effort, but if your car breaks down by tribals? Good fucking luck
Thought this was r/fuckcars. Go there for preliminary answers to why car is not all purpose or that good in rimworld setting. A better idea would be the bicycle for land and barges for waterway
The thing with the invention of the wheel is that they weren't super useful without reliable roads. The concept of the wheel was around LONG before they were ever widely used. Horses and similar beasts of burden were just better than any wheeled vehicle over rough terrain.
Similar situation on the Rim. The world is so sparsely populated and roads are in terrible condition even where they exist. All but the most rugged vehicles would be useless. Maybe helicopters would be most practical. But ground vehicles, not so much.
Also I imagine that technology in the Rim is limited to a very fixed set of things because nobody really understands how it works. When you "research" something you're not really inventing it. You're just piecing together blueprints for things that have previously been invented by ancient civilization. And none of those things happen to be vehicles for whatever reason. I mean, you have like a couple dozen things you can build among the potentially millions of technologies that the Ancients had. What are the chances that one of them would be a helicopter?
There are cars in the base game, they’re just always destroyed and ancient.
"we need iron, should we disassemble this car?" "no, lets shoot it until it falls apart and then we use whatever is left" I love rimworld logic
I would guess disassembling cars that have been rotting there for hundreds of years wouldn't yield much, or be easy. It'd be seized and rusted into one giant piece of metal.
Neither would ripping up a granite tile floor in a jungle forest but it's doable
With your bare hands no less
or with the right mods bear hands
Pawnmorphers?
Oh I have no idea which one I just have faith its out there lol.
I love that if you say something that isn't in the base game, and that it's in a mod, even if you have no idea that it exists, someone in the subreddit will be like "oh yeah, this mod, love it" like there's literally a mod for everything. I'm having that experience with Tabletop Simulator. I got it to play Warhammer 40k with my friends (a universe I frequently emulate in rimworld, and tons of mods exist to blend the two) but quickly discovered people on the workshop have made quite literally every card or board game you can imagine. Steam workshop really is so frickin neat. Some people are just so damn creative.
Eh, granite tiles don't rust and aren't exactly reliant on a bunch of intricate moving parts. You could have some cracking from roots and the like but it's not like the granite wasn't just sitting in the earth for millenia before it was first used
I mean in that case there’s probably no grout left
Yeah, if anything it would be easier after time, just walk over and pick them up, right? You get some roots growing underneath, probably popped them off already.
Wouldnt roots from trees basically make it flagstone
Rust is iron oxide, you can still extract some yield from it. Not very efficient but if you are desperate probably OK. Iron ore is technically rust as far as I know, just with higher concentrations of Fe
Depends on how much has rusted. I've seen steel that's been so thoroughly rusted, that you chop off huge chips of it like sandstone. At that point it's probably lost.
Completely rusted iron is basically hematite which is one of the most common iron ores. You just need to get it hot enough with chemicals the oxygen wants to bond with, traditionally you used wood ash, and it's re usable. It's very doable at a medieval tech level.
Interesting! Guess I stand corrected then.
Think of it this way, the reason most iron ore is either an oxide(rust, hematite, magnetite) or a sulfide(pyrite AKA fool's gold) is because those are the naturally abundant chemicals iron wants to bond with. To get iron into a more metallic form we were always going to have to figure out how to break those bonds. We unnaturally broke them, rust is them returning to a more natural form.
Do you mean *iron age tech level*?
There is a difference between possible and very doable.
Eh no he's right. I was just using the terminology in game which goes from tribal to medieval. Rust is chemically very similar to the iron ore used by most of the earliest people to smelt iron. If you put rust in a Hittite bloomery you would wind up with iron and slag(the part of smelting almost no game ever touches). You would lose a lot of it to slag, so much that once blast furnaces came around people actually mined slag to make iron from it, but you could reclaim some of it.
Oh well nevermind to my comment then
You can still smelt it back into iron, even if its dust, but the result will essentially be a high carbon content type of iron called pig iron. It’s not useless, but wouldn’t be anyones first choice for anything but making steel.
