Rimworld: 10 Tips For Defending Your Base (2024)

Rimworld contains more than a handful of ways to design, build, and maintain your colony that grows ever more variable with each expansion. One thing that doesn't change from game-to-game, however, is that you will have to defend your base from attacks of all kinds.

While the tutorial glances across different ways to defend your base, you will need a lot more than a line of sandbags to stop your base from being overrun by raiders or mechanoids. Luckily, there are more than a few additions you can make to your base to be the best stronghold on the planet.

10 Surround Your Base With Walls

The easiest way to slow down attackers and force them into specific entrances is to surround your base with a fortified wall. While you won't be able to build a large one until after your first or second year, as soon as you are able to build and consistently work at a stone cutting station, start crafting bricks.

You should build it fairly large to give yourself room to expand within your base without having to tear it down first, and focus on using the stone type most available in your biome so that you always have materials to repair it with. Building alongside mountains can also reduce the amount of bricks you need.

9 Create Trapped Bottlenecks

Along the walls of your base you can place long, open sections that all raiders will always travel to first. In these open sections is where you should place barricades, sandbags, and turrets to create a kill-zone that drastically increases your chances of survival.

At the entrance to these bottlenecks you can place rows of spike traps that raiders won't think twice about crossing over, sometimes dealing enough damage to cause the rest to flee before a shot is fired. Just make sure you use a plentiful material as these traps will need to be reset fairly often.

8 Have Long-Range Options

Depending on the storyteller you chose and the difficulty, you will eventually get raids that set up mortar pits from a distance and will rain hell on your colony. Other than immediately gathering your most able colonists and risking death before they place a single sandbag, try beating them at range.

The simplest solution is with mortars of your own or with autocannon turrets, both of which have decent range and damage. You can also equip colonists with long-range weapons like snipers to ensure you always get to strike first before they inevitably chase them down.

7 Place Fire Suppression

Especially with expansions like Biotech, some raiders will come equipped with fire breath, Molotov co*cktails, or flamethrowers. If they are able to use them, it can quickly cause your base to burn to ash if your colonists are stuck fighting the raiders.

This means you need to strategically place fire suppression items so that your colonists can remain unburnt with a finger on the trigger. This can be done with foam turrets placed where you'd expect attackers to see or by giving colonists firefoam pop packs to throw manually.

6 Build Your Base At The Center Of The Map

One way to quickly cause your colonists to drastically drop their mood is by spending a long time outdoors, in the rain or darkness, as they trek across the entire map to destroy a crashed mechanoid ship. By placing your base at the center of the map, you can avoid more than a handful of potential issues.

This includes raiders setting up mortar pits that would otherwise be too far out of range or raiders spawning too close to your base to give you time to prepare your colonists. This will also give you the best access to the resources on the map, which will let you set up defenses faster.

5 Use Autodoors

An easy way for a group of raiders to infiltrate your base and do real damage, especially at higher levels, is by following your colonist through a door that didn't close fast enough. Not only will autodoors open quickly for any colonist, but will shut out any intruder before they can slip through.

Since autodoors require expensive materials, you should only place them along the walls of your colony and in crucial areas like hospitals, so that dying colonists don't waste a second getting help. You also want to avoid using wood autodoors as these can be easily burnt down or hacked away with breach axes.

4 Smooth All Ground Inside Your Base

Since some raids send attackers immediately after announcing their presence, your colonists will need to be drafted and geared as soon as possible. When traveling to bottlenecks and storage areas to equip armor, rough ground will waste precious seconds slowing their speed.

This is especially true with injured colonists or ones with lost toes, so making sure you smooth the ground inside your base can be the difference between survival and failure. Since each patch of ground takes an unreasonable amount of time to smooth, you should begin the process early.

3 Place Internal Defenses

While most raiders will prioritize open areas and doors to your base, others can equip breach axes or explosives that rip through any wall they choose. This can leave vital areas of your base vulnerable and will avoid any defenses you built.

To mitigate this, you can place sandbags or barricades along long sections of wall so you at least have cover while shooting. A double thick wall can help slow down these attackers so that you can have enough time to get into position or strike preemptively.

2 Surround Your Power Generation With Walls

No matter how expertly you build your base, in the early and mid-game there will be times your base is breached and raiders find themselves able to wreak havoc. One of the targets they tend to go for first is power generation, and destroying these can eliminate automated defenses and cost precious materials to replace.

In order to defend against these attacks, you should place walls around your chemfuel, solar, and geothermal generators to slow down any attacks against them. Just make sure you designate the roof areas as a "remove roof area" zone.

1 Use Mods

Rimworld is a game with infinitely variable playstyles and areas of focus that change from player to player. While the base game and expansions add a decent number of options in terms of security, sometimes you will find specific scenarios unfulfilled.

If you are on Steam, you can use the community workshop to find thousands of mods that add any flavor of addon that you are looking for. These mods are also frequently updated and can fit in to the base game so well that the devs later include it as an update.