RimWorld is a sci-fi strategy game about survival, trading, exploring and developing your colony. You start the game with three survivors of a shipwreck on a distant planet and begin to craft structures, weapons and clothes. The objective of the game is to create a successful colony, keep your settlers happy by fulfilling their needs.

You use the arrows and keys on your keyboard to scroll across your colony area and you can zoom in and out to see specific areas and events happening. You click to select your people, objects and items which you want to interact with and you type into the command bar what you want to do also such as selecting all of your colonists, doors or enemies at once.

Rim World allows you to take control of your people and gives you the opportunity to run the colony in the way you want to. The building and trading encourage you to think about the future of the colony and how you can keep your settlers as happy as possible with as little conflict as possible within your area.

The colonists that you get at the start of the game are not professional settlers so you could be given three different types of people with unrelated professions. For example, you could start the game with an accountant, a housewife and a surgeon and you can acquire more colonists by capturing them in fights, buying them from traders or taking in refugees.

Each settler in your colony behaves and lives differently depending on their background so an accountant might be an expert in negotiations in trading but not do any physical labour tasks, and a scientist might specialise in research however not have good social skills. Your colonists have relationships with one another, as well as having opinions on each other which might lead them to fall in love, marry or fight. In Rim World, your colonists also catch diseases, get wounded or have conditions or prosthetics which affect how well the character works.

Your colony lives on a world that is fully generated by the game and you choose where you want to land your crash pod, for example, a desert, a jungle, a tundra or a forest. The areas on the planet have different climates where certain animals, plants and diseases might live, so where you decide to colonise effects how you play. You travel across the planet, rescuing kidnapped allies from pirates, trading with other colonies and complete other quests. While developing your colony you have to prepare for random events that happen such as natural disasters, ambushes or animal attacks.