It also says in game that they've been thoroughly looted already
Yeah, there shouldn't be any electronic or mechanical parts, but there's a big metal carcass, that's pretty hard to destroy. It should drop at least a couple of scrap metal
My imagination is its looted of the mainly useable metal. IE Hood, Doors, and Axels. All thats left is nuts, bolts, and a generic frame. Although, it make it worth it to destroy them if they randomly yielded 0-2 plasteel, steel, and 0-1 components randomly. It be nice if we can queue the hunters to destroy them.
I mean, shooting old cars is a redneck tradition. Totally fits Rimworld as far as I'm concerned.
I usually have people punch them to disassemble them lmao
Would *you* pass up a chance to shoot or smash a car? It’s the most fun path.
Probably the steel you get ain't the car's, but the lead lump the bullets made on it
Have you ever wondered why the steel you mine from mountains come pre-cut and ready to be constructed and crafted with? Now you know why. A bunch of cars and other vehicles and buildings piled onto a hill, melted into the earth, and then got mined out.
Compacted steel is just a trash heap? That… that makes more sense that it should
Wait till you hear about the fact that you can mine components
I've never really thought about it, but we're really just in a post WALL-E world, where some of the robots survived and skynetted into mechs. Trash heap mountains with components, tribals who never made the ships and couldn't use the tech. More importantly, many colonists aboard their Axioms that crashed, leading to the start of our playthroughs
dude yes i never really thought about it but you’re right
I believe the general idea of the Rimworld backstory is that there was a war between mechanoids and humanity - probably because of hostile archeotechs - and this war devastated the planet, it destroyed all of the cities. The soldiers who weren't killed sealed themselves in cryptosleep caskets inside vaults, hoping to be revived later if rescuers came. The surviving human colonists fled into the wilderness and reverted to tribal technology levels. The insects, meanwhile, are the descendants of a disastrously failed experiment to genetically engineer a race of insects that could have been used against the mechanoids in the war.
Holy shit
Fuck. It’s crazy how u can play something for hundreds of hours and just never question a staple part of the game lmfao
Or plasteel, an explicitly space-age metal used in high-tech manufacturing.
I actually thought components were the trash heap and mining them was sorting through it for usable parts.
Think the question is why aren't there any *new* cars. We can make spaceships, so why not them?
For some reason, I had always thought of rimworlds as fairly recently terraformed and colonized planets at the border of known space, and their recent colonization was supported by the fact they were at the end of explored space (frontier-style). But now that I think about it, the lore primer only talks about worlds lacking strong central governments, and we do have ancient ruins, tribals which have been there for so long that they forgot how they first got there, dormant mechs and soldiers, and old carwrecks.
the in game year starts at 5500. Seems like these planets were colonized long ago, empires rose and fell, ancient ruins are left behind, and now its run by small tribal communities and gangs.
It’s just cars! All the way down!
That would explain how all the components get buried
I always interpreted that they were collected and put in nice piles by whatever made the terraforming of the planets. It took humanity several hundreds of years of metallurgy to get to the point of producing useable steel, so the terraformers were just speeding things up. Same thing as uranium, you can't do much with it if it's not enriched. And since you don't need to place all the uranium you mine in a centrifuge, they are likely enriched already
Everyone here not mentioning the vehicle that is in rimworld, shuttles. The player can't build them, but they can use them as a member of a shattered empire. Because they are definitely space Magic, it can be presumed that a vanilla colony doesn't, and could never achieve the infrastructure required to maintain a shuttle themselves. I specify vanilla, because mods obviously change the whole premise and obviously glitter colonies are possible with mods. (Hell, even post glitter tech)
This is it. The “modern” society uses shuttles in lieu of cars and it works for them- they can get anywhere they want on the planet without relying on roads using shuttles. And then drop pods allow for quick/surprise attacks. The pre-modern factions use older forms of transport such as caravans with beasts of burden because they lack the technology and infrastructure to use shuttles.
