RimWorld's update 1.4 makes its expansions play nicer together
And this means you can now make vampire worshipers
Colony sim RimWorld added ideologies in an expansion last year, prompting Nate to force drifters to knife-fight a unicorn (among other things). There have been other RimWorld expansions however, and while each has added a substantial new chunk of content, those systems have previously been unable to interact with each other.
That changed with RimWorld 1.4, which adds "cross-expansion integration", so now you can use the ideology system from the Ideology expansion to, for example, tell stories about people who have ideologies about the biotech from the biotech expansion.
In discussing player feedback in a recent news post on Steam, RimWorld's designers say that one requested feature they've seen is "the desire for integration between expansion packs."
"Originally, I was a bit hesitant to put this in because I worried it would feel like locking one expansion’s content behind another expansion. However feedback seems to indicate that people want it, and narrative-wise, it would make a ton of sense if the ideoligions from the Ideology expansion had beliefs about xenohumans, sanguophages, children, and so on. So I decided to work on this."
The post then offers multiple examples of the kinds of stories the integration allows you to tell, including colonists who revere bloodfeeders, who encourage child labour, who love or hate mechanoid labour and growth vats, and those who have "preferred xenotypes".
Update 1.4 also makes several other amendments to features around xenotypes and gene-modding, to fix bugs with inherited genes, to make gene-modding cheaper, and more. There a few dozen fixes in total, plus other small additions not mentioned above such tweaks to menus and the ability for gases to travel through vents.
RimWorld remains on our lists of the best survival games, management games and building games on PC.