RimWorld – All Specialist Guide – Tips and Tricks

RimWorld – All Specialist Guide – Tips and Tricks 1 - steamlists.com
RimWorld – All Specialist Guide – Tips and Tricks 1 - steamlists.com
A brief overview of the new specialist roles in the ideology DLC. Includes disabled work types, work types NOT disabled, abilities, and which memes unlock which roles.

 
 

Intro

 
A quick reference for the different specialist roles. Don’t be surprised if this guide goes out of date due to balance patches, bug fixes, and the discoveyr of new strategies and/or exploits. 
 
Most of this guide is based off of tooltips and theorycrafting. Take everything with a grain(silo) of salt. 
 
Feel free to copy and reuse anything and everything in this guide for any use. Credit appreciated but not necessary. 
 
The Leader and Moral Guide roles are NOT covered here. Discussing them requires going over Ideologies, Rituals, and other subjects that are beyond the scope of this guide. 
 
 

Specialists: Skill Table

 
RimWorld - All Specialist Guide - Tips and Tricks - Specialists: Skill Table 
 
The “X” indicates jobs that are NOT allowed. Ability names have been shortened and summarized for ease of reading. Click on the image to enlarge it. 
 
The Leader and Moral Guide roles are not included in the above table as they are allowed to do all work types and have no bonuses outside their special abilities. 
 
 

Specialists: How to Get Them

 
All ideologies can have one Leader and one Moral Guide role. An Ideology can only have up to two Specialist Skill roles, which adds up to a maximum of 4 roles total. You cannot have two of the same kind of specialist. 
 
Specialist Roles are chosen at the start of the game. You can freely change which pawn has which role (at a mild mood penalty), but you can’t change the roles themselves without editing your ideology using Dev Mode. 
 
Which kinds of skill specialists are available to you depends on which memes you select. Since your ideology can only choose TWO skill specialists, I recommend to have at least two memes that add different specialists. 
 
<Skill> 
<Meme> (<Meme Points>) 
 
Animals 
 
Animal Personhood (3) 
Rancher (3) 
 
Mining 
 
Darkness (3) 
Tunneler (3) 
 
Medical 
 
Blindsight (3) 
Flesh Purity (2) 
 
Plants 
 
Tree Connection (3) 
High Life (2) 
Nature Primacy (2) 
 
Production 
 
Human Primacy (2) 
 
Research 
 
Transhumanist (2) 
 
Shooting and Melee 
 
Raider (2) 
Supremacist (1) 
 
No Specialists Unlocked 
 
Pain is Virtue (3) 
Nudism (3) 
Cannibal (3) 
Proselytizer (2) 
Female/Male Supremacy (2) 
Loyalist (1) 
Guilty (1) 
Individualist (1) 
Collectivist (1) 
 
 

Specialists: Tips and Tricks

 
You can reassign and unassign specialist roles at a mild -5 mood penalty. You can use this to give emergency combat and ability buffs to pawns, even if they are part of a distant caravan. 
 
Ability cooldowns of specialists are tied to the role. You can’t eliminate or bypass the cooldown by reassigning or unassigning roles. 
 
Required clothing is a mandatory feature, and not recommended. You want to transition to power armor eventually anyway. 
 
To edit your ideology after the game has started (which I highly recommend for Role Playing purposes alone), enable Dev Mode using the checkmark in the settings tab in the bottom right of the screen, select the ideology tab, then select the Edit Ideology checkmark. 
 
Don’t forget to disable dev mode afterwards to avoid making mistakes (and to get rid of the ugly Dev Mode UI). 
 
Every time you edit your memes, the rest of your ideology (including specialists) is randomized. Finish editing your memes before you do anything else to avoid wasting time. 
 
While editing your Ideology (in dev mode or when making a new colony) you can right click on a role to remove it. This lets you add different roles (provided your memes have unlocked them). 
 
ALL ROLES ARE USEFUL. Some roles are more useful than others, but none of them are bad. Once your colony has enough pawns/the right kind of pawns, you will want all of your roles to be assigned. Choose whichever memes you want FIRST, then decide how to make the best of whichever roles are unlocked by those memes. 
 
ROLES AREN’T EVERYTHING. Some memes add excellent roles but are terrible for your playstyle, and vice versa. For example, the Animal Personhood and Rancher add the amazing Animal Specialist role but have the nasty drawback of greatly limiting what your colonists can eat. 
 
 

Shooting

 
Shooting 
 
Questionable value to most colonies. Positioning, numbers, fortifications, skill, weapons, and armor play a very significant role. Aim, on the other hand, is capped at high skill/bionics levels mid-late game, making Marksman Command less useful long term. 
 
