RimWorld Access

RimWorld Access is a mod that makes RimWorld playable with a screen reader and a keyboard. It adds keyboard navigation and spoken announcements to the game's interface, so the same things you would do with a mouse, from building a base to running a colony, you can do by listening and pressing keys.

A note on the people behind this

The mod was started by Shane Earley, who built the foundation and did the early work that made everything else possible. Shane transferred the project to me, Aaron Ramirez, in early 2026, and I've been the main person working on it since. If you get something useful out of this, a lot of the credit belongs to Shane.

Why existing guides work here

The mod was built to mirror the way the game's interface is structured rather than create a separate path through it. The screens you reach, the menus you open, the names of things: they line up closely with what a sighted player sees. That matters because RimWorld has a huge community and a detailed wiki, and most of what's there applies directly.

I learned the game by watching sighted players on YouTube. These docs are not meant to replace the wiki, and they are not the best strategy advice available. For playing well, the RimWorld wiki is the better resource. These docs cover how to work the mod's controls. For everything else, including getting good at the game itself, see Where to learn RimWorld.

What you are getting into

RimWorld is deep. It was inspired by Dwarf Fortress, which gives you a sense of the territory. People put hundreds of hours into it and still find new things. The learning curve is real.

The difficulty is adjustable, though, and that helps a lot. Turn it down and raids get rare and mild, you get room to learn the controls, and the game plays a bit like a darker, more grown-up Sims: build a home, keep people fed and mostly happy, watch small dramas unfold. Someone will have a mental break over a bad haircut, and you will learn to live with that.

If you are new to this, especially if colony sims are new to you, start on a low difficulty or peaceful mode. Learn the keyboard first, get a colony on its feet, and turn the pressure up later. You can raise or lower difficulty at any point in a running save, so there is no need to commit to anything right away.

For context, the closest prior reference in blind gaming for this kind of depth is Castaways by Aprone, a survival and colony game that has been a community favorite for years. Other complex management games have since become accessible too, including Oxygen Not Included. RimWorld sits in that same territory, with a lot of systems to learn. These docs exist because that learning curve is worth some guidance.

Download

The easiest way to install is through the Steam Workshop, which keeps the mod updated automatically. You can also download the latest release and set it up by hand. Either way, follow Installation. The one setup step you should not skip is turning off the Steam in-game overlay, so keys like Shift+Tab actually reach the game.

Join the community

There is an official RimWorld Access Discord server. It is the best place to get help, ask questions, report bugs, and trade strategies with other players. If you run into trouble installing the mod or get stuck anywhere in the game, come say hello and we will be glad to help.

Where to go next

You do not have to read these docs cover to cover. Here is where most people should start.

• New here? Start with Installation, then First launch to get the mod set up and find the RimWorld Access options.
• Want to understand how the controls work? The Core Concepts section is the foundation. If you understand how menus, the map, the scanner, gizmos, the context menu, and the info card work, you can find your way around any screen in the game.
• Just need a key? The keyboard reference lists every shortcut, organized by where you are when you press it.
• Want to get good at RimWorld itself? See Where to learn RimWorld for the wiki, the YouTubers, and the advice that turns a struggling first colony into something that survives.

If you would rather not jump between pages, the whole thing is also available as one long page. That is the place to read it all at once. I would hold off on saving a copy to read offline, though, since I expect to be updating these docs often and a saved copy will fall behind.

Getting Started

Installation

This page walks through what you need to do before the mod will work, including turning off the Steam overlay and installing the mod files.

Having trouble?

If you get stuck on any step here, join the official RimWorld Access Discord server. Ask in the help channel and we will be happy to walk you through it.

Turn off the Steam in-game overlay

Do this before anything else, for your sanity. This will benefit all your Steam games, not just RimWorld.

Steam's in-game overlay grabs certain key combinations like Shift+Tab before they reach RimWorld. The overlay itself is not screen-reader accessible, so when it is on, some of the mod's keys will silently do nothing and you will have no way to tell why.

Turn it off:

1. Open Steam.
2. Go to Steam menu > Settings.
3. Select the In-Game tab.
4. Uncheck "Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game."
5. Close the Settings window.

If a key like Shift+Tab ever stops working, come back and check this first.

Install the mod

There are two ways to install RimWorld Access: through the Steam Workshop, or by hand. The Workshop is the easier path and keeps the mod up to date for you. Pick whichever fits, then finish with the shared step at the end that switches the mod on.

Steam Workshop (recommended)

1. Log into Steam, open the RimWorld Access Workshop page, and click Subscribe.
2. Steam will ask whether you also want to subscribe to Harmony, the other mod RimWorld Access depends on. Choose Subscribe to All.
3. Both will automatically download the next time RimWorld launches.

That puts the files in place. Now read Turn the mod on.

Manual install

Use this if you do not own RimWorld on Steam, or you would rather manage the files yourself.

Download the latest release and unzip it into RimWorld's Mods folder, so you end up with a RimWorldAccess folder inside Mods. With a default Steam install, the Mods folder can be found at the following locations:

• Windows: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\RimWorld\Mods
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/RimWorld/RimWorldMac.app/Mods

If you installed RimWorld to a different Steam library, the path up to steamapps changes, but everything after it stays the same.

A manual install does not include Harmony. You will need to download it separately:

• On Steam: Log into your Steam account in a web browser, open the Harmony Workshop page, and click Subscribe. Steam downloads it the next time the game launches.
• Without Steam: Install Harmony from its GitHub releases page and place it in the same Mods folder.

Turn the mod on

Regardless of how you installed it, the final step is the same. RimWorld's own mod list is not screen-reader accessible until RimWorld Access is already running, so instead of switching the mod on inside the game, you drop in a settings file that has it switched on already.

Download ModsConfig.xml and place it in RimWorld's Config folder. It comes ready-made with Harmony and RimWorld Access already enabled. The Config folder can be found at the following locations:

• Windows: %localappdata%low\Ludeon Studios\RimWorld by Ludeon Studios\Config
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/RimWorld/Config

You can paste either path as-is and it will open the correct folder. On Windows, paste it into the Run dialog (Win+R) or the File Explorer address bar. On macOS, paste it into Finder's Go to Folder box (Cmd+Shift+G).

Already installed it by hand before?

If you installed an earlier version of RimWorld Access by hand, you may still have a RimWorldAccess folder in your Mods folder. After subscribing on the Workshop, it is worth deleting that folder, for two reasons:

• A copy sitting in your Mods folder always loads instead of the Workshop copy. You could keep running an old version without realizing it, and it would not update automatically.
• Older builds used a different mod identifier than the Workshop release. The two will not clash on their own, but if both end up enabled in your mods list, RimWorld might load the mod twice, which would probably break things.

The settings file above enables only a single copy, so as long as you use it and do not turn on a second one by hand, you are safe either way. Deleting the old folder just removes any chance of mixing them up.

Launch the game

Once the files are in place, launch RimWorld. With your screen reader running, the main menu should start talking immediately.

Next steps

Head to first launch to learn more about getting started with the mod!

First launch

Launch RimWorld with the mod enabled and your screen reader running. The main menu should start talking right away. Use Up and Down to move through the menu items and Enter to select one.

If nothing speaks, make sure your screen reader is running and the Steam in-game overlay is turned off. Both are covered on the installation page.

The RimWorld Access settings

The mod's settings live at Main Menu > Options > RimWorld Access. You can open that same screen from inside a game too: pause, open Options, find RimWorld Access.

The defaults are sensible, so there's nothing you have to change before playing. If you want to look around, the settings reference explains what each option does.

Tutorial series

I've recorded a tutorial series walking through the game from the beginning. Part 1 is up now, and more parts are coming. If you're new to RimWorld, it's worth watching as you find your feet.

Next steps

To understand how the mod's controls work, read the Core Concepts section. It covers menus, the map, the scanner, and the handful of ideas that let you find your way around any screen in the game. To get better at RimWorld itself, see Where to learn RimWorld.

Core Concepts

Navigating menus

RimWorld has many screens, but they share a small set of navigation shapes. This page covers all of them. When you open something new, the first question is: which shape is it?

• Tabs: separate panels, moved between with Tab and Shift+Tab.
• Columns or categories: sections moved between with Left and Right arrows.
• Tree views: lists that expand and collapse to reveal nested details.
• Tables: a grid of rows (usually pawns) and columns (usually attributes or policies).

A few things work regardless of shape: you can start typing to jump to an item (type-ahead), and press Escape to back out. The rest of this page walks through each shape and the rules that connect them.

Tabs (Tab / Shift+Tab)

Many screens are split into panels. Tab moves to the next panel; Shift+Tab moves to the previous one. This is not the classic "tab through every field" behavior from web forms. It moves between whole sections of a screen.

For example, the Work tab uses Tab and Shift+Tab to move between pawns, and the caravan formation screen uses them to move between the summary and formation panels. Once you land on a panel, arrow keys navigate within it.

