Rimworld: The Story of Mewling-by-the-cliffs, Part One

Hello, and apologies for my absence from this blog. I'm still creating STNL (now STNL: Rebirth) on my other one and got carried away. However, I decided to take a look at another game set in space: Rimworld, an indie early-access colony simulator where you attempt to help people of various backgrounds (nobles, space pirates, slaves, tribespeople with Hispanic names, etc.) survive on a distant world on the rim of the galaxy (it's a world on the rim, hence rimworld-get it?)
I'd seen it played on Youtube and recently decided it was worth a shot, especially since a new update was recently released that massively overhauled the mechanics to make your planet an actual... planet that you can travel across and colonize (previously, it was just a rectangular map). So, let's chronicle my first playthrough of this infuriatingly difficult and occasionally sadomasochist game! (In other words, expect a short run, whether I fail horribly or stop chronicling because reasons.)

A final note: This game, like Starbound and Stellaris, is one that is chock-full of possible Steam Workshop mods, but I will be playing the stock version, with the exception of a mod that adds a bunch of cold-loving space-cat-people called the Orassans, because [space] cats are awesome; as well as one that lets me make my colony into a hotel and eventually recruit people nicely (so as not to annoy the aforementioned space cats, who don't like being taken... I wonder why).

The Three Lone Survivors of the SS Bengal

Without further ado, let me introduce you to the three main people who I will be controlling (don't get to attached to them, they could die at any moment). They are:

Vivis, an Orassan colonizer charged with expanding their
space-cat empire. She is a pyromaniac, and I bet you all know what that means!

Erika, the only human (initially) in our group. She is a super-smart
particle physicist with an innate distrust for men (we only one of them to worry about, thankfully),
but she's also a pacifist, so no fighting people or fires.

Chaz, another Orassan who is a cook for their space navy. He has been known to experiment
with drugs, and living in cramped starship quarters has made him not care about
how spacious or beautiful the bedroom he sleeps in is.

Our World

And this is the planet that we crashed on, Arkab Nusukan. Being a rimworld and all, it is far away from the core worlds of the galaxy and thus has no central government. Nevertheless, there are still plenty of people here in diverse groups ranging from simple homesteaders to scummy pirates to Hispanic tribespeople (well, their names are pretty Spanish, anyways). Full information on planetary topography and population was unavailable due to the urgency of the ship's scan; there was only enough time to find a suitable location in the planet's north-western hemisphere. This is the data that was able to be received:

Acting upon this data, I wanted a temperate mountainous location (so building walls would be easier), and the two Orassans decided they wanted to be near their compatriots. This is ultimately where I decided to land:

The site of our first base, info on its climate, and the surroundings.
Note the white snowflake emblem, indicating an Orassan base.
The other two are a tribal village (yellow tepee) and a pirate hive
of scum and villainy (red Jolly Roger).

Thus concludes the initial setup of my colonists and base location. Now we move onto actual gameplay...

Setting Down

The SS Bengal, now a wrecked heap of metal,

burns up in Arkab Nusukan's atmosphere. This was captured by
some random guy on the planet who happened to be looking in
this direction.

FINAL COMPUTER ENTRY, SS BENGAL, 6SR-5500:

-Antimatter containment leak detected in Pylon 6B-

-Protocol "6FT0 Prime" Initiated-

-Scanning Planet RIM-9024-2D (ARKAB NUSUKAN)-

-Suitable Crashsite Identified, Deorbiting-

-Awaking Passengers and Instructing-

-Be S-

As the last flaming chunks of the Bengal fell towards the mountainous forest, our three passengers emerged from their escape pods. They were stranded lightyears from home on a distant rimworld, with little hope of escaping back to civilized space. Thankfully, they were in a temperate region of the planet during springtime, so temperature wouldn't be a problem (except for the cold-loving Orassan passengers, but it wasn't warm enough to cause more than mild discomfort).

The initial landing site, as well as me setting up jobs for the colonists.
The whiter the box, the awesomer they are at doing it.

Eagle-eyed viewers might notice that there are four names but only three people. This is because the "fourth" person, Kazumi, is actually a pet female warg (basically a super-wolf named after a creature from Norse mythology). Pets are a thing in this game, and you can even have normal Earth cats (that can't be trained like dogs and wargs, but oh well).

