Have you ever wanted to leave your colony and explore? Sure hanging around the farm is nice and safe, but venturing out into the wider world can be filled with opportunity and adventure. Luckily, RimWorld gives you a way to do just that, and it all comes down to forming a caravan.
Caravans are one of the more underappreciated aspects of RimWorld, and that’s not because they aren’t worth the trouble. For many players, caravans are simply too complex, but shying away from this system because it’s hard to understand will keep you from seeing a ton of interesting parts of the game. Here’s everything you need to know about forming and ordering caravans and why you would want to do so in the first place.
How To Form A Caravan
Forming a caravan can seem confusing at first, but it’s relatively simple. Navigate to the World menu at the bottom of your screen. You’ll be taken to a world map with your colony at the center. Select your colony, and you’ll see the option to form a caravan. Next, the game will ask you to choose a destination for the caravan.
Once you choose where you’re headed, you’ll be asked to put together a traveling party composed of colonists and animals currently present at the base. You’ll even have control of what they pack for the trip. Keep in mind that your colonists will still need to eat out on the road. They can either take food with them or try to forage from their surroundings as they move. The packing screen will inform you of how many days worth of food you have, including food it assumes your caravan will forage.
Once you’ve finished deciding what to take, the traveling colonists will pack all the necessary supplies and animals, head toward the edge of your colony, and set out on their way.
Ordering Caravans
Once caravans have left the colony, they’ll appear on the world map as yellow dots. If select this dot, you can change its destination by selecting other tiles on the map screen. You can also merge two controlled caravans that are occupying the same space by selecting both of them and hitting the merge button that appears.
Once a caravan arrives at its destination, you’ll likely have to give it more instructions. For example, if you send it to a rival colony, you’ll have to select the caravan once it has arrived and choose to either attack or trade with the settlement or attack it. You can also give these orders when you first select the settlement.
How To Use Caravans
Caravans have a bevy of uses that can all completely change how you play RimWorld. One of the best uses for your caravans is trading with nearby friendly colonies. If you’ve been slowly accumulating a lot of trade goods and Silver, you don’t just have to wait for a passing merchant.
To trade with a nearby settlement, form a caravan and load it up with everything you want to sell. Caravans have a limited carrying capacity, but if you include some pack animals (such as Muffalo or Alpacas) you can carry much more.
Once you arrive at your destination, you’ll be able to trade with the settlement as you usually would with traders except using the caravan inventory. Trading this way also lets you buy specific items much more reliably since settlements will carry a plethora of different trade goods instead of specializing in one or two types.
Caravans are also essential for raiding camps and completing some quests. Every once in a while you may have a quest noting that some type of camp is nearby. You can attack those camps using your caravans to score tons of lightly guarded loot. There are also some quests involving plundering ancient complexes that will require you to caravan to the location first as well.
Caravans are also your only way to start another colony on the same map. As long as you’re far enough away from another settlement, you can order your caravan to settle where ever they are. You’ll enter a colony map for the area, and you’ll be able to build, mine, craft, and research just as you would in your original colony.
You can either use this to set up a series of smaller bases around the map or create a handful of mining camps to help refresh your Steel stockpile back at home. Doing this might stress your micromanaging abilities as each base will have its own raids and events.
Keep in mind that you can abandon these colonies as long as they’re empty, and you have one colony left on the map. Whenever you abandon a base, it’ll leave a set of ruins behind that you can always return to later.
Finally, it has to be mentioned that there is no better waste-disposal service than a 1-colonist caravan. Simply pick a colonist that’s not one of your best, load them up with tons of trash (or toxic wastepacks), and have them march far away from your base. Once they’ve made it a fair distance, select the caravan and navigate to the Item tab. There you can decide to throw away any item the caravan is carrying.
