[2021] (Analysis/Rant) Rimworld 1.3, Ideology, and Tynan, Please Fix the Caravans!

Ten thousand years ago, when RimWorld was still a young Early Access game, you were confined to a single map tile. There was no way to leave your chosen map tile, the planet was flat instead of round, and only other factions possess this miraculous ability to come to you, but you can't go to them.

It wasn't until Alpha 16 that players were able to leave their tile and travel across the Rim.

Five years later, and many, many updates and fixes later, caravaning has become much easier. 1.3 even reworked the World Map travel formula and even added riding of animals, making travelling much quicker!

But it still isn't perfect.

We all know how caravaning works right? You go to the World Map, you Set Up a Caravan, you point to where you want to go, and your pawns will drag the animals to the caravan packing spot, put stuff onto the animals, and leave.

Unfortunately, the system has its quirks, and a lot of it can turn into a huge headache especially for new players who don't know what they're doing. With 1.3's penning system, it's turn into even more of a hassle as pawns will literally stutter as they drag the animals with them.

- The Problems with the Current Caravan System

1. If the player doesn't place a caravan packing spot, then the the game will set one for them: This can be a huge hassle because the spot the game places can be random, and you need to cancel the caravan, place the Caravan Packing Spot, and only then will they be hauled and 'tied' to the spot. A solution to this is to disallow any caravan travel at all until the player places it themselves.
2. There's no way to return the Packing UI mid-packing: If you've doing a Quest where you need to send say, 15 Pants to a nearby settlement, there's no way to return to the UI and add said pants. If you want to do that, you either need to cancel the caravan or click on one of the travelling pawns, right click on the thing you want to pack, and have them manually load them onto the animal. This is fine for the odd bedroll, but about the 15 pants? You need to click on them one by one. This would be better if you can return to the UI. Speaking of the UI ...
3. The UI doesn't remember the last thing you loaded: If you're sending a war party to raid an outpost, and you've chosen all the bedrolls, medicine and pawns you want to bring, but MAYBE you forgot to bring some beer, then you need to do Point 2, or you need to do it all over again. A solution to this is to simply for the game to remember the previous loadout, and this would save a lot of time clicking on the things you want to bring like your pile of pemmican. Speaking of food ...
4. You cannot set a Food Assignment for your pawns: If you're like me, you probably have a stockpile of pemmican, packaged survival meals, insect jelly, beer, ambrosia, for these sort of trips. So you set a Food Assignment for your colony pawns to not eat these things. However, you want to select ABCDE pawns to raid, so you change the Food Assignments in the Assignments Tab, maybe the Drug Assignments too, then you have to REMEMBER which pawn to bring on the caravan.And you must do this, EVERY TIME you send them travelling. Even worse, when they come back, you need to SET THEM BACK to the old Food Assignment. This busywork really makes travelling a hassle, especially if you're running a big colony. And then there's the animals ...
5. You cannot set food for your pawns vs your animals: I am currently running a raider playthrough, and I have horses and wargs travelling with me. I bring hay for the horses (the world is freezing and there's no grazing), meat for the wargs, and food for the pawns. But the Caravan UI does not differentiate the meals for the animals. I'm afraid that my wargs will eat my carnivore fine meals instead of the human meat, and I honestly don't know if they do, that's the worst part!

Well okay, that's a lot of problems, but the worse has is over right?

Unfortunately not, now there are problems on tiles that isn't your colony.

1. Pawns cannot take food from pack animals: The pawn will likely only carry the meal they have on them while travelling. If the pawn is the handler, they might have kibble on them. And if they're set on a Food Assignment, that means they will eat the kibble on hand instead of the ones on the animal, and get a mood debuff.There's literally a mod that addresses this issue. Chances are the pawns will only eat food from dead enemies, and not the precious Insect Jelly you carry around to keep mood high. A solution is to simply have a pawn carry food on their person first, animal second.
2. Pawns cannot take medicine from pack animals: Oh did your medic pawn use all available herbal medicine to heal wounds sustained during battle? Well, that's okay, we can just find the pack animal that has all the meds. But wait, we brought ten muffalos! We gotta click on every single one of them to find the meds!This is less of a hassle if all your pawns carry medicine, but if you're bringing wargs or any other combat animals, you're going to run out of meds fast, and pawns now will tend on animals without medicine, and said animals will likely get one or two infections. All because they don't know how to pop open a muffalo's pennier.
3. The pen marker doesn't work on other map tiles: Now I'm actually pro pen-marker, I think it is overall a good thing and fixes the problem of Alpacacops (sorry Johnn Francis!). But the issue of not being able to control your animals means that your ten muffalos and four horses are gonna roam the map, and you need to hunt each and one of them down to find the food/medicine. If the enemy has a mortar, you cannot rope them to safety!In real life, horses and mules are trained to be quiet and even taught to follow. So whenever you assault an ancient complex, your animals are at the edge of the map and so are the precious, precious medicine. Why not just allow zoning of animals, just on non-colony tiles?
4. Bedrolls are a hassle on travel tiles: If you are travelling to a mining tile, it's gonna take at least a couple of days of mining assuming you have a decent miner or two. This is where bedrolls come to play, and so is temporary shelter. However, that means finding which pack animal has it, dropping them from their inventory, installing them near the resource node, and so on and so forth.Again, there's a 1.2 mod that fixes this, but I just dread going to mining tiles because the pawns are gonna be pissy that they have to sleep on the dirt and refuses to place the bedroll that they alive.

