I sus:amogus: but cannot say with 100% certainty that the Rimworld developer Tynan Sylvester is a chud.
The evidence
He worked on bioshock, bioshock was never a clear denouncement of libertarianism, it was certainly critical but that criticism always felt from the perspective of libertarians. Like how Disco Elysium was made by communists and was critical of communism. The fact that Tynan Sylvester worked on bioshock makes me sus:amogus: that he holds at least some libertarian sympathies.
Rimworld handling of gender in mechanics has always been problematic. Sexual orientation is a trait, there are three related traits. Gay, bisexual, and asexual. Mechanically these traits are net-negatives because they cause social conflicts because gay pawns hit on non-gay pawns and non-gay pawns don’t reciprocate romantic feelings and this causes negative mood debuffs and this makes having gay pawns a net-negative. Straight of course is not a trait and just the default for every pawn.
Also pawns can only be male or female, there is no non-binary option, trans pawns do not exist mechanically in-game and there is only one example of Transgenderism in Rimworld, and that is in a single pawn background written by a trans gofundme backer which Tynan has used to deflect criticism from himself for having shallow mechanics around gender in Rimworld, he literally pulled the “I have a trans friend” argument to defend why his in game social system is so shit.
In the second DLC there was the introduction of real world religions as in-game factions through a system called Ideoligions (ideology + religion). Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism were hard coded into the game. There’s burkas, Christmas trees, Buddha sculptures, turbans. These ideoligions can be male supremacist, women can be forced to wear burkas. Also there’s slavery now.
In the third DLC there was a huge focus on body modification and children were added, but there is no way to even change the gender of a pawn, no sex change operations, no way for a man to get pregnant even though you can apparently implant a kidney from anyone into anyone else. There’s now also distinct “races” of pawns and your colony can favor certain races. If you have ever heard of any d&d struggle sessions about races you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Finally there’s the community that has made it a game to commit the worse warcrime. From organ harvesting, selling crack, letting kids smoke crack, child soldiers, child slaves, killing gay pawns because they are fundamentally worse, gas chambers, what more? There’s a lot of fuck up shit the community is doing and tynan is on board with it, he is actively fostering the part of the community that wants to commit war crime. Human skin furniture. He has been constantly getting input from the community forums about has not kicked out these people from it.
Rimworld was not an inherently violent game, yeah it had combat but it was a story generator, the game can be played without committing war crimes. It’s just that the dev is really leaning in heavy with the edgy shit and kind of ruined it. If anyone is wondering what DLC one is, it was literally Star Wars, there was the empire, and the force, all it was missing was lightsabers.
If anything I wish someone would speak to tynan about how he’s starting to become more like notch, it would be a shame if he turns Rimworld into something that’s reactionary.
Finally there’s the community that has made it a game to commit the worse warcrime. From organ harvesting, selling crack, letting kids smoke crack, child soldiers, child slaves, killing gay pawns because they are fundamentally worse, gas chambers, what more? There’s a lot of fuck up shit the community is doing and tynan is on board with it, he is actively fostering the part of the community that wants to commit war crime. Human skin furniture. He has been constantly getting input from the community forums about has not kicked out these people from it.
Someone once discovered that you could create a mermaid farm in Dwarf Fortress by embarking next to the ocean. They found some caves and built a mechanism that allowed them trap Mer-people and drain the caves. Mer-people would come into the cave, get stuck, the cave would be drained and they would then suffocate without water to breathe.
These would then be butchered for their bones, because everything in Dwarf Fortress has a value and Mermaid bones were the highest value bones in the game as a result of being extremely rare (and these can be used in ivory crafts) this allowed you to accumulate enormous wealth by farming mermaids.
Tarn did not like this so he nerfed the value of mermaid bones into the ground.
Tarn actively discourages exactly what Tynan actively encourages.
Glad to see this; was going to comment this exact story.
Fwiw, the forum thread about Mermaid 'farming' was the exact type of Gamer joy at how 'transgressive' they are that you see around the 'rimworld is warcrime simulator' Gamers. Just reveling in how 'funny' it is that the found a way to automate raising, breeding, and slaughtering of human-like pawns for virtual cash-money.