A quick recon of the map revealed an abandoned granite house to the south, in the middle of some mountains. I quickly decided that this would be an optimal location to set up shop and build out my base, due to its strategic position (in the center of the map and cordoned off by Thermopylae-style mountain passes) and the ability to mine into the nearby mountains for expansion, which I (perhaps foolishly) decided to do to start off.

The day after planetfall, this is the first expansion of our base from the small house/hut.
But before we could get to that, I had to endure a very annoying night...

Some People Just Want to Watch the (Rim)World Burn

Remember how I said that Vivis' pyromaniac tendencies would bite me in the rear? Turns out I only had to wait that night for her to cause trouble. Apparently, after spending years frozen in a starship (I presume it was years, but to be honest I don't know how long the trip took), she looked outside at all the plants and all the trees and realized that they could all burn. At that point, she just... snapped. She immediately whipped out her lighter and proceeded to ignite some grass. Chaz knew that even a single blade of flaming grass would expand into a forest fire that would threaten the entire area, so it was up to him to stop her from setting everything on fire.

Now, you might be asking "Why didn't Erika help? Surely two heads would be better than one in this case?" The answer is that Erika, in addition to being a pacifist, is deeply afraid of fire due to an accident in a lab she was working in and won't go anywhere near it. (Why she would travel and be in close proximity with a self-acknowledged pyromaniac is something I do not know). Suffice to say, only Chaz could stop forest fires.

And so, in an act of brave self-sacrifice, he spent nearly the entire night putting out the fires Vivis left in her wake. He thought about arresting her, but knew she probably wouldn't go willingly and could even be killed when he tried to subdue her. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she gave up willingly and both of them went to bed in their hastily-prepared sleeping spots.

Perhaps as a result of the incident, two days later, they came together-mewling like a pair of hungry kittens and entwining their tails, they decided that they were perfect for each other. (I sincerely hope that neither of them have family on this planet; otherwise things will get awkward).

Ooh la-la!

Three days after planetfall, Erika realized that the three of them were going to be on the planet for quite some time, and would need to identify both themselves and their community. Since her fellow colonists were both space cats and a friendly Orassan base was nearby, she chose to name the town Mewling-by-the-cliffs (as a reference to Old English towns such as Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of ancient Earth playwright William Shakespeare), and the people would call themselves the Cat's Meowers. Vivis and Chaz seemed to actually like the names, and the motion passed. 

The original town name suggested
by the game was of a similar naming scheme, so I went with that.

However, Erika wouldn't be the only human for long: On the fourth day, while the colonists were all working on building a wall and making the nearby pirates pay for it, a random wanderer named Emmie came strolling towards the base. She had witnessed the ship's atmospheric entry and went to the crash site to investigate, only to find three desperate people who looked like they needed all the help they could get. It all seemed pretty normal and I was happy to have another pair of hands to do the work we needed... and then I saw this:

 That's right, she is a former sex slave. You read that right. This was pretty much my initial reaction:

From what she told the colonists, she'd been illegally grown in a vat on an urbworld (basically a crowded planet covered in violent and polluted cities) for the sole purpose of being the perfect object of sexual gratification (most of the colonists were repulsed too; especially Vivis, who had also been genetically engineered for perfection by her parents). She was also used as a slave for doing dumb labor the "normal" residents of the urbworld were not willing to do. At some point, she finally grew tired of it and managed to escape on a starship; fate eventually bringing her to Arkab Nusukan like the colonists.

Despite being "born" on a completely different planet and then fleeing to this one, she hasn't aged a day
in cryptosleep, it seems. Also, I find it interesting that two of my colonists are
older at 50+ (biological) years but look younger (except Vivis, who's only 28; and Erika who
actually looks older than 52).

After Emmie arrived, Chaz decided to throw a base-warming party for her, so she could get to know the other colonists (in the non-Biblical sense, thankfully) and know the lay of the land.

No, new arrivals are not always welcomed with a party. It just happened
that the party happened after Emmie arrived, so I decided to go with it
being a base-warming party held on her behalf.

Final Remarks

And that's basically the start of my first proper game of Rimworld. Other than the aforementioned incidence of Vivis going berserk and starting fires, nothing too bad has happened. I did get a few traders from the Orassan base nearby (but the only things they were selling were some Orassan weapons that looked sweet but were much too expensive for our nascent colony), but other than that, things have been quiet and I've been able to develop a rather crappy defensive structure for the first raider[s] that attack us. As usual, if anyone bothers to read this, let me know about things I should do differently.