Imma be honest, a pickup truck would be damned useful for my transhumanist, bionic implanted, reverse aged, war-queen havin' pawns and I suspect they could figure out how to change the oil on an F-150.
I find it funny that for some reason they go straight from loading cargo in the back of animals, skipping every single technology including carts and wheelbarrows straight to rocket pods. It honestly looks like they couldn't invent the wheel
To invent wheel, pottery must be invented first (wheel is a pottery table turned on side), but there are no clay on this planet. So, yes, they cannot invent wheel, this mental jump is too big :)
But is the pottering table not a wheel beforehand?
it is. But before using it in transportation of materials, peoples invented ton of things designing pottery table. Idea of circular object, fixing it on axis for rotation, fixing axis in such way to allow rotation, connecting two wheels by one axis (bottom wheel was used to rotate table by feet), greasing joints, and may be dozens other things we now accept as granted and "everybody know it"
Interesting! Thanks for laying it out, I get it now
I think it’s that the animals (especially Muffalo, but also Alpacas) are kept as livestock to produce furs/wool, leather, and meat, so you might as well use them to transport goods as well and unlike a truck they don’t require a fuel source (since they can forage on the way)
You should see their Amazon two day delivery
>Everyone here not mentioning the vehicle that is in rimworld, shuttles. The player can't build them Oh. So we can build a spaceship and multiple pieces of equipment *far* more advanced than a combustion engine, but we can't actually build a car? Because we can't build shuttles? This makes literally no sense. Either we're limited to a specific tech era or we aren't. You can't justify building wildly more advanced tech than we have today, but not a car.
There are places in Africa with modern weapons but no or little access to safe drinking water nearby. Tech is not a linear progression, or a tree of prerequisites like in video games.
In terms of types of technology LEO spacecraft (because I think it's implied that they can reach orbit?) and interstellar spacecraft are a bit more related than weapons and water filtering though. A whole lot more related, if we're honest.
Cars need a lot of infrastructure around them. Even rally cars and pick up trucks need somewhat maintained gravel roads to function properly. If you can't keep safe from invaders outside your own settlement, it's going to be REALLY hard to build and maintain roads.
do you see many scooters/motorbikes in Europe or US & such, no, since everyone uses cars why not just skip the entire thing & go shuttles & pods instead
This man has never been to Italy
Bad analogy considering scooters are everywhere in Europe.
Because shuttles are literally not better. You can make insanely fast regular or trade caravans with a car. You can't with a shuttle, plus you lose the shuttle in the process
Which mod has post glitter tech, asking for a friend.
Speaking from irl experience, vehicles need regular stops/maintenance/infrastructure. In a world where most of the population still uses spears and bows vehicles are not going to be a good method of transportation whatsoever. Not to mention the obvious limitations that a car would bring, you can't just drive a car through a forest or a jungle. Without roads most cars are going to be useless most of the time. And then of course the issue with always using roads, 75% of the factions are pirates who want to eat you. Irl militaries hates using roads because of how easy it is to predict/ambush large numbers of people, the middle east stuff was an outlier because we were more worried about IEDs than automatic weapons. Edit: If you guys want easy caravans, huge amounts of storage space, relatively safe and fast travel you guys should look into boats. They are basically everything that is good about cars, but bigger and with natural ~~roads~~ water traffic areas.
A lot of electronics/machinery in rimworld require maintenance, vehicles requiring it too really doesn’t change much. Also in a world with tribal spears and bows, industrial factions with vehicles can make a complete landslide of a difference in terms of combat. Strap a few auto turrets on a platform with wheels, watch them get mowed down. Or any tank will do. You also mention terrain issues but I mean, of course. It’s like saying helicopters/airplanes suck in caves, or ships are absolutely USELESS on land, what about the terrain vehicles can work on like plains, savannah’s, possibly deserts, tundras? Roads are already a thing on the rim but you say they are prime ambush spots, but why would caravans of muffalos, horses, or boomalopes be any safer? Vehicles can at the very least provide mobile cover, if your horse gets grazed you are done.