Yeah. I do think the devs deserve some responsibility for the "Dwarfy" antics though, it has always been encouraged to build elaborate over the top contraptions to achieve industrious tasks. Killing the Elves or Goblins in any way you see fit and for any purpose has always been largely encouraged and there is a very distinct industrial vs anprim thing going on when it comes to Elves getting mad at you for cutting down too many trees. The entire community hates and encourages killing them in any way you want but it's nowhere near the scale of Rimworld and the anti-Elf meme has some carryover from Bethesda that you can't really stop.
Media influences thinking.
By that I don't mean that these people will go out and start doing those things, but that there is a certain influence towards "survival of the fittest" and "well the world is awful deal with it" types of mindsets that work against us. Additionally it attracts the people who want to play out their industrial holocaust fantasies which results in an absolutely shit community and is the reason that Rimworld's community is chuddy garbage while DF's is incredible.
Again, why are you here? You are clearly an anti-social gamer,
The weird thing is that even if you take some seriously niche precepts in ideology, the human skinning and organ harvesting thing is actually very inneficient when it comes to playing. So too actually is running a drug production colony.
Sure you can harvest organs and yes, they are valuable and yes, you get a lot of cash for drugs but the effort you put into developing and maintaining that setup diverts effort and work away from other crucial stuff like research, farming, mining etc. Basically you wind up with a very rich colony that doesn't have many pawns or much tech or defense. The threats you face are based on colony wealth.
Broadly speaking there's almost always (outside of extremes like playing on sea ice, which was never meant to be more than random world encounter tiles, more or less demanding cannibalism) a more humane way of playing that is at least as and often more effective and efficient.
That's cool! Lots of those games say "wouldn't it be crazy if the most effective resource gathering methods involved a ton of cruelty? Haha it's just efficient play lol"
I think it's cool to interact with systems in unexpected ways, but eventually it's considered regular gameplay and any passerby you don't skin and organ harvest is wasted money
any passerby you don’t skin and organ harvest is wasted money
Exactly, you're just playing efficiently as a monster. Every spawn of a group of people becomes no different to any herd of animals that comes passing through, something else to be farmed for resources.
The mindset it creates is awful.
Just saying, there are plenty of warcrimes to be done in Dwarf Fortress. I remember one thread in particular about capturing and harvesting mermaids for their bones. But it's true that the DF devs don't get off on that stuff the same way the Rimworld devs do, which is why a patch after the thread about harvesting mermaids came out the devs nerfed the value of mermaid bones to make it not worth doing.
But I think Rimworld having an edgier community is mostly a product of when it came out. DF has been around a lot longer and as a result the community skews older and a given member is less likely to be a 4chan fascist (though they do exist, and more will probably exist now that the steam DF is out).
Yeah the community for rimworld is shit. Case in point the refugee quest. It is always better both morally and practically to accept them and treat em nice unless your people are starving with no food and about to basically become refugees themselves.
They do work around the place while they stay and that is amazingly useful even if all they do is haul stuff and clean. At least one of them usually has really high skill like research or medical so they can boost areas you really need and there's a fair chance at least some will offer to join you. There's a small chance another faction will offer a mediocre reward for killing them and a smaller chance they will turn on you. These refugees turn up mostly without armour and with crap weapons so any attempt to turn on your people is laughably easy to deal with. Additionally when they do leave, theres a reasonable chance that they do well and send you something really cool a year or so later as a thank you.
However the arseholes over on the subreddit talk about it as if it's the sensible practical decision to preemtively murder them and harvest their organs. These people are absolutely choosing to play the game like sociopathic fascists because they've mistaken being like that for having a personality I think.
Tynan's absolutely infested with brainworms, along with prominent modders like Oscar Potocki who bafflingly managed to take the Ideology framework and fill it with even more brainworms than Tynan did. He does seem generally better adjusted than Notch was, though. Notch was less brainwormed to start with and more a self aggrandizing asshole who alienated everyone around him when he got rich and then became a writhing mass of brainworms because he replaced the human contact that he lost with a bunch of 4chan weirdos on social media.
Rimworld's still something that should always be pirated because it's trivial to do so (it's small enough for direct download filehosters and cs rin ru always has the latest patches) and you don't even lose out on mods because not only can you pull them from the workshop with steamcmd the community actively made and maintains a python gui to let you browse mods, queue them for download with steamcmd, and manage them and their dependencies all in one client without loading the game.
all it was missing was lightsabers.