Ruins and raiding offensively is a different story. There are fewer variables you can control in fights, so the extra aim might be more useful. (ToDo: Does Trigger Happy -50% aim time stack with Shooting Specialist -50% aim time? If so, an invisible grenadier could be interesting to see.) 
 
Keep in mind that roles can be swapped from one colonist to another with a mild -5 mood penalty, so you could always assign this role in emergencies like caravan ambushes and drop raids, then unassign this role wants it’s no longer needed. 
 
 

Melee

 
Dubious value to a normal colony, even moreso than shooting. Melee combat is extremely dangerous in Rimworld, even with the best armor, skills, and equipment. When possible, shooting is almost always preferred. Even in situations that call for melee blockers you will usually have more shooters than melee units. 
 
Less useful in the early game, more useful as better armor, melee weapons, and hospitals become available. 
 
(ToDo: What are the exact melee calculations? Is the dodge bonus to allies enough to make melee viable?) 
 
 

Animals

 
Extremely valuable to certain colonies. Doubling taming chance means you can safely tame even the most dangerous animals with enough skill, doubling training chance means wasting half as much time and food to make animals useful, and a 1/5th revenge chance makes it much safer to attempt risky tames in the early game. 
 
Will not prevent predators from hunting your tamer for food. In emergencies, you can use “Animal Calm” as a get-out-of-death free card. 
 
Note that even the most dangerous animals are safe to breed, slaughter, train, and manage once they are initially tamed. A single tamer that collects an initial pair of bears can be of immense value to any colony. 
 
 

Mining

 
Dubious value to most colonies. Useful early game if you want to carve a home in a mountain, and nice mid game if you like sending out mining caravans, but completely redundant in the late game when you have drill arms. 
 
 

Medical

 
Variable usefulness. The only job restriction is hunting, likely as compensation for medical not being a skill you can use full time. Immunity Drive is invaluable for not only surviving infections and disease, but reducing the downtime. The tend speed combined with tend quality dramatically reduces the odds of death. 
 
The only catch is the surgery success chance, which has a hard cap. There will ALWAYS be a 2% chance of failure, which will ALWAYS have a chance of death on major surgeries. Sufficiently advanced colonies will see little benefit from this role. 
 
 

Plants

 
At face value, this is one of the least valuable roles. It is very easy to scale up growing and harvesting compared to most other tasks, so +30% yield doesn’t mean much. 
 
However, the same memes that add Plant Specialists also add Dryad Trees as an optional reward for rituals. Depending on how much use you get out of dryads, you might consider this role quite valuable. As I haven’t seen anyone test or use Dryads extensively yet, I can’t say much here. 
 
What I can say is that Dryads probably don’t add as much wealth as a pawn does, while doing at least as much work as a pawn while ALSO being extremely disposable. Low wealth/low tech colonies might get more use out of these – but again, this is speculation. 
 
 

Production

 
The most powerful specialist in the entire game, hands down. Let’s break this down, shall we? 
 
Construction Speed +70% 
 
Useful, but you could also just assign more pawns to construction. Niche utility if you want to repair a door faster than a centipede can bash it down. 
 
General Labor Speed +70% 
 
What does General Labor impact? Well, it applies to Art, Crafting, Smithing, Tailoring, as well as misc unskilled work like stonecutting, cremation, and chemfuel refining. That is a very impressive array of tasks. 
 
Quality Level +1 
 
Every time this pawn would craft an Excellent item, it is now Masterwork. If it would be Masterwork, it is now Legendary. A single dedicated Production Specialist can churn out either Legendary furniture or Legendary equipment for the entire colony. 
 
In terms of generating equipment, wealth for trading, and improving living conditions, no role is anywhere close to this powerful. Even in a lategame colony with 100+ pawns, having a single Production Specialist is a gamechanger. 
 
 

Research

 
At face value, this is one of the least useful roles. On the one hand, nearly doubling the research speed of your best researcher lets you skip much of the early game. On the other hand, the rate limiting step in your colony growth is manpower and supplies – not research. 
 
With enough manpower you can easily double or triple your research speed without relying on this role. (Of course, increasing your manpower is easier said than done.) 
 
The bonus to Hack Speed is interesting. If I understand correctly, this makes raiding certain ruins and points of interest much easier, by nearly halving the amount of time you need to endure raids while you hack objectives. I don’t know enough about ruins to speculate on how useful this may or may not be. 
 
Despite being suboptimal in the late game, tech rushing playstyles benefit greatly from this role. 
 

Written by RedPine

Hope you enjoy the Guide about RimWorld – All Specialist Guide – Tips and Tricks, if you think we should add extra information or forget something, please let us know via comment below, and we will do our best to fix or update as soon as possible!
 
 
 
 


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