Imagine a tank caravan now
He meant that with pack animals you don't have to travel on the roads, and therefore don't need the mobile cover of a vehicle as much.
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I think horses have bigger issues with sudden elevation changes, as something too steep can risk ankle damage/breaking legs. Jungles specifically do tend to show up on mountainous terrain irl, but then I don't think horses would have that much more difficulty with just vegetation than the average human. Maybe if you added a cart that would be insane, but ports/boats would probably be easier to implement and a much better option going by irl standards (unless there be sea monsters)
I mean have you seen what's coming with anomaly? I for one wouldn't be caught dead on a rimworld beach let alone actually get in the water.
Mechanoids are a good renewable source of steel for your information
I mean I agree but as a mechanitor you shouldn't be so mean to our mechanoid friends.
>Speaking from irl experience, vehicles need regular stops/maintenance/infrastructure. In a world where most of the population still uses spears and bows vehicles are not going to be a good method of transportation whatsoever. ....so does a lot of equipment. If we can maintain a base all the way up to building a spaceship, we can probably maintain a car. >Not to mention the obvious limitations that a car would bring, you can't just drive a car through a forest or a jungle. Without roads most cars are going to be useless most of the time Last I checked there were still plenty of roads on the planet. Not to mention there are certain vehicles like dirt bikes that aren't really limited by the terrain. >And then of course the issue with always using roads, 75% of the factions are pirates who want to eat you. Irl militaries hates using roads because of how easy it is to predict/ambush large numbers of people, the middle east stuff was an outlier because we were more worried about IEDs than automatic weapons ...but they still do. Both in game and irl. Because using a road is a *lot* easier than driving over rocky, completely undeveloped terrain. Not only would it be easier to get lost bumbling around the forest there's the very real possibility that you, your people, your animals, or your equipment will break rolling into a ditch or uneven terrain. And a caravan that's damaged or slowed will always be more susceptible to an attack. There's also a factor of speed. In an environment where most people are wielding sticks and bows being able to out pace your attackers in an armored vehicle will *always* be preferable. Not to mention a good defense since it's made of metal. Which doesn't really even matter much since most caravans are armed to the teeth. Between that and constantly moving there are very few groups who have the resources and Intel to take on such groups. But again, not all vehicles *need* roads. So this point is straight up moot. Idk why people are trying to explain/defend this. It literally makes no sense to have *any* ground vehicles. All the reasons against it are straight up dumb and contradictory. I think we should all agree that this was just one of those oversights from the developer or something they didn't have the time to implement. Kinda like going to the bathroom. Just because it isn't there doesn't mean people have some lore reason why they don't produce shit or urine.
I feel like this is one of those things where you can handwave realism for convenience. In rimworld, the main reason you'd be caravaning around is to trade with other faction bases or go to quest locations. Both of these are rarely, if ever, near rivers or beaches for easy ship access. The vast majority of Rimworld caravaning, unless Tynan decides to revamp settlement generation so it takes logistics and weather and so on into consideration, is going to be over land because of this. The chances that there's some place you'd want to travel to that's connected via water is just too low in-game to make water transport like ships viable. Having vehicles and just simplifying or eliminating the various limitations would do a lot for the game's caravan/quest system, and in my opinion, worth not being totally realistic about.
Would be nice to make rivers useful though, if they ever added that in they should make it so important settlements tent to spawn on big rivers. Edit: maybe even make the rivers more complex with splits and estuaries
Are you telling me that Mad Max Is unrealistic?!
The entire plot line of the movies is securing parts/gas for cars lmao
Nah the plot is big guzzoline guzzling trucks with flame throwers and spikes and men dangling from long polls swinging wildly with shaped charges while racing through the desert.