No, it had those too. https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Plasmasword
This guy was a level & systems designer on Bioshock Infinite, not a writer
The most libertarian jobs in a game design studio, checkmate
If you have ever heard of any d&d struggle sessions about races you’ll know what I’m talking about.
I'm about to go off on a tangent, so my apologies, but my DM is the absolute worst about this. He's not a chud but he is sort of an idiot and also a huge nerd, so he gets 100% uncritically into the world building of D&D. Our most recent campaign was an attempt to run Kingmakers, but it sort of fell apart because of me. I'm the guy who starts the struggle sessions.
The last time we played, we were confronted with a group of orc bandits. They were supposed to be a tough battle for us, but I convinced the party that they could be useful to us. Clearly these were strong warriors who were not being treated well by the current regime - if we could make a deal with them, they could serve as the guards for the new settlement we were building. We could give them a sense of purpose and a sense of ownership over their community, allowing them a voice in how we run things.
"No, that would change your alignment to evil because they're the bad guys."
The enthusiasm all but died after this. He also said that not paying taxes was an issue of good-evil rather than lawful-chaotic, which I cannot even begin to comprehend...
Ugh. That type of logic is exactly Gygax's, who infamously said 'it is a Good action to kill orc babies, because nits breed lice.' Y'know, the quote from the actual Colonel who actually genocided Cheyenne and Arapaho children.
Which, DnD proper has distanced itself tepidly from that type of rhetoric, and from what I've seen, Pathfinder has been even more aggressive about removing itself from that. Pathfinder recently from what I've seen has been fairly based, if still imperfect, and the credit belongs entirely to their writers. The management still sucks from what I've heard.
I love lampooning this after our party massacres a bunch of people who probably didn't deserve it. "Oh don't worry guys kobolds have evil alignment anyway there's no reason to feel bad about killing the entire family. It's not racist it's just a fact"
I heard they were getting rid of this in next edition or something? May have been just a rumor
yeah it's something they've been actively working towards apparently https://www.wargamer.com/dnd/races-alignments-lore-removed
though of course this has been an issue since its inception and has been a subject of discussion for literal decades but hey
I'm running Kingmaker for my friends and them collecting different "monster races" into their kingdom has been the best part. They have kobolds and spriggans and even a giant living in their city now, and allies in all the other lizardman and boggard settlements that they found in their explorations. This will all become relevant as the story goes on and war mechanics are introduced.
Your DM sucks and you shoulda been able to make friendly with the orcs.
This sounds dope af. Do you know of any other kinda media that his this vibe to it?
not paying taxes was an issue of good-evil
critical support for anti-libertarianism
My argument was that the taxes weren't going to any sort of social services - they were funding our imperial expedition to conquer new lands.
observations:
- only ways i could make money in rimworld was to become a drug lord or slaver
- you can't become truly self-sufficient as certain high level ingredients can only be purchased from core world traders
- easiest ideology to play with is the one where your colonists enjoy physical discomfort
- objective of the game is to leave the planet you're on to presumably go somewhere more pleasant
conclusion:
- rimworld is comprador bourgeoisie: the game
only ways i could make money in rimworld was to become a drug lord or slaver
I got pretty good results having my most talented artist keep making statues for me to sell.
I usually make coats for money. Supercharging your wealth isn't usually a great idea until the last DLC that let you set difficulty ramping to time played instead of wealth level.
Happy I never dropped any money on it then. Also very fucking yuck and sus that sexuality outside of hetero makes people into sex pests that can't take no for an answer, Jesus fuckin' Christ why not just have "pushy or self absorbed"as a trait instead and just make the character suck at interpersonal relations? Also gonna guess no way to set up a commune society at all?
sexuality outside of hetero makes people into sex pests that can’t take no for an answer,
It's straight ones too, they just have an easier time finding partners than vanilla gay pawns do (there are mods that fix sexuality distributions and at least are supposed to rein in the constant proposition meltdowns but don't anymore because they're all poorly maintained unofficial patches of old projects). The whole romance mechanic is basically just "is desired gender? Proposition them," with dice rolls to see if the target says yes, and hilariously a willingness to proposition someone doesn't translate to an automatic acceptance of propositions from that pawn: the last game I played had a pair who kept getting into social fights and beating each other bloody because they each kept propositioning the other one and being turned down so they were permanently furious with one another until one of the dice rolls finally succeeded and they became a couple.