A single tab can itself contain any of the other shapes: a panel might hold a tree view, a table, or a set of columns. Some screens are several tables side by side. Tab and Shift+Tab always move between the panels; once inside one, you navigate it by its own shape.

Columns and categories (Left / Right arrows)

Some screens lay content out as sections you step through sideways. Left and Right move between those categories; Up and Down move within the current one.

The Quest menu is a clear example: Left and Right move between Available, Active, and Historical. Tables also use this pattern, where Left and Right move between columns.

Tree views

A tree view is a list where items can contain other items. RimWorld uses these frequently because much of its information is dense and hierarchical. Expanding an item reveals everything inside it.

• Right arrow expands the current item (reveals children).
• Left arrow collapses it (hides children).
• Up and Down move between items at the current level.
• Shift+8 (asterisk / *) expands all expandable siblings at the current level, so you can arrow across them without expanding each one individually.
• Ctrl+Home / Ctrl+End jump to the absolute first or last item in the tree, regardless of nesting level.

When an item is collapsed, the mod speaks a short summary of what's inside, so you can decide whether to expand it. Some tree items hold controls (a checkbox, an adjustable value) as well as readable content, so expanding can reveal things you act on as well as things you read.

Level announcements

As you move up and down the tree, the mod announces the depth level when you change levels. This tells you where you are in the hierarchy without requiring you to track it mentally.

The "Rashad Hates Treeviews" mode

There is an option that changes how trees behave, named after a fellow accessibility-mod developer. The label is "Rashad Hates Treeviews (Submenu-Style Navigation)" and it lives under Main Menu > Options > RimWorld Access. It is off by default.

With the setting off (standard mode): pressing Right on a collapsed item expands it and keeps the parent in view, with children listed below. Pressing Right on an already-expanded item drills into the first child.

With the setting on (submenu mode): pressing Right expands an item, hides the parent, and drops you onto the first child, like stepping into a submenu. Pressing Left collapses back to the parent. The mod remembers your position inside each parent, so stepping back in returns you to where you were.

Tables

A table is a grid. Rows are usually your pawns; columns are usually attributes or policies (medical care, apparel, a skill, a checkbox). Up and Down move between rows; Left and Right move between columns.

Sorting (Alt+S)

Press Alt+S to sort the table by the column you are on. Press it again to cycle: descending, ascending, no sort. This is how you find, say, your best constructor or your highest shooting skill.

Painting a column

To copy one cell's value down (or up) an entire column without setting each cell individually:

• Shift+Up / Shift+Down: paint the current cell's value onto the row above or below.
• Shift+Home / Shift+End: paint from the current row to the top or to the bottom.
• Ctrl+Shift+Home / Ctrl+Shift+End: paint the value across every row in the column, regardless of your current position.

Editing cells

• Enter or Space toggles a checkbox cell.
• = and - nudge a numeric cell up or down by one; Enter lets you type a number directly.
• ] on a column header or cell opens a context menu of options for that category. See the context menu page for how that menu works.

Type-ahead: start typing

In any menu or list, start typing and the mod jumps to the first matching entry. This is one of the fastest ways to navigate. In a long Architect menu, type "wall" or "stock" to land directly on what you want instead of arrowing through dozens of entries. Type-ahead also works inside filter screens and search boxes when adding items by name. Press Enter to run whatever the search landed on. If you would rather arrive there and look around first, press Shift+Enter: the search ends and the item is read back without being activated.

The Enter-vs-Alt+S rule

The question is always: on this screen, does Enter already do something to the current item?

• If Enter selects or deselects items (checking a pawn into a caravan, toggling a choice), Enter is "busy." In that case, Alt+S confirms the screen and moves you to the next one. The starting-pawns and caravan-formation screens work this way.
• If Enter does not do anything special to the current item, Enter finishes the screen. World-map site selection works this way: Enter settles on the tile.

Before assuming Enter will advance you, notice whether it is already doing selection work. If it is, use Alt+S to confirm. In tables, Alt+S is also the sort key, which fits the same logic: you are toggling and editing cells, so Enter is busy and Alt+S takes the confirm role.

Escape

Escape cancels or closes the current screen and steps you back one level. On the main map with nothing else open, Escape opens the pause menu.

A quick checklist for any new screen

1. Press Tab once. If it moves you to a different panel, Tab and Shift+Tab navigate between them.
2. Try Left and Right. If they move between sections while Up and Down move within a section, it is a columns or categories layout. If Up and Down step through rows (usually pawns) while Left and Right change which column you are reading, it is a table.
3. Try Right on an item. If it expands, you are in a tree view (and Left collapses).
4. Start typing. Type-ahead jumps to a match.
5. To finish: check whether Enter is already doing selection work. If yes, confirm with Alt+S. If no, Enter finishes. Escape backs out.

The map

The map is your colony: a grid of tiles where most of the game takes place. A cursor moves over it with the arrow keys, terrain under the cursor plays a distinct sound, and number keys provide on-demand information about a tile. This page covers getting around the map and controlling game time. For finding and jumping to specific things, see the scanner.

Moving the cursor

The arrow keys move the cursor one tile at a time, with the camera following. Up, Down, Left, and Right work as you would expect.

As you move, the tile underfoot plays a terrain sound. Soil, stone, sand, water, and built flooring each have distinct audio cues, so with practice you can tell where you are by ear. Moving against a wall plays its own sound, which helps you trace room edges.

As you arrow around, the mod announces the name of what is under the cursor. Number keys are for deeper, on-demand detail rather than something you press after every step.

What is on this tile? (number keys 1–7)

With the cursor on a tile, press a number key to hear a specific category of information about that tile. These are spot-checks; most of this information is also announced as you move.

• 1 = items and pawns at the cursor
• 2 = terrain (fertility, path cost, beauty, cleanliness)
• 3 = harvestable things (plants and their growth, and with the right DLC or equipment, fish and deep-scanner mineral targets)
• 4 = light (brightness) and temperature
• 5 = room stats
• 6 = power
• 7 = areas

On the world map, the same number keys report different categories. That mapping is covered on the world map page.

Jumping to coordinates (Ctrl+G)

Press Ctrl+G to open the coordinate-jump dialog. Type an X coordinate, press Comma or Space to advance to the Z field, type a Z coordinate, and press Enter to jump. Leaving a field blank keeps the current coordinate. Entering +N or -N moves that many tiles relative to the current position. Escape cancels.

Jump modes: covering ground fast

Tile-by-tile movement is fine for close work, but crossing the map one step at a time is slow. Jump modes let a single keypress leap to the next thing in a given direction. Four jump modes are available:

• Preset distance: jumps a fixed number of tiles in the direction you choose.
• Impassable: jumps to the last tile a colonist could walk to that way, stopping before a wall, a rock face, deep water, or anything else that would block a pawn.
• Terrain: jumps to the next tile whose ground is different, so a stretch of sand or a paved floor crosses in one press.
• Structure: jumps to the next tile whose building is different, so a run of marble wall crosses in one press and lands where that wall changes or ends. Standing on open ground, it finds the next building instead.

Blueprints and frames count as the thing they will become, so a colony under construction navigates like the one being built.

Controls:

• Ctrl+arrow jumps in that direction using the active mode.
• Shift+Up / Shift+Down cycle to the next or previous jump mode. The cursor does not move; the mod announces the new mode. In the three scanning modes, where there is no distance to adjust, Shift+Left and Shift+Right repeat the mode name.
• Shift+Left / Shift+Right adjust the preset distance by 1.
• Shift+Ctrl+Left / Shift+Ctrl+Right adjust the preset distance by 10.

The scanning modes cover an unpredictable number of tiles, so they announce the distance before describing where the cursor landed, for example "7 tiles. Marble wall." When there is nothing to jump to, the mod says so and stays put: "blocked", "no terrain change that way", "no structure change that way", or "map boundary".

No jump crosses into unexplored ground. A scan stops at the fog line, so a jump never tells you what is hiding in the dark.

Jump modes are also used when sizing a wall or zone during building placement. See the Architect menu page for that flow.

Controlling time

RimWorld runs in real time when unpaused. You will pause often to think and give orders.

• Space pauses and unpauses.
• Shift+1 sets normal speed, Shift+2 sets fast, Shift+3 sets super-fast.
• T announces the current in-game time, date, weather, and season. Press it twice: if the time has not changed, the game is paused.
• Alt+T announces the current game speed and performance: speed name (Normal, Fast, etc.), actual and target ticks per second, and whether a threat is causing a forced slowdown.
• ? (question mark) opens the Learning Helper, RimWorld's own built-in tips. Press Enter on a lesson to read it, Down to keep reading, choose "Mark as learned" and press Enter to dismiss a lesson. Escape closes the helper. These are the game's tutorial nudges, separate from this documentation.

Where to go next

• The scanner finds and jumps to anything on the map: a stretch of stony soil, a dropped weapon, the nearest geyser.
• Checking on pawns covers selecting colonists and reading their health, mood, needs, gear, and skills.
• The Architect menu is how you place buildings and zones.