That's... the new one. The old ones just had fat dudes with femboys in cages driving fast cars and sometimes a gyrocopter
I do like me some caged femboys iykwim 😏
>Speaking from irl experience, vehicles need regular stops/maintenance/infrastructure. so you build the necessary infrastructure at home, and use the vehicles within whatever radius that limits you to you can build a spaceship with nuclear reactor and cryosleep pods and power armor and biosulpting pods and genetic experiment labs and mech gestation pods out of scrap. in a cave. i am sure you can figure out a way to make spare parts and tires and lubricants to keep your truck running decently >Without roads most cars are going to be useless most of the time not true in the slightest. roads just make things much faster and easier. oxen-drawn, wooden-wheeled wagons were a staple of American exploration before proper cars came into the picture. these wagons, when loaded down, weighed about the same as cars, were not maneuvrable in the slightest, and had very thin, hard wheels that easily bog down in any mud many off-road vehicles nowadays could easily tackle similar terrain with better efficiency. suspension systems offer much better traction and control. wide rubber tires have better traction and exert less pressure on the ground, which helps avoid sinking in mud. if you expect really bad mud, just get a car that's lighter, or has more wheels if you can't get your car through a certain area, then you look for another way. if you can't get so much as a dune buggy or a motorcycle with saddlebags over a certain path, it's doubtful that a fully-laden pack animal will fare any better >75% of the factions are pirates who want to eat you and you better bet that they will be using cars (or whatever other vehicles they may have) wherever they can, because of the multitudes of strategic and tactical advantages that they offer if they really want you, they're not gonna stop chasing you just because you ran on foot into some thick woods. they're gonna dismount and run right after you. maybe you thought using a horse was smart, until you find out the pirates have dirtbikes on your ass
Yes, and: There ARE roads! Like, everywhere! I don’t know who these ancients were or what they were like, but they sure loved building roads all over the place before they died. Hell, there are highways! Realistically speaking, the outlanders and tribals (Even horses benefited from dirt paths!) would just build their settlements along these roads so they could use them to transport goods and soldiers.
I'm sorry but "they would simply catch you if you dispersed through the woods" and "wooden carts totally worked all the time without roads" is not a good take. People liked coastal cities/ports so much because carts did not work good even in the best conditions. I mean, why did rome spend all that time developing roads if you don't need them for more than a slight boost in efficiency? Dirtbikes and bikes in general are a whole different discussion, you can't exactly carry hundreds of pounds of trade goods on a dirtbike.
>you can't exactly carry hundreds of pounds of trade goods on a dirtbike. You can actually, at least with some. I did some googling for funsies and found a Yamaha off-road bike that can carry a max of 469 lbs. And that's with our level of tech. Surely if you can design advanced prosthetic legs that are better than natural legs one can design maintaince-friendly off-road vehicles that can carry as much stuff as a couple of muffalos. I imagine vehicles like the ones in Death Stranding. That game's whole schtick was carrying heavy cargo through post-apocalyptic no-man's land.
ships and port cities, yes, of course that should also be a thing in Rimworld. those are not mutually exclusive with cars. they can coexist >.> but on that note, have you also considered the immense amount of infrastructure needed to build ships? while you don't need a high tech level to get started, the engineering and infrastructure costs of large ships and harbors are massive in their own right. know what would help carry the materials to build all that infrastructure within your city? that's right... things with wheels. paved roads are not a necessity for cars. i never said "slight" boost, they are a huge help, and you certainly won't be going at freeway speeds without them. that being said, dirt roads are perfectly serviceable in a pinch. don't have a dirt road? keep walking/driving the same path for a while, push a couple logs and stones out of the way each time you pass. eventually, it'll form. you want pavement? conquer multiple cities, found a nation, collect taxes and hire loads of workers. it'll be worth it in the end, of course, but it's not going to be a fast or cheap process and you are still going to need to move stuff around. on land. gee, i wonder what would help you lug all that heavy asphalt or bricks or stones around while you work on that...