I played had a pair who kept getting into social fights and beating each other bloody because they each kept propositioning the other one and being turned down so they were permanently furious with one another until one of the dice rolls finally succeeded and they became a couple.
I feel like this is an anime I've seen
this is the slap slap kiss dynamic that dominated romcoms for at least a solid two decades
utter tripe, and probably one of the most harmful bits of instruction young people can get in romance. that and "just keep being persistent!"
Bollywood has that trope as well. The main guy always gets the girl no matter how many times she says no
sadly unsurprising. i dont have much experience with bollywood flicks unfortunately, but i have noticed foreign media sometimes goes through the same phases u.s. media does, i imagine at least in part due to its proliferation worldwide
Maybe a long time ago but Bollywood has been like this for many decades.
i mean i'd wager it was relatively common in u.s. media before the period i describe, i just don't have much experience with it
but either way, it's unfortunate that that's the case
That sounds like a very dysfunctional system for romancing that only the most chuddest of programmers would code
It was extremely bad when it was first added, and it's only been cleaned up somewhat since (sexuality moved from being a trait to its own special slot and IIRC the proposition spam meltdowns were reduced but they were definitely never fixed). I think the intent was to drive drama and conflict by making pawns pair up in barely-tolerated relationships of convenience to increase the rate that they'd fight and break up later, but it didn't add safeguards for when pairings are functionally impossible. But also Tynan has worms instead of brains, yes.
This is something that the game defaults to because otherwise it would be unplayable. When your colonists are hungry, they go get food from storage and eat it - adding a layer of buying it and tracking who owns what food would just overcomplicate and slow everything down, especially if you tried to do that for every single little thing (we know because DF actually tried to do that years ago, and learned that it sucks and makes the game unfun so they took it out).
really everyone is a pushy sex pest, even among a colony of single heterosexuals 90% of hookup attempts fail and happen multiple times in a row, often someone will make an advance on someone and be rejected only for them to reject an advance from that same person a day later. the biggest downside to gay pawns is they just never end up in relationships unless you use character editor to start with multiple gay people. the best fix for this is the rational romance mod or whatever modern fork there is since the original modder stopped, it changes it so everyone comes with a sexuality trait and its default split 50%bi,20%straight,20%gay,10%ace, but you can change the ratios to whatever youd like.
Someone just need to make a mod to have everyone as part of a bisexual polycule commune
I've done that. One of the more prominent mods Psychology puts everyone on the Kinsey scale and I set my religion to unlimited spouses/free love.
I remember hearing initially that the plan was to have colonies do full economic situations - colonists would buy and sell shit between each other - but they actually had to remove that because it was frustrating and didn't work.
i pirated rimworld and downloaded a fuckload of medieval and fantasy mods immediately to try to make a comprehensible version of dwarf fortress lol. have never played vanilla rimworld, excited about the DF release on steam
I haven't played dwarf fortress but I do like Rimworld. The community is pretty shit tbh but I love how every single part of your society is fundamentally interconnected. If you want hi tech stuff you have to mine the materials or buy them, that means you need people to mine but before you even get that far you need crops to turn into food, you need someone to cook and clean, you need a decent crafter etc...
It's just pretty neat to me that when something goes horrifically wrong you can trace it back to something like a colonist getting fed up because they were massively overworked and having a tantrum, which led to the kitchen not being cleaned which in turn meant that your doctor got food poisoning so they couldn't race over in time to patch up your defenders in time which meant your best sniper died so the raid after that took out the wall with a rocket launcher and burnt your potato crops and now the three surviving chumps are now huddled round a fire in the ruins of your base in the middle of winter and you're debating whether or not to risk another mental break and have one of them carve up a frozen corpse for food.
Fun fact, you can pirate RimWorld and use a mod organizer to download Steam workshop mods.
While I dont disagree that Tynan has brainworms Rimworld is still one of the best games in the gerne. I would argue the only colony sim better than Rimworld is Dwarf Fortress.
When I first bought Rimworld I could not figure out how to set specific items for drop piles, I spent the better part of a hour looking at video tutorials for beginners and eventually messaged Tynan saying maybe he could make the tutorial more explicit because I had almost refunded the game over it, he replied but seemed extremely irritated over the question.