The scanner

The scanner finds and jumps to things on the current map or world map without hunting tile by tile. Looking for the nearest geyser, a dropped rifle, every patch of stony soil, or all the temperate forest tiles on the world? The scanner organizes what is out there into categories and lets you jump directly to any of it.

It works by drilling through levels: broad categories, then subcategories, then item types (ordered by distance), and finally individual instances of a type. Home jumps the cursor to whatever the scanner is currently pointing at.

Key scheme

• Ctrl+Page Up / Ctrl+Page Down: move between categories (the broadest grouping).
• Shift+Page Up / Shift+Page Down: move between subcategories within the current category.
• Page Up / Page Down: move between item types within the current group, ordered by distance (nearest first).
• Alt+Page Up / Alt+Page Down: step through the individual instances of the current type, one at a time (for example, "grass, 1 of 39").
• Home: jump the cursor to the scanner's current target.
• End: announce the distance and direction from the cursor to the current target.
• Alt+Home: toggle scanner auto-jump mode (the cursor follows the scanner automatically as you step through items).

As you move through levels, the mod announces what you have landed on and how many there are. You might hear "12,977 grass tiles" at the type level, or "grass, 1 of 39" as you step through instances.

Not every category has subcategories. When one does not, work with categories, item types, and instances only.

Clumps and the Home double-press

Many terrain types and items appear as contiguous patches rather than isolated tiles. The scanner groups these into a single clump entry and reports the tile count (for example, "fertile soil, 200 tiles").

Pressing Home once jumps the cursor to the tile in the clump nearest your current position. If you are now standing on the clump and it is large enough to have a distinct center, pressing Home a second time jumps to the clump's center. The mod offers the "press Home for center" hint only when a center jump is available.

A typical flow

1. Use Ctrl+Page Up/Down to find the right category.
2. If the category has subcategories, narrow down with Shift+Page Up/Down.
3. Use Page Up/Down to pick the item type you want (nearest first).
4. Press Home to jump the cursor to it. If there are many instances of the type, use Alt+Page Up/Down to step to the specific one you want, then Home.

Examples

On the world map, finding biomes. Move to the biomes category with Ctrl+Page Up/Down, then use Page Up/Down to reach temperate forest. The mod reports how many there are, and Alt+Page Up/Down steps through each patch. Home jumps the cursor to the current one so you can check its tile info. Roads and settlements are available as their own categories.

On the colony map, finding terrain. Looking for stony soil to build a foundation? Drill into the terrain category, pick the terrain type (sorted by distance, so the closest patch appears first), and press Home to land on it. Press Home again from within the patch to jump to its center.

On the colony map, finding an item. You dropped a weapon somewhere in the chaos. The scanner groups items into categories and types; find weapons, narrow to the rifle, and Home jumps the cursor straight to it.

Pairing the scanner with search

Sometimes it is faster to name the thing you want. Press Z to open the map search, type what you are after, and press Enter to dismiss the search field. Matches become available as you type, so the scanner is then pointed at your results: step through them with the scanner keys and press Home to jump the cursor to one. Get in the habit of pressing Enter to close the field first, otherwise a later Enter just closes it when you meant to do something else.

Where to go next

• The map covers cursor movement, terrain audio, the number-key tile info, and jump modes.
• The world map and choosing a site uses the scanner heavily when picking a landing spot.

Gizmos (the G key)

Gizmos are the contextual command buttons that appear when you select something: deconstruct a wall, reinstall a bed, form a caravan, rename a zone, and so on. Whatever is under the cursor, its gizmos are the actions available for it.

Press G with the cursor over an object to open its gizmo menu.

Opening and using the menu

Place the cursor on an object (a building, furniture, a pawn, a caravan) and press G. The mod reads the gizmos available for that object. Arrow Up and Down to move through them and press Enter to activate the one you want.

What appears depends entirely on what is under the cursor. A wall offers deconstruct. A bed offers reinstall and deconstruct. A finished caravan hitching spot offers "Form caravan." If an object has no actions available, the menu will be short or empty.

Gizmos with a target you can set

Some gizmos are sliders rather than buttons: the hemogen target on a bloodfeeder, the target fuel level on a generator, the psyfocus target on a psycaster, the suppression threshold on an entity. When one of these is focused in the menu, press Left and Right to move its target. Each press announces the new value and takes effect immediately, the same as dragging the bar with a mouse. Hold Shift for larger steps.

Enter on these gizmos still does whatever the gizmo's own button does: toggle whether hemogen packs are allowed, toggle auto refuel, toggle the neural heat limiter, toggle auto-suppression.

Gizmos can carry their own shortcuts

As you arrow through the menu, the mod announces a gizmo's keyboard shortcut when it has one. These shortcuts come from the game, but RimWorld Access uses the plain letter keys for its own navigation. So it delegates a gizmo's shortcut to Shift plus that letter: if a gizmo's vanilla key is B, you press Shift+B to fire it.

You can trigger a gizmo this way without opening the menu at all. With the right object under the cursor, press Shift plus the gizmo's letter and the action runs immediately. Once you know an object's common shortcuts, you can skip the G menu.

When two gizmos share a shortcut

Sometimes two gizmos share the same shortcut. Pressing it opens a short menu of the choices: arrow to the one you want and press Enter. You pick from the menu rather than pressing the shortcut a second time.

A worked example: moving a bed

1. Place the cursor on the bed.
2. Press G to open its gizmos, arrow to "Reinstall," and press Enter. (Or press the reinstall gizmo's Shift+letter shortcut directly.)
3. You are now in placement mode. Move the cursor to where you want the bed to go.
4. Press Space to place it, then Enter to confirm.

Deconstruct works the same way: it is another gizmo in that same menu. For the full walkthrough of moving and removing things, see moving and reinstalling.

Where gizmos appear

• On the colony map, gizmos command buildings, furniture, and pawns.
• On the world map, gizmos command caravans: settle, split, rest, merge, and more.
• During building placement, the gizmo menu is unavailable. You cannot open it until placement is finished.

When you have selected an object and want to know what you can do with it, press G.

The context menu

Press ] (right bracket) to open the context menu. Arrow Up and Down through the options and press Enter to choose one. [ (left bracket) fires the top option immediately without opening the menu. Shift+[ queues the top option instead of doing it right away.

The context menu lists the actions available for the selected pawn at the cursor tile. It is the keyboard equivalent of a right-click menu. With a colonist selected, pressing ] on a tile or object shows what that colonist can do there. Point the cursor at a weapon on the ground, press ], and the menu might offer "Equip bolt-action rifle." Press Enter to issue the order.

The list changes with context. A pawn near a door, a downed colonist, or a stack of steel each produce different options. On a designation type in the Architect menu (such as a chop-wood order), the menu offers bulk actions like "Cancel all designations," which wipes every matching order at once.

On the world map

The context menu works the same way on the world map. Select a caravan with comma and period, move the cursor to a destination tile, and press ]. You get options such as "Travel to," "Trade with," or "Attack," depending on what is on that tile. The selected caravan is the actor and the cursor tile is the target, exactly as a selected pawn acts on a tile back home. For commanding the caravan itself (settle, split, rest, merge), use its gizmos with G.

A DLC example: picking a xenotype (Biotech)

During character creation with the Biotech DLC active, the context menu is how you change a colonist's xenotype. Place the cursor on a pawn, press ], and the menu includes the pawn's current xenotype (usually "Baseliner"). Press Enter on it to open a list of every xenotype.

For more on pawns, see selecting pawns.

The info card (Alt+I)

The info card is the detailed stats screen for whatever the cursor touches. It exposes the numbers that drive the simulation: a terrain's fertility and movement cost, a wall's material and hit points, a pawn's full stat sheet, an item's value and quality.

Press Alt+I to open the info card for the thing under the cursor. Alongside G (gizmos) and ] (the context menu), it is one of the keys you reach for constantly.

On the map

Point the cursor at almost anything and press Alt+I to open its info card: terrain, a pawn, a wall, an item. When a tile holds more than one thing, the mod opens a small menu so you can choose which one's card to read.

The card shines when you want numbers a quick readout won't give you. Making a growing zone? Press Alt+I on the available plants to compare their stats. Outfitting a colonist? Press it on a piece of clothing to see its protection and insulation. Press it on a colonist for their full stat sheet, or use Ctrl+Alt+I to open the info card of the pawn currently selected on the colonist bar, wherever your cursor happens to be.

In other places

Alt+I appears on several screens beyond the map:

• Quest rewards. On a quest's reward buttons, Alt+I opens the info card for a specific reward item so you can inspect what you would receive before accepting. See quests.
• Caravan stat values. In caravan formation and info screens, Alt+I on a value breaks it down into the contributing factors. For example, caravan speed or carry capacity is the sum of several contributions, and the info card shows each one.

Coverage

Alt+I works in most places, but not absolutely everywhere yet. If you press it somewhere you expected an info card and nothing happens, that spot may not be wired up. If that happens on a screen where you think it belongs, let me know and I can take a look.

