Various mods have changed the way I play this game over the years but the more important mods on my list include Rimatomics, rimfactory, sos2 and android tiers. I play with most of the difficulty settings on 100% with the only exceptions being random deaths which get set to zero and raid strength set to at least 115%. I always start on a tribal naked survival scenario where my starting pawn is randomized but with no disabled work types or health conditions. My starting pawn rarely lives to see the colony thrive despite this.

Generally I rush rimatomics weapons research. Sometimes this takes as little as 4 years but on particularly brutal playthroughs it can take as long as 10 years. Research is the most valuable part so it can be smart to establish 2 really shitty colonies instead of just 1 shitty colony. Even if all my colonists die, I just wait for a random wanderer to join and then I’ll keep playing and keep my research. My economy at this stage consists of making human leather dusters + 1 or 2 side ventures, usually organ harvesting and drugs. Once I’ve finally achieved unlimited electricity and have an array of rimatomics tesla coils and obelisks I can breath a sigh of relief. This is when the real game starts.

By this point if I’m not already at war with every single faction on the map, I declare war on all those bums. Once I get to space, I attack all the trade ships too because fuck 'em. At this point the bodies start piling up faster than I can dispose of them which is where rimfactory comes in. Also by this point, grinding for money has gotten really fucking old so in the interest of maintaining my sanity, I start using mining drills and some ultratech mods where I can do things like produce my own neutroamine and hyperweave. I also have epoe + a few other bionics mods. I build several squadrons of cyborg and android super soldiers. I end up with 1 large base and 1 sos2 ship. The land base is where I do most of my plutonium production. I then spend the rest of the game making sure every last humanlike on the entire plant that doesn’t believe in my religion is dead.

Once there’s only a few more enemy settlements left, I load up everything I care about on the ship, fire every single nuke in my stockpile as one big final “fuck you” to the miserable planet I’ve been stuck on and then flee from my war crimes against humanity by going to another planet.

Once I find a new planet, it’s time to rinse and repeat and just do that until a new rimworld version comes out and borks all my mods.