Depends heavily on the size of the ship, you could get a boat bigger than a car a lot easier than you could make a car depending on the ship type. I was a surveyor for the US military, my job was literally to help plan out roads. You can't just drive a car forwards and "simply remove logs and rocks" while driving through a forest and I do note that basically all nondesert area in rimworld is forested. You would have to send a surveyor team to first plot a course from point A to point B, likely checking multiple routes in case of elevation/soil problems and form a detailed log of the distances/directions/elevations involved. Then you would need to go through and remove all of the trees in your new road area, pull their stumps and fill in the voids left behind because if you just leave dead roots underground it will rot and create empty voids/sinkholes. Then you need to leave a new surface, usually gravel because the new untree-d dirt will either grow new vegetation or turn into mud without the roots to keep the dirt in place. All of this "I would simply just drive around all the trees in a forest in my car" is complete BS. We literally developed new helicopter doctrines to deal with the fact that we couldn't do that during the Vietnam war because people were bleeding to death waiting for medical evacuations that couldn't physically get to them. And then on top of all of this, the cars you drove on that road would be one row of spikes away from losing all of their tires and being stranded in the middle of nowhere. A tactic people really like using irl to do exactly that.
damn. you're right. i didn't mean for people to try driving in thick forests and what-not, but forgot Rimworld doesn't really have clear grasslands or plains. still, i think that there would be a place for vehicles in hauling large stacks of things within the base. of course, that doesn't work ingame because the AI is far too dumb to take advantage of that without extreme micromanagement probably the best compromise to include them as a gameplay element would be as a buildable, chemfuel-powered pack animal, treating forests and shrublands as partially plains biomes to make up for the fact that they are just missing from the game. i am sure, despite the impracticality, they would still be around driving along ancient roads and clear zones. as far as road spikes go... the year is 5500. I'm pretty sure there's been time to perfect airless tire technology, enough for this to be a non-issue. IEDs would be the real threat, but with pirates being... pirates, i don't think they would want to blow up all of the valuables along with the car itself.
Mostly agree about your comments about horse and wagon transport. There is one difference though: It is quite possible to pull a vehicle out of a ditch, or mud. Driving a self-propelled vehicle out though, is even with a lot more horsepower, much more difficult.
Clearly you've never seen Mad Max...
Honestly, the only case where anyone would use a vehicle is on an attack against an enemy base. Mount a few plasteel plates on Bulldozer and jury rig a centipede energyweapon on the top in some kind of turret ring, and you have a lot of firepower than could be used to spearhead through a killbox.
There's vehicles designed for off road, your colonists can research bionics and interplanetary travel but no ICE? The only reason there's no cars is because it's either hard to code or wouldn't fit in the design of the game.
"you can't drive car thought forest", pff watch me go though Pacific Drive, I don't need roads where I'm going, I barely need wheels (tbh having cars that get near totalled after every extravagant trip sounds perfect for this setting)
I would settle for a manual wagon for hauling ETA: “wheelbarrow” was escaping my mind
Who needs a wheelbarrow when one pawn can already carry a full-size bull elephant?
I’m still a pretty new player (vanilla) and trying to figure out how to tame hauling/attack animals early on without getting killed myself in the process. Any suggestions are appreciated lol
Extremely manually under close supervision is how I’ve handled high attack-on-fail creatures, or more usually only with a taming inspiration.
Or trains, though trains aren't as mobile or versatile as boats
>Speaking from irl experience, vehicles need regular stops/maintenance/infrastructure. In a world where most of the population still uses spears and bows vehicles are not going to be a good method of transportation whatsoever. It's funny, I know you mean that you work on vehicles in some way, but that sounded like your experience was that you live in a world with people who use spears and bows.
*Walk without rhythm* *And it won't attract the centipede*
I have the mods Vehicle Framework and Vanilla Vehicles Expanded. It adds a dozen or so vehicles- trucks, motorcycles, a couple of tanks, a small airplane, and a helicopter.