Selecting pawns

Colonists (the game calls them pawns) are the heart of a RimWorld colony. This page covers how to select them, navigate the colonist bar, jump the cursor to a specific pawn, and build combat groups. For reading a pawn's health, mood, and other stats at a glance, see checking on pawns.

The colonist bar

The colonist bar is a persistent strip along the top of the screen that shows all your colonists and mechs. You can navigate it, select individual pawns, reorder it, and page through larger groups without touching the cursor.

Cycling through colonists (comma / period)

Period selects the next colonist; comma selects the previous one. This is the game's own vanilla cycling behavior: it steps through your colonists in bar order and announces the selected pawn. When you reach the mech section of the bar, the same keys cycle through mechs instead.

Selecting by number (Alt+1–0)

Alt+1 through Alt+9 select the colonist at positions 1–9 on the current bar page. Alt+0 selects position 10.

Pressing the same Alt+number twice within about half a second also moves the cursor to that pawn's tile and snaps the camera to them. The single press selects and announces; the double press is the cursor jump.

Paging through more than ten colonists (Alt+Down / Alt+Up)

When you have more than ten colonists or mechs, they are organized into pages. Alt+Down pages to the next group; Alt+Up pages back. After paging, use Alt+1–0 to select within the new page.

Navigating the bar one pawn at a time (Alt+Left / Alt+Right)

Alt+Left and Alt+Right move through the colonist bar one pawn at a time, crossing page boundaries. This is a linear walk across the entire bar rather than a page-at-a-time jump.

Reordering the bar (Ctrl+Alt+Left / Ctrl+Alt+Right)

Ctrl+Alt+Left and Ctrl+Alt+Right move the currently selected pawn earlier or later on the bar. This lets you arrange colonists in an order that makes sense to you, so the numbers fall where you expect.

Ctrl+Alt+Down and Ctrl+Alt+Up move the pawn between pages on the bar.

Focusing the cursor pawn on the bar (/)

Press / to focus the pawn under the cursor on the colonist bar. If the cursor is on a colonist or mech that appears on the bar, the bar jumps to that pawn's position. This is how you move quickly from "cursor on pawn" to "pawn selected on bar."

Jumping the cursor to the selected pawn (Alt+C)

Press Alt+C to move the cursor and camera to the currently selected pawn. This is the reverse of /: it takes you from "pawn selected on bar" to "cursor on pawn." When several pawns are multi-selected, Alt+C opens a picker so you can choose which one to jump to.

After the jump, the cursor stays with that pawn. It rides along as they walk, silently, so pressing K tells you where they are right now rather than where they were when you jumped. Move the cursor any way you like, or select someone else, and it stops riding and is yours again. Press Alt+C again whenever you want to catch back up.

Multi-select (Alt+Space)

Alt+Space toggles the pawn under the cursor (or the currently focused bar pawn) into or out of a multi-select group. Once multiple pawns are selected, orders issued via ] or gizmos apply to all of them.

Multi-select is mainly useful for combat: sending a group to attack a position, drafting several colonists at once, or setting up combat groups. Many gizmos expect a single pawn and will produce unexpected results (or not work at all) when multiple pawns are selected. If a gizmo behaves strangely, check whether multi-select is active.

Ctrl+Alt+Space selects all colonists at once, or clears the multi-select if already active.

Alt+Shift+Right and Alt+Shift+Left extend the current selection contiguously to the next or previous pawn on the bar.

Combat groups (Ctrl+Shift+F1–F4 / Ctrl+F1–F4)

You can save and recall named groups of pawns for fast combat deployment.

• Ctrl+Shift+F1 through Ctrl+Shift+F4 save the current multi-select group to slot 1–4.
• Ctrl+F1 through Ctrl+F4 recall the saved group from slot 1–4, re-selecting those pawns.

Note: F1 by itself opens the Work menu; F2 opens the Schedule menu; F3 opens the Assign menu; F4 opens the Animals/Mechs menu. The combat group keys require Ctrl to avoid conflicting with those.

Going further

• Checking on pawns: health, mood, needs, gear, and skills at a glance.
• The context menu: issuing orders to a selected pawn at the cursor tile.
• Gizmos: the command actions available for a selected pawn or object.

Checking on pawns

Colonists (the game calls them pawns) need attention constantly: who is hurt, who is in a bad mood, who should be on the guns. This page covers how to get a fast read on any pawn from the map without opening a full screen.

For selecting pawns, cycling through colonists, and building combat groups, see selecting pawns.

The at-a-glance info keys

These keys give a quick spoken summary of the pawn under the cursor, or the currently selected pawn if the cursor is not on a specific one.

• Alt+H: quick health readout, focused on what matters in combat or triage: consciousness, movement, manipulation, and whether the pawn is bleeding. Use this to decide who needs immediate attention.
• Alt+M: mood.
• Alt+N: needs.
• Alt+G: gear (what they are wielding and wearing).
• Alt+K: top 3 skills.
• Alt+B: the pawn's recent combat log (their last several fights).

These prioritize the thing under the cursor first, then fall back to the pawn you selected with comma/period or an Alt+number. Place the cursor on an enemy raider and press Alt+H to get the raider's health, not your selected colonist's. Move the cursor off anything specific and the keys report on the selected pawn instead.

Finding conditions with type-ahead

For a deeper read on a pawn's health state, open the pawn's inspect view (press Enter on the pawn under the cursor, or Ctrl+Alt+Enter on a pawn selected via the colonist bar). From the top section of the inspect screen, start typing to jump to a condition:

• "inf" jumps to infections.
• "leg" or "arm" or "head" (or even "hea") jumps to everything wrong with that body part.

Arrow Up and Down through matching results. This is the fastest way to find a specific injury or condition without scrolling through the full list.

The skills table (Alt+P)

To compare every colonist's skills side by side, press Alt+P to open the skills table. It lists all your colonists against all their skills.

Inside the table, Alt+S sorts by the column you are on, so you can jump to a skill column and find your strongest pawn for it. Press Alt+S again to flip the sort direction, and once more to clear it.

This pairs naturally with setting up work priorities: find your best cook in the skills table, then assign cooking to them.

Where to go from here

These keys assume you are on the colony map. For the basics of moving the cursor and camera, see the map. For a deeper read on a single pawn (full health detail, operations, traits, relationships), open the relevant tab via the inspect view. The at-a-glance keys above are for the constant spot-checks that keep a colony running.

Starting a Game

Starting a new game

Selecting New Colony from the main menu opens a short setup flow: choose a scenario, then a storyteller, difficulty, and save mode, then configure the world. This page covers those screens in order. The next two pages cover choosing a landing site and creating your colonists.

Each screen advances with Enter when you are done, and Escape goes back to the previous screen.

Choosing a scenario

A scenario sets the starting rules: who your colonists are, what equipment they begin with, and what conditions apply throughout the game. When the screen opens, the mod announces the current scenario's name, summary, and category.

Use Up and Down to move through the scenario list. The mod announces the name, summary, and category of each scenario as you navigate. Type letters to jump to a scenario by name (typeahead search).

The default, Crashlanded, starts you with three survivors and some basic supplies. The Rich Explorer starts with one well-equipped colonist; Lost Tribe starts with more people and less technology. The choice has a meaningful effect on the early game.

Reading the scenario details

Press Tab to switch to the detail panel for the selected scenario. The detail panel is a tree view listing the starting colonists, starting items, items scattered on the map, and any special conditions. Use Up and Down to move through the entries, Right to expand a node, and Left to collapse it. Press Tab or Escape to return to the scenario list.

Editing or copying a scenario

Press Alt+E to open the selected scenario in the editor. If the scenario is a built-in or another user's Workshop upload, the mod creates an editable copy for you and says so. If it is your own custom or Workshop scenario, it opens directly for editing.

The scenario editor is a separate page with its own navigation. When you are done in the editor, the screen returns you to the scenario list.

Selecting a scenario

Press Enter on the scenario list to confirm the highlighted scenario and advance to the next screen. If the Scenario Builder entry is selected, Enter opens the Scenario Builder instead.

Choosing a storyteller, difficulty, and save mode

This screen contains three sections cycled with Tab and Shift+Tab: storyteller, difficulty, and save mode. The mod announces which section you are in when you switch.

Within each section, press Up and Down to move between options, and type to search by name.

Storyteller

The storyteller controls the pacing and style of events that hit your colony.

• Cassandra Classic sends a steadily escalating challenge. This is the default and the most common choice.
• Phoebe Chillax spaces events out and gives more breathing room. A calmer pace if you want to build without constant pressure.
• Randy Random does whatever it wants. Sometimes quiet, sometimes three raids in a row.

For the differences in how each storyteller behaves, see the Storyteller article on the RimWorld wiki.

Difficulty

Press Tab to move to the difficulty section, then Up and Down to choose. Each option reads its name and a short description.

There is also a Custom difficulty option. Press Enter on Custom to open the custom difficulty editor, which exposes individual sliders for threat scale, population cap, disease frequency, trade prices, and many other factors. You can adjust these sliders at any time during a running save, so there is no pressure to get them exactly right before you start.

