After five and a half years of development, Rimworld 1.0 is now live

After five and a half years of development, Ludeon Studios has released the 1.0 version of its colony management game Rimworld.

You can watch a trailer for it above—the latest version is "mostly the same" as beta version 19, save for lots of bug fixes and a food restriction system that lets you manage what your colonists and prisoners can eat.

If you've never played before, then Rimworld tasks you with building a new colony in the far future, starting with the three survivors of a starship crash. It's a dense, deep game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, and it simulates ecology, gunplay, melee combat, climate, biomes, diplomacy, interpersonal relationships, art, medicine, trade, your colonists' mental state, and more.

It's full of detail: a character's background will change how they act, and wounds or infections are tracked for individual body parts, which each one affecting the capacity of a colonist.

Ludeon describes it as a "story generator", and where you land on the planet—desert, jungles, forests, snowy tundra—will have a huge impact on your journey.

The Steam user reviews are overwhelmingly positive, and Steven had a blast when he played through a custom scenario in 2016. There are a ton of mods available in the Steam Workshop.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.