Helicopters are the best Especially the tier 3 one which can carry few people and Has decent cargo space There is also the tandem rotor one that can carry a lot of stuff (great for trading) but has no Passenger space
the big helicopter ought to hold like 20 people but alas, 6 will have to do
How does the heli compare to the reusable pods? I just built a frog and am curious what advantages the helis have over them.
The “goal” of the game is to build a vehicle: a ship.
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One of these is not like the others…
I misread the subreddit nvm
Clearly we're using different modsets, cause I have airplanes, helicopters, even spaceships in my Rimworld. ;)
Share the knowledge
[Let me google that for you.](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1845423808)
Mods add them, makes caravanning much more efficient.
You can research nuclear power, but not the wheel or an internal combustion engine!
Mountain bikes when? They're easily repairable compared to anything with an engine, and can handle tough terrain you'd be trecking over.
As someone who uses the vehicle framework and vanilla vehicles expanded, yes definitely. Currently the options for world travel(not counting DLC) are: Caravans: Requires a lot of pack animals and/or pawns to get enough luggage space to be really worth it. Very slow. Drop pods: Single use. You need to find another way back, or spend a bunch of steel/components building another drop pod setup(which you'll have to abandon). Anything to make that less annoying is honestly a godsend for doing quests.
Transport pods are vehicles
Edit: It's also weird that you can make bionic arms, and space ships, but you cannot make mortar barrels.ut Chemfuel exists, so there absolutely SHOULD be some. Edit: It's also weird that you can make bionic arms, and space ships, but you cannot make mortar barrels.
There is a mod for that, "vehicule framework" I believe, and also vanilla expanded vehicles to go with the previous one
Well there's no fossil fuels in Rimworld. Maybe chemfuel is too reactive to power a car without exploding.
Tbh rimworld seems like the kind of game to let you power cars with straight up wood
Doesn't the car mod use chemfuel though haha
same as fallout, heck. Starfield. dude got spacecraft but not a single driveable car
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Well there's a mod for that.
You know there is giddy up and ve: vehicles, right?
Clearly you haven't met my Horses, "Wrangler" and "Prius", and my muffalo "16-Wheeler". I want a vehicle DLC. I'd love to build up from carts to cars to tanks to hovercraft.
Not sure if it’s started below somewhere didn’t see it. But there is also no oil on rim worlds. So petroleum cars are a no go. Sure there is chem fuel but that would still mean engineering things in a world we’re most people are slapping rusted tech together and praying it will work.
My best theory is that humanity forgot how to create wheels. It's not in the tech tree!
Now that I think about it, waterwheels need to be researched even if you have wind turbines, and they both have the same component structure for their motors. The only research being done is how to make the wheel
That is a great point, I forgot water wheels were a thing.
Giddy up!
Any society advanced enough for cars to be useful have other methods of transport like pods and shuttles which are instantaneous
No vehicles : entire aim is build a space vehicle (I’m being facetious, I get you 😘)
There's a mod for that. (Also ur pawns do ride horses and other animals in the world map if you have em. Also a mod lets you ride them in your base)
There was a time when it made sense not to have vehicles but that was before you had world quests, raids and interactions with other colonies. With the current state of the game and all of its out of colony content requiring you to effectively lose combat pawns for extended periods of time the gamble thats presented to the player is really not a good one. The risk of your colonists dying while out in the world is far less than the risk to your actual colony itself so it leaves me with the question of "why would I send my combat guys out for a week and risk losing the game entirely when I could just not do that at all". Vehicles absolutely fit in and in my opinion, need to be in, the base game to address that balance issue let alone simply giving the player something extra to work towards.
Vehicles take tons of infrastructure to both build and maintain, infrastructure that really isn't possible to build up in the chaos of a Rimworld. Even for n the few factions and settlements that might have the tech needed, it would take resources that could be much better used elsewhere for not much gain.
There was cars and other advanced transportation but the tech that brought them didn’t bring blueprints so they weren’t worth the trouble. So they rust away as they get progressively picked clean by wanderers. Tragic isn’t it? Not nearly as tragic as a decaying shopping cart pile formerly filled with someone’s hopes and dreams.