For a description of what each preset difficulty changes, see the Difficulty article on the RimWorld wiki.

Save mode

Press Tab to move to the save mode section, then Up and Down to choose:

• Reload anytime lets you save and load freely.
• Commitment mode keeps a single rolling save you cannot reload. Events are permanent.

When all three sections are set, press Enter to advance to the world configuration screen.

Anomaly settings (Anomaly DLC)

If the Anomaly DLC is active, a fourth section appears after save mode. Press Tab to reach it. The Anomaly Settings dialog is already open at that point, so there is nothing to confirm to open it: you are placed directly in the dialog, which lets you set the anomaly playstyle and adjust related sliders. Press Alt+S to accept your changes, or Escape to discard them and return to the storyteller screen.

World configuration

This screen lets you set the world seed and adjust parameters such as planet coverage, rainfall, and temperature. It is a list of sliders; press Up and Down to move between them and Left and Right to adjust the current one. Press Enter on the Seed field to type a seed directly.

The defaults produce a valid world, and the seed is randomized automatically. This screen is mainly useful for experienced players who want a specific type of world.

Press Enter to generate the world. After generation, the world map opens for you to choose a landing site.

For information about how world generation parameters affect the planet, see the World generation article on the RimWorld wiki.

Next steps

• Choosing a landing site on the world map.
• Creating your colonists, the screen after you settle.

Choosing a landing site

After the world generates, the world map opens so you can pick where your colony will be. Your job here is to find a tile you like and settle it. The navigation you learn here carries over to the same map you will use later for caravans and travel.

Moving around the map

Arrow keys move the cursor one tile at a time and the camera follows. When you move onto a tile, the mod announces the biome name and a short summary of conditions. Use this to get a quick read on the terrain as you explore.

A few shortcuts make navigation faster:

• R jumps the cursor to a random valid starting tile and reads its details. A generated world holds tens of thousands of tiles, so this lands you somewhere new each time you press it.
• Space re-announces the current tile.
• Ctrl+Up/Down/Left/Right jumps to the next biome boundary in that direction, useful for finding the edge of a desert or the start of a forest.

Reading tile details

When the cursor is on a tile, the number keys 1 through 5 each read a specific category of information. These are on-demand spot checks; much of this information is already announced as you arrow around, so you do not need to press these after every move.

• 1 reads growing conditions: the growing period, rainfall, forageability percentage and food type, whether animals can graze, and stone types available for mining.
• 2 reads movement and travel cost: movement difficulty (including any road multiplier and winter penalty), terrain and hilliness, elevation, roads, and rivers.
• 3 reads disease frequency: how often diseases strike here per year, plus pollution and haze data if the Biotech DLC is active.
• 4 reads time zone and global coordinates: the tile's latitude and longitude, and its UTC offset.
• 5 reads regions and landmarks: the region or feature name, plus any landmarks (DLC only).

For how each biome plays and what a good starting climate looks like, see the Biomes article on the RimWorld wiki.

Finding a site with the scanner

The scanner is the fastest way to locate anything on the map without arrowing across it. On the world map its categories include biomes, roads, and settlements. Switch categories with Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down, move between entries with Page Up and Page Down, and press Home to jump the cursor to the current entry.

When the scanner lands on a clump of related tiles (such as a biome spanning many tiles), it reports a tile count. Press Home once to jump to the nearest edge of the clump. If the clump has a distinct center, the mod offers a hint: press Home a second time to jump to the center.

To find neutral factions nearby, switch the scanner to the settlements category. The scanner announces each settlement's faction name and whether it is hostile or friendly.

For the full set of scanner keys, see The scanner.

Where you can and cannot settle

• You cannot settle on a tile already owned by a faction. The game will refuse and explain why.
• Settling within 5 tiles of another faction's settlement incurs a goodwill penalty for crowding them. Settle at least 5 tiles away to avoid it. There are no friendly factions to settle near at this stage: other factions are hostile or neutral.

If a tile is otherwise invalid (an ocean tile, for example), the game tells you when you try to settle.

Settling

When the cursor is on a tile you want, press Enter to settle there. The mod validates the tile first. If it is invalid, you hear why and stay on the map to pick somewhere else. If it is valid, you hear "Starting site selected" and move to the next screen.

If settling would affect a nearby faction's opinion of you, the game may prompt you to confirm. Confirm to proceed.

Next steps

After you settle, you choose who comes with you. See Creating your colonists.

Creating your colonists

This is the last screen before the game starts: the character setup screen, where you decide who lands with you. You can read each candidate's background, reroll ones you dislike, set filters to control what the game generates, and rename anyone. The colonists you keep here are the ones you will be keeping alive for the rest of the game.

The screen is a tree view (see Navigating menus). Use Up and Down to move through the list of candidates, Right to expand one and read its details, and Left to collapse it again.

The slots: Selected and Left Behind

The screen shows up to eight candidate slots even if your scenario only starts you with three colonists. The list is divided by two markers: Selected and Left Behind. Pawns in the Selected group come with you when the game starts. Pawns in the Left Behind group do not. As you arrow across the boundary, the mod announces which group you have entered.

The extra slots exist for rerolling. You can reroll a Left Behind slot as many times as you like looking for a good candidate, then move that pawn up into the Selected group.

Moving a pawn between groups

Press Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down to move the current candidate up or down the list. When a pawn crosses the Selected/Left Behind boundary, the mod announces which group they landed in and who their new neighbors are.

Reading a pawn's details

Press Right on a candidate to expand them. Inside you find categories you can expand in turn:

• Bio: their backstory and background.
• Age: RimWorld tracks two ages. Biological age is how old the body is; chronological age is how many years have passed since birth. The two can differ due to cryptosleep stasis.
• Relations: other pawns this candidate knows, with opinions in each relation's detail. Press Enter on a relation to jump to that pawn in the list.
• Traits: personality traits. Most pawns have at least one, up to three.
• Incapable of: work types this pawn refuses to do. Worth checking before you commit to keeping someone.
• Skills: their twelve skill levels (0 to 20) and passions. A passion makes a pawn learn a skill faster and gain a mood boost from doing it. Skills come with no passion, a single passion, or a double (burning) passion.
• Health and possessions round out the picture.

When a category is collapsed, the mod reads a short summary so you can decide whether to expand. The collapsed pawn entry itself carries age, gender, traits, and top skills inline.

Comparing the same detail across pawns

Once you have expanded to a particular detail on one pawn, Page Up and Page Down jump to the same spot on the previous or next pawn. If you are on the Construction skill for candidate one, Page Down takes you to Construction on candidate two, and so on. This makes it easy to compare one attribute across everyone without re-navigating each pawn's tree.

Rerolling and filtering

If you do not like a candidate, you can generate a new one. Filters let you tell the game what to look for before it generates.

Pressing ] on a candidate opens a context menu gathering these actions in one place: randomize (the same as Alt+R), rename (the same as Alt+N), and edit the pawn filter (the same as Alt+F). With the Biotech DLC it also includes the developmental stage and xenotype options described below. Each has a direct key as well, so you can use whichever you prefer.

Reroll (Alt+R)

Press Alt+R to reroll the candidate you are on. A new pawn replaces them. If you have filters active, the game rerolls behind the scenes until it finds someone who matches (or hits the roll limit), then tells you how many attempts it took.

Filters (Alt+F)

Press Alt+F to open the pawn filter editor. Filters constrain what reroll will accept. You might ask for a colonist with Shooting 8 and no Pyromaniac trait, then reroll until you get one. This is not a native RimWorld feature: it is a rebuild of Random Plus, a mod popular with sighted players. New players can ignore it and just reroll by hand; it is here for when you want finer control. Filters persist across new games.

The editor is a flat list grouped into sections. Use Up and Down to move through it.

• Minimum skill levels: for each of the twelve skills, use Left and Right to set a minimum level, or Shift+Left and Shift+Right to jump in larger steps. Press Enter on a skill row to cycle the required passion (none, then single, then double). Shift+Home and Shift+End snap a value to its minimum or maximum.
• Passion counts: set a minimum and maximum number of total passions across all skills, adjusted with Left and Right.
• Age: minimum and maximum, adjusted with Left and Right.
• Required traits and excluded traits: navigate to the "add required trait" or "add excluded trait" row, then press Enter to open a trait picker. Type to search (typing "pyr" finds Pyromaniac, a trait you do not want), then press Enter to select. To remove a trait you have added, navigate to it and press Delete.
• Roll limit: the maximum number of reroll attempts before the game gives up and keeps the last result.

Press Alt+S to save your filters and close the editor. Escape also closes the editor.

Presets

Near the bottom of the filter list are preset options. You can save the current filter set as a named preset and load a saved one later. Because presets persist across games, you can build a "balanced starter" filter once and reuse it for every new colony.

The Team Skills summary (Tab)

Press Tab to switch to the Team Skills summary, which covers everyone currently in the Selected group. It lists the skills the game treats as important for a starting colony, which is most but not all of the twelve. For each listed skill it tells you the best pawn at that skill, their level, and their passion. Press Up and Down to move through the skills, or type to jump to one by name. Press Tab again to return to the candidate list.