Fine, those issues are on non-colony tiles, there isn't a problem while on the World Map right? Wrong, again, random r/rimworld user.

1. Pawns arriving at their destination automatically enter: You might not think this is a problem, but it is. If you're trading, it's a non issue. If you're raiding, then depending on the time of day, then your pawns are likely sleepy and/or hungry. You're busy managing your colony and suddenly your war party arrives at the enemy settlement, hungry, tired. It would be nice to have a notification of arriving, but NOT enter. This would mean we could rest and eat, but ...
2. You cannot make pawns eat on command on the World Map eat: You can make the caravan rest, and if you rest long enough, they'll eat. But this seems to be based on percentage, and pawns seem only to eat when they're a certain percentage. The ability to make caravans sleep or eat when the player chooses to, would make raiding a lot less of a hassle. Nothing sucks more than having your best melee fighter hungry when entering the tile. Speaking of sleeping ...
3. You cannot travel during night time: Caravans automatically stop between hours 22 and 6 to sleep. But what about night time raids? One of the most common raids in human history? Actually, enemy pawns in settlements don't seem to sleep at all! They're awake when it's 8 am or 10 pm. Seeing as players will usually be outnumbered, it would be nice to be able to raid the enemy when half of them are asleep (like mechanoids sometimes do).
4. This sucks for Colonies with the Darkness meme: The Darkness meme from Ideology gives great combat bonusses while in the dark, but as in Point 3, you can't travel during the night, you cannot effectively attack during the night, because your pawns are likely also tired from the day of travelling.There's another mod, one I consider essential to make caravaning fun, that adresses this problem, but again, we shouldn't rely on mods to fix this problem. It is a HUGE oversight and punishes players who play with the Darkness meme.
5. Psycaster pawns are at a disadvantage: Powerful psycasters require a lot of time to meditate, so they can have enough psyfocus to unleash their powers at the enemy. But guess what? Psycasters kinda have a hard time meditating on the move. You can meditate if you Force Rest, but you can't tell how much psyfocus a pawn has on the World Map. This is a massive oversight because a psycaster can be the difference between life and death during raids.Having the Farskip psycast is the ONLY way to tell how much psyfocus a pawn has, and chances are not every psycaster has this. Not only that, but Farskip requires a minimum of 70% psyfocus to actually be of use (teleporting an entire caravan easily with a single cast) and the pawn more or less needs to meditate an entire day at the enemy settlement to get them back, and chances are said psycaster has already use their entire bar.
6. The current travel formula is a mixed bag: If you didn't know, the new caravan formula has made travelling easier. All pawns, regardless of health conditions, will travel the same. That means a pawn missing one leg can travel just as well as a pawn with two archotech legs. This is a godsend for injured pawns after a battle, but I can't help but feel depth is missing with this new formula. Even moreso with riding animals like horses.One of my favorite things to do is to make a fully Bionic runner, running around the map selling all the drugs. Now, with the addition of horses, that's less of a thing. I like the new riding animals, but something is lost with how simple the new travel formula is. A pawn that's missing their leg during battle SHOULD slow down the caravan, and that tells for a better story. Afterall, doesn't RimWorld pride itself of being a story simulator?

Conclusion

RimWorld is one my favorite games of all time. It is right up there with Fallout: New Vegas, Red Dead Redemption, as the Western for me. I've got 1000 hours plus logged into this amazing game. I bought Ideology and Royalty on release date, and I loved every janky minute of it. Ideology especially has made travel more important with the additions of Relic Quests.

But the caravan system is outdated. I don't want to say it's not updated because it is, but it's very much lacking in QoL features, especially for memes, and it still needs a lot of work. I didn't even mention how packing items takes a long time, because the Packing priority is under Haul. It would be a good thing to have Packing as a separate priority even. This would make Packing go a lot smoother, or maybe take a bit of a hint from Pick Up and Haul, and have every pawn fill their Inventory to the max before unloading them onto the pack animal.

I want this game to be the best, and I understand the devs are working really hard on fixing and updating Ideology, but a focus on updating the caravan to make it more player friendly would really, really help a lot. Thanks for reading this very long post.

TL;DR: Caravan needs more work.

Edit: Dang, I almost forgot how pawns can do Recreation while travelling. You're travelling! Why can't you have fun?!

External link →