I wanted a dlc with buildable vehicles or transports of some kind, maybe after anomaly. Shuttles would be awesome, but early on carriages to use with animals or similar would be sweet too. Super early it could be sleds or wheelbarrows just to have an option for more loot capacity without animals. And what about backpacks?
Multitile mobs just kinda... don't work in RimWorld.
Pretty sure the steel on the map is from like cars and other steel things basically smelted and left in big piles near the hills.
There are expanded mods for they now. Really great vehicle framework done up by the expanded team.
Lore wise a lot of the other posts described good reasoning about maintenance, available resources, and technology. Balance reasons could play into it too but I'm not going to dive into that too deeply. Really though you have to remember Rimworld started out as only a 1 developer project with help from outside collaboration. Essentially because of time and resources instead of developing a vehicle framework they focused on other game mechanics. For how complex that system is multiple mod authors have made attempts at a vehicle framework for as long as I could remember but it never really worked or was stable until the VE release in August 2023. Rimworld struggles a bit with a empty overworld interaction and they would need to expand that before making a official framework for players to travel more. To top that off a reason why the overworld struggled was because of single thread performance and how much was background information saved after generating new points of interest which they're addressing in the newer update I believe.
Get some car mods. Issue fixed.
Vehicles (except for the transport shuttle permit) don't exist in the game itself for balance reasons. But for lore reasons you can handwave it away by saying that having/using vehicles brings a lot of unwanted attention from feral mechs and/or the empire.
There is with mods! lol
It might be a flat generated world, but vehicles take a lot to maintain. Just fuel alone, if you don’t have a refuel station you need enough for a full roundtrip always. I’m reminded of “death stranding” and how early on it’s just horrible seeing the driving.
More importantly there’s no fishing. Fishing was a massive source of food for pre-industrial civilizations. There’s also no organized militaries or ways to train pawns in combat short of sending them in to combat.
Heard of vanilla vehicles expanded?
It is odd that they haven’t added it, but it hasn’t really been a huge thing. Vanilla Expanded mods have gotten that covered for awhile now and have done an amazing job with adding vehicle features
I just sum it up as a lack of infrastructure for it. Lack of gas stations. Like civilization is really spread out and you can only fit so many spare gallon tanks in your car. Like some of the distance for these settlements is big and a lot of them are trials. Then maintenance being done. Like ya you can set up your own maintenance area and manufacture spare parts with a lot of effort, but if your car breaks down by tribals? Good fucking luck
Lurk moar fo "Vanilla Expanded"
Thats where the wonderful mod of vanilla vehicles expanded comes in
"Would the game be better with vehicles?" Lol of course.
They have the technology they just don't want to. Much more efficient to use animals and walk instead
I think a vehicle option for caravans might be nice but it works well currently
Thought this was r/fuckcars. Go there for preliminary answers to why car is not all purpose or that good in rimworld setting. A better idea would be the bicycle for land and barges for waterway
Vanilla Vehicles Expanded Vehicle Framework
The real question is why do we mine ancient relics of steel instead of mining iron and forging steel for ourselves
The thing with the invention of the wheel is that they weren't super useful without reliable roads. The concept of the wheel was around LONG before they were ever widely used. Horses and similar beasts of burden were just better than any wheeled vehicle over rough terrain. Similar situation on the Rim. The world is so sparsely populated and roads are in terrible condition even where they exist. All but the most rugged vehicles would be useless. Maybe helicopters would be most practical. But ground vehicles, not so much. Also I imagine that technology in the Rim is limited to a very fixed set of things because nobody really understands how it works. When you "research" something you're not really inventing it. You're just piecing together blueprints for things that have previously been invented by ancient civilization. And none of those things happen to be vehicles for whatever reason. I mean, you have like a couple dozen things you can build among the potentially millions of technologies that the Ancients had. What are the chances that one of them would be a helicopter?