Renaming a pawn (Alt+N)

Press Alt+N to rename the candidate you are on. You can set their first name, nickname, and last name. The nickname is what the game usually uses, so a clear, distinct nickname makes everyone easier to track. This is your chance to set a pawn's first and last name: you cannot change those once the game starts. With the Biotech DLC there is a brief 24-hour window to name a newborn child, but otherwise names are fixed at the start.

Starting the game

When you are happy with your roster, press Enter to confirm. The game asks you to confirm starting with the colonists you have chosen. Confirm, and the game begins.

Picking a xenotype (Biotech DLC)

With the Biotech DLC, each candidate has a xenotype representing their genetic makeup, with most baseline humans set to Baseliner. To change it, press ] on a pawn to open its context menu and choose the xenotype option. That opens a list of every xenotype in the game, plus an option to create a custom one in a gene editor. Picking a xenotype rerolls the pawn as that type. Developmental stage (baby, child, adult) is also on this menu. For how the context menu works, see The context menu.

Managing Your Colony

The Work tab

The Work tab is where you decide who does what. Hauling, cooking, mining, doctoring, art: every job in the colony gets assigned here. Press F1 to open it.

Two views

There are two ways to look at the same information. Switch between them with Ctrl+Tab.

• Focused view shows one pawn at a time. You move through that pawn's jobs and priority levels, then Tab to the next pawn. It is a straightforward place to start, and most of the instructions below assume it.
• Table view is the multi-column layout: every pawn as a row, every job as a column. It covers the whole colony at a glance and adds a few bulk tools, but the concepts are the same. It suits players who are comfortable with large tables.

Whichever view you pick becomes the default for next time.

Basic mode and manual priority mode

Press Alt+M to toggle between the two assignment modes:

• Basic mode uses on/off checkboxes. A pawn either does a job or doesn't. The game then decides the order on its own, working left to right across the jobs (the leftmost enabled task is attempted first). Basic mode is perfectly fine for a new colony: you can leave it here, get comfortable with the rest of the game, and come back to manual priorities later.
• Manual priority mode lets you set a number from 1 to 4 on each job, giving you direct control over the order. It is more work up front, but it is the only way to say "doctor first, haul only when there is nothing better to do." The docs assume manual mode once you are ready for it.

Setting priorities in manual mode (focused view)

In manual mode, in the focused view, jobs are organized by priority level:

• Up/Down move between priority levels (1 through 4, plus Disabled).
• Left/Right move between jobs within the current priority level.
• Tab/Shift+Tab move to the next or previous pawn.

You can also start typing a job's name to jump straight to it, wherever it currently sits. While a search is running, Up/Down step through the matches, and Enter or Shift+Enter settles on the one you are hearing without closing the menu.

To set a priority, press a number key:

• 1 is the highest priority.
• 2, 3, and 4 step down from there.
• 0 turns the job off entirely.

Enter and Escape both save and close the tab.

As you arrow left and right through a priority level, the mod announces each job's name, skill level, passion, a description, and the specific sub-tasks it includes, in the order the pawn performs them. Some of those sub-tasks are spoken with an "E" in front. The "E" is a spoken marker, not a key you press: it flags a task the game treats as an emergency (such as firefighting or rescuing a downed colonist), which a pawn will drop other work to attend to.

Bulk operations and bracket cycling

These keys work the same in both the focused view and the table view.

[ cycles the current job's priority up (lower number, more important). ] cycles it down (higher number, less important).

Add Shift to apply the same cycle to every eligible colonist at once: Shift+[ raises the priority for every pawn, Shift+] lowers it for every pawn.

Shift+number (0 through 4) sets that job to the chosen priority for every eligible colonist at once.

Copying a colonist's priorities

Once one colonist's jobs are set the way you want them, you can hand the whole set to someone else. These keys work in the focused view and the table view alike, and they use the same clipboard as the copy and paste buttons a sighted player clicks.

• Ctrl+C copies the priorities of the colonist you are on.
• Ctrl+V pastes them onto the colonist you are on.

Paste needs a copy first, so pressing Ctrl+V before anything has been copied just says so. Jobs a colonist can never do are left alone.

How execution order works

The game runs all priority-1 jobs first, reading them left to right across the row, then all priority-2 jobs left to right, and so on down to 4. Two jobs at the same priority number resolve by their left-to-right position. This is why the order within a priority level matters alongside the number.

Table view

The table view gives a colonist-per-row, job-per-column layout. The same concepts as the focused view apply, plus a set of painting tools that exist only here. All the standard table controls apply:

• Up/Down move between colonists.
• Left/Right move between jobs.
• Alt+S sorts by the current column.
• Shift+Up/Down paints the current cell's value onto rows above or below as you move.
• Shift+Home/End paints from the current row to the top or bottom of the column.
• Ctrl+Shift+Home/End paints the value across every row in the column at once.

Painting (the Shift+Up/Down and Shift+Home/End keys above) is available only in the table view. The bracket keys ([ / ] and their Shift variants) and Shift+number behave the same in both views.

See navigating menus for the full table grammar.

The unskilled-job warning

When you enable a job the pawn has no skill in, you will hear a warning sound. It is not blocking you, just a notice. Sometimes assigning unskilled work is exactly what you want (someone has to haul rocks). Other times it signals that you are about to let your best researcher attempt surgery.

Learn more

Deciding which priorities to give which pawns is a strategy topic in its own right. The RimWorld wiki's Work page covers the trade-offs in depth.

Related pages

• The Schedule tab decides when pawns work; the Work tab decides what they do.
• Checking on pawns shows a pawn's skills and passions, which is useful to have open while assigning work.

The Schedule tab

The Schedule tab sets each pawn's daily rhythm: when they work, when they rest, and when they sleep. The day is divided into 24 hours, and you decide what each hour is for. Press F2 to open it.

The default schedule is usually fine for a new colony. Most colonies run for a long time without needing changes here, so if this screen feels like extra work, leave it alone until you have a concrete reason to tinker.

Brushes

You assign hours by picking a "brush" and painting it onto the schedule. A brush is a time assignment type, and you choose one by pressing a number key: 1 through 9 and 0.

The list typically looks like this:

• 1 Anything
• 2 Work
• 3 Recreation
• 4 Sleep

The list comes directly from the game, so the exact order can vary, and DLCs can add more entries. Trust what the mod announces when you press a number over what is written here.

Applying a brush

Move to the hour you want, then:

• Space or Enter applies the current brush to that single hour.
• Shift+Left and Shift+Right paint the brush across the hours toward that side as you move.
• Shift+Home paints the brush from the current hour back to hour 0.
• Shift+End paints the brush from the current hour to hour 23, the last hour of the day.

Filling a night

A night is not a single stretch on this screen, because the row runs from hour 0 to hour 23 and a night spans the wrap between them: the late-evening and early-night hours sit at the right end of the row, while the late-night and early-morning hours sit at the left end. Filling a full sleep period therefore takes two passes, not one. Pick the Sleep brush with 4, then paint each edge of the night separately: from your pawn's bedtime use Shift+End to paint to hour 23, and from hour 0 use Shift+Right (or Shift+Home from the wake-up hour) to paint the early-morning hours. Painting from a single hour cannot wrap across the end of the day in one move.

Copying a schedule

Once you have built a schedule you like, you can apply it to the whole colony without rebuilding it for each pawn.

• Ctrl+C copies the current pawn's schedule.
• Ctrl+V pastes it onto another pawn.

Related pages

• The Work tab decides what each pawn does during their work hours. The Schedule tab decides when those hours are.

The Assign tab

The Assign tab is where you set the standing rules your pawns follow on their own: what medicine they receive, which clothes they are allowed to wear, what food they will eat, and which drugs they take. You set policies once and pawns follow them automatically. Press F3 to open it.

The layout

Assign is a table. Rows are your pawns; columns are the policy categories:

• Medical care
• Apparel
• Food
• Drugs
• Reading
• Medicine carry amount
• Allowed medicine quality
• Allowed meal quality

Each column holds a policy name, and several pawns can share the same one. If you want most pawns on an "anything goes" food policy but two pawns on a strict diet, you create two food policies and assign each pawn the one they need.

The Reading column appears with the Anomaly DLC. A reading policy controls which books and tomes a pawn is allowed to read. This matters because some reading material in Anomaly is dangerous, so you can keep risky tomes away from pawns you would rather not expose to them.

The standard table controls apply here: Alt+S sorts by the column you are on, and painting a value down a column works the same way it does everywhere. See navigating menus for the full table grammar.

Managing policies with the context menu

To create, rename, copy, or delete a policy, press ] on a policy category. The available options depend on the category and are announced as you arrow through them:

• On Medical care, ] offers "Change defaults."
• On Apparel, ] offers New (Alt+N), Rename, Copy, Delete, and Edit.

Food and drug policies offer the same kind of options. This is also how you create a new policy before assigning it to anyone. See the context menu for how the ] menu works in general.

Editing a policy

Choosing Edit (or opening any policy for editing) opens a large tree view where you specify what is allowed. Type-ahead works throughout, so you can jump to an item by typing its name.

The hit-point requirement filter

Apparel and weapons lose hit points as they take damage. This filter sets the condition range a pawn is willing to wear or carry.

Press Enter on the hit-points entry (it reads something like "65% to 100%"), then:

• Up/Down move between the minimum and maximum bound.
• Left/Right adjust whichever bound you are on.
• Enter confirms.

One reason to adjust this: a piece of clothing's resale value drops noticeably once it falls below roughly 60% hit points. Setting the lower bound above that point means pawns will swap out of their clothes while the items are still worth selling.

The quality filter

Items have quality levels ranging from awful up to legendary. The quality filter works exactly like the hit-point filter: Enter to open, Up/Down between min and max, Left/Right to adjust, Enter to confirm.

Allow and forbid checkboxes

The tree includes checkboxes for broad categories, such as burnable apparel or bio-coded items. Toggle them to allow or forbid whole groups at once.

One thing to watch: forbidding burnable apparel sounds tidy, but most cloth and leather clothing is burnable, so that single checkbox can leave pawns with almost nothing they are allowed to wear. Read what you are forbidding before you commit.

Expandable items for precise control

When a broad category is not precise enough, expand it. Armor categories expand into specific pieces, so you can allow flak vests but forbid flak pants, or any combination you like. Right expands, Left collapses.

Food and drug policies

Food and drug policies follow the same tree-view pattern. A food policy lets you specify which meals a pawn is allowed to eat, useful for keeping fine meals away from the hauler who would just eat them standing over the pots. A drug policy sets which drugs a pawn takes and how often.

Learn more

Policies go deep, especially drug schedules and the finer points of apparel management. The RimWorld wiki's Assign page covers the strategy and the edge cases. For specific policy types, see the wiki's Food and Drug policy articles.

The Animals tab

The Animals tab is where you manage every tamed creature in the colony: who trains them, what they are allowed to do, where they can go, and how many of each species you want around. Press F4 to open it.

With the Biotech DLC and mechanoids in your colony, F4 may open the Mechs tab instead. If you have both tamed animals and mechs, F4 first shows a chooser. The two tabs are nearly identical tables with slightly different columns, so everything below applies to both.

The table

Each animal is a row, and the columns are its settings. Sorting, painting a value down a column, and moving around all work the way they do in any table. See navigating menus for the full set. The short version:

• Alt+S sorts by the column you are on. Press again to toggle descending, then clear.
• Shift+Up/Down paints the current cell's value onto the rows above or below.
• Shift+Home/End paints from your row to the top or bottom of the column.
• Ctrl+Shift+Home/End paints the value across every row at once.
• Enter or Space toggles a checkbox cell.

Training

Many columns represent trainable skills you turn on with a checkbox. Checking one tells your handlers to begin training that animal. Training takes time and depends on your handler's Animals skill.

The standard training categories are:

• Tameness (keeping the animal from reverting to wild)
• Guard (the animal follows a master and stays near them; this is the prerequisite for the other training types)
• Attack (the animal can be released to attack distant targets instead of only guarding)
• Rescue (the animal retrieves downed colonists)
• Haul (the animal carries items)

How attack training actually behaves

By default, an animal trained to guard and assigned a master will follow that master and guard them: it attacks foes that come close, but it does not go looking for enemies. Guard mode is usually the safer choice, because an animal that charges into a firefight can catch your own gunfire.

Once an animal has learned Attack as well, has a master assigned, and is set to follow, a gizmo appears on the master (not on the animal) when that master is drafted. The gizmo toggles between guarding and being released to go attack, so you can decide whether the animals hold their position or charge the enemy. To reach it, select the master, draft them, and press G to open their gizmos. See gizmos for how to navigate gizmo commands.

With the Odyssey DLC, an additional attack target training type lets you point attack-trained animals at one specific target. When trained, a separate gizmo appears on the drafted master; activate it and press Enter to pick the target the animals should attack.

Hunting and the Animals tab

Hunting is designated in the Wildlife tab, not here. When a hunter kills an animal, they collect meat and may collect other resources such as hides, wool, or leather depending on the species. Not every animal yields leather.

The auto-slaughter screen

Auto-slaughter lets you set population caps per species. Whenever your count exceeds a cap, the game automatically slaughters the surplus until you are back under the limit. You set it once and the colony manages its own herd sizes without ongoing micromanagement.

The screen lists every animal species in the game, including species you do not yet own. You can pre-set caps before you have a single animal of that type.

Setting a cap

Find the species you want to limit. For each numeric cell, press Enter to type a value directly, or nudge it one at a time with = to raise and - to lower. The columns are:

• Maximum population: the total of that species you will keep.
• Maximum males
• Maximum young males
• Maximum females
• Maximum young females

The per-sex columns let you keep plenty of breeding females while capping surplus males. Leave a cap blank and that count is not limited.

Pregnant and bonded animals

Two checkboxes determine whether certain animals are spared from auto-slaughter:

• Allow pregnant slaughter: off by default. Pregnant females are protected until you turn this on. The screen shows how many are currently pregnant.
• Allow bonded slaughter: same idea for animals that have bonded with a colonist. Enabling this when a bonded animal is over the cap will cause a mood hit when that colonist loses their companion.

Who gets slaughtered

When you are over a cap, the game removes the oldest animals first and works down until you are back within the limit. This means auto-slaughter trims the elderly before the young, which generally makes sense for a herd you are managing for meat or breeding.

Learn more

Bonding, training mechanics, and which animals are worth keeping are covered on the RimWorld wiki's Animals page.

Related pages

• The Wildlife tab is for untamed animals: marking creatures to hunt or tame.
• Navigating menus covers the full table mechanics including sorting, painting, and type-ahead.
• Gizmos explains how to navigate and use the command buttons on a selected animal.

The Wildlife tab

The Wildlife tab lists the untamed animals on your map and lets you decide which ones to hunt and which ones to try taming. Press F5 to open it.

The table

Wildlife is a table built the same way as the Animals tab, so all the same controls apply. Each animal is a row; you sort with Alt+S, paint values down a column with Shift+Up/Down, and toggle checkboxes with Enter or Space. See navigating menus for the complete rundown.

Hunt and tame

Two checkboxes do the real work:

• Hunt: marks the animal to be killed. A colonist who has the Hunting work type assigned and a ranged weapon equipped will go shoot it. Successful hunts yield meat and other resources from the carcass, which vary by species (leather is common but not guaranteed). See the Work tab to make sure Hunting is assigned.
• Tame: marks the animal for taming. A handler will approach it and attempt to win it over. Success depends on the animal's wildness and your handler's Animals skill.

Revenge chance

One column to check before committing to anything is revenge chance. This is the probability that the animal attacks instead of cooperating when a hunt or taming attempt goes wrong. A high revenge chance means a failed shot or botched taming is likely to start a fight. Some animals can seriously injure or kill a colonist before help arrives.

Low revenge chance means an easier and safer target. High revenge chance means bring backup, or leave it alone.

Predators

Predators on the map hunt your animals and occasionally attack colonists. They show up in the Wildlife tab like any other animal. You can designate a predator for hunting to remove the threat, or tame it if your handler is skilled enough. Predator behavior is covered in depth on the RimWorld wiki's Animals page.

Learn more

Which animals are safe to hunt, which are worth taming, and how predators behave on the map are all covered on the RimWorld wiki's Animals page.

Related pages

• The Animals tab manages the creatures you have already tamed: training, allowed areas, and auto-slaughter.

The Research tab

The Research tab is where you choose what your colony learns next. Almost everything advanced in the game requires completing research first, from stone cutting to ship engines. Press F6 to open it.

The game lays research out as a large node graph. The mod presents it as a tree view instead: arrow Up and Down through projects, expand and collapse with Right and Left.

Categories

The tree groups projects into three categories:

• Available: projects you can start right now because their prerequisites are met.
• Completed: everything already researched.
• Locked: projects you cannot start yet because a prerequisite is unfinished.

With the Anomaly DLC, a second research tree sits alongside the standard one for the DLC's own projects.

Project details

Press Enter on a project to open its full details, then arrow through them. You will find:

• A description of what the project does.
• Its prerequisites: the projects that must be finished first.
• Any other requirements beyond prerequisites, such as a specific workbench or building.
• What it unlocks: the buildings, items, or abilities the research grants.
• Its dependent projects: what becomes available once this one is done.
• A "start research" action to queue it up.

Jumping along the tree

The prerequisites and dependent projects listed in a project's details are navigable links. Press Enter on one to jump directly to that project in the tree. This lets you trace a chain backward to see what you need first, or forward to see where a line of research leads.

When you have followed a link and want to return, press Escape. It steps you back one level at a time, so you can chase prerequisites three projects deep without losing your place.

A note on hidden prerequisites

A few research projects have prerequisites that the game itself never displays on screen. Because the mod reports what the game exposes, it cannot announce a requirement the game keeps hidden, so a project may occasionally depend on something that is not listed in its details. The RimWorld wiki's Research page documents every project's full requirements, including the ones the game leaves out, so it is the place to check when a project will not unlock and you cannot tell why.

Learn more

What to research first, and the order that gets a new colony established quickly, is a strategy question of its own. The RimWorld wiki's Research page lays out the full tree and common opening priorities, and lists every prerequisite, including any the game does not show in-game.

Related pages

• Navigating menus covers tree views in general, including the submenu navigation mode if expand-and-collapse feels cumbersome.

Quests

Quests are the offers and jobs the world sends you: a faction requesting help, a wanderer who wants to join, a request to host a refugee in exchange for goods. Press F7 to open the Quests menu.

Moving around the menu

The menu has two parts: the list of quests on one side and the reward preferences on the other.

• Left/Right move between the quest categories: Available, Active, and Historical. Available holds new offers, Active shows accepted quests in progress, and Historical is the archive of finished or expired ones.
• Tab/Shift+Tab move between the quest list and the reward preferences panel.

Reading and accepting a quest

Arrow up and down through the quest list to hear each quest's details. For short quests this works well. For longer ones, press Enter to expand the quest and arrow through its details one piece at a time instead of hearing everything in one announcement.

To accept a quest, press Alt+A.

Choosing among reward options

Many quests offer several reward packages to choose from.

After pressing Alt+A, arrow through the reward options that appear.

Alternatively, expand the quest with Enter, arrow down to the bottom, and activate one of the per-option buttons: "Accept reward 1," "Accept reward 2," and so on.

When the cursor is on a reward button, press Alt+I to choose which item in that reward to open the info card for. The info card shows full stats so you can compare what each reward option contains.

Reward preferences

Tab over to the reward preferences panel to set which kinds of rewards you will accept. This steers what the game offers. For example, refusing goodwill prompts the game to substitute a different reward type instead.

(Royalty) With the Royalty DLC, refusing honor here nudges the Empire toward offering higher-quality items.

Learn more

For what specific quests do, how rewards are generated, and the strategy of which to accept, see the Quests page on the RimWorld wiki.

The info card works the same way here as on other screens: Alt+I opens it on a reward item. The context-menu key ] does nothing on the quests screen, so do not expect it to act here.

Health and medical care

Sooner or later someone gets shot, bitten by a wild boar, or wakes up with the flu. This page covers how to check a pawn's health, how treatment works, and how to schedule surgery. For the medical mechanics themselves (what each injury does, how infections progress, which prosthetics are worth installing), see the Health and Medicine pages on the RimWorld wiki.

The quick health readout: Alt+H

Press Alt+H on the map to hear a fast health summary for a pawn. The mod checks the tile under the cursor first; if no pawn is there, it falls back to whoever you have selected via the colonist bar. It works on colonists, enemies, and animals.

The summary is built for combat triage, not paperwork. It reads the name, then: pain level, bleeding rate with a time-to-death estimate when they are losing blood, any of consciousness, movement, or manipulation that has dropped below full, injured body parts with their remaining hit points, and whole-body conditions such as diseases. If nothing is wrong, it says the pawn is healthy.

When multiple pawns are selected and the cursor is not on anyone, Alt+H opens a small picker to choose whose health to read.

For a deeper look, open the pawn's inspection tree and go to the Health category. Type "inf" to jump to infections, "leg," "arm," or "head" to jump to everything wrong with that body part. Arrow up and down through the matching results. For how the inspection tree works in general, see navigating menus.

Reading the full health tab

To open the inspection tree for a pawn, put the cursor on them and press Enter, or select the pawn via the colonist bar and press Ctrl+Alt+Enter. Then arrow to the Health category and expand it.

Inside Health you will find, in order:

• Operations and Health Settings: the two action items described below.
• Pain and bleeding lines, when they apply.
• A node for each injured body part. Expand a part to hear its condition and remaining hit points, plus the specific conditions on it. Identical wounds are grouped, so you hear "gunshot wound x3" rather than three separate entries. If the pawn has no conditions, it says so.
• A Capacities section: sight, manipulation, moving, consciousness, and the rest, each with a percentage and a plain-language rating. Expand a capacity to hear what is dragging it down.

Learn more about what specific conditions mean on the wiki: Injury and Disease.

How treatment works

Treatment is a job your colonists perform on their own, controlled through the work system. A pawn who is hurt or sick needs to be tended by a doctor. The doctor is whoever has the Doctor work type enabled and a free moment. The patient needs the Patient work type enabled so they will go rest in a bed and accept care. Both are columns in the Work tab (F1). If nobody is tending the wounded, the usual causes are that no colonist has Doctor turned on, or the patient will not lie down because Patient is off.

A few details:

• Tend quality depends on the doctor's Medicine skill and the medicine used. Better medicine and a more skilled doctor mean wounds heal cleaner and infections are less likely.
• Medical beds and a clean, well-lit room improve outcomes. Mark a bed as medical from its inspection menu.

See Doctoring on the wiki for tend quality and surgery, and Medicine for the medicine types and when to use each.

Scheduling surgery

Surgery in RimWorld is a bill placed on a pawn, the same way a crafting bill sits on a workbench. Queue the operation, and a doctor performs it when they get to it. This covers everything from amputating an infected limb to installing a peg leg, a bionic eye, or harvesting an organ.

To schedule one:

1. Open the pawn's inspection tree (Enter on them, or Ctrl+Alt+Enter when selected), expand Health, and activate Operations with Enter.
2. A list shows operations already queued for this pawn, with an Add operation entry at the bottom. Arrow with Up/Down, and type to search.
3. Move to Add operation and press Enter to see every operation available for this pawn right now. Each entry announces the operation's name, description, the skill it requires, its ingredients, and a warning if you are missing a required medicine or part.
4. Press Enter on the operation you want. If it applies to a specific body part and more than one valid spot exists, you then pick the part from a list that reads each part's name, condition, and hit points. If there is only one sensible part, or the operation is not tied to a part, it is added immediately.

Back on the operations list, press Enter on a queued operation to reach View details, Remove, and Go back. Reorder the queue with Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down to control which operation a doctor performs first.

Two things to know before queuing surgery:

• The operation only happens if you have the right ingredients on hand (medicine, and the prosthetic or organ being installed) and a colonist with enough Medicine skill. The list flags missing ingredients, but it will not conjure a bionic arm you do not own.
• Surgery can fail, and a failed operation can injure or kill the patient. Higher Medicine skill and better medicine reduce that risk.

See Doctoring for success chances and Prosthesis for what can be installed.

Health Settings: per-pawn medical rules

The other action under Health is Health Settings. Open it to set three things for this pawn:

• Allowed food: which food policy the pawn follows.
• Medical care: the highest quality of medicine a doctor is allowed to spend on this pawn, from no medicine up through herbal, industrial, and glitterworld. The setting reads its current value and the available levels.
• Self tend: whether the pawn is allowed to treat their own wounds. If you enable this for a pawn who cannot perform Doctor work, the game reverts it and tells you why.

Arrow Up/Down through the three settings, press Enter to change one, pick a value, and Enter again to confirm. Medical care is a radio button: press Enter to select the care level you want. Interaction mode, where it applies, is a separate radio button.

Medical care across the colony

Health Settings changes one pawn at a time. To set medical care for the whole colony at once, use the Medical care column in the Assign tab (F3). It is the same setting, in a table where you can sort by column and paint a value down the column, so setting "industrial medicine for everyone, glitterworld for the prisoner you're trying to keep alive" takes a few keystrokes instead of a tour of every pawn.

Choosing the right medicine level matters: glitterworld medicine works wonders but runs out fast, and spending it on minor injuries is a waste. The Medicine wiki page lays out the trade-offs.

Learn more

• Health: overview of injuries, conditions, and capacities.
• Doctoring: tending, tend quality, and surgery.
• Medicine: medicine types and when to use each.
• Injury and Disease: what specific conditions do.
• Prosthesis: prosthetics and bionics.

Combat

When a raid shows up, a manhunter pack wanders in, or you want a colonist to put down a wounded animal, you take direct control of your pawns and tell them where to go and what to shoot. That direct control is called drafting, and this page covers how to do it from the keyboard: draft a pawn, move them, and order an attack.

RimWorld's combat runs in real time, so pausing with Space is essential. Pause, line up your orders, let time run, and watch what happens.

For the combat mechanics themselves (how shooting accuracy works, why cover matters, when a pawn goes down instead of dying), see the Combat page on the RimWorld wiki.

Drafting a pawn

Drafting takes a colonist off their normal work schedule and puts them under your direct command. While drafted, they stand where you tell them and attack what you point at instead of wandering off to haul rocks.

First select the pawn you want to control (comma and period cycle colonists; Alt plus a number jumps to a specific one). Then press R to draft. You will hear the pawn's name and the draft sound. Press R again to undraft, and the pawn returns to their schedule.

You can draft several pawns at once. Select a group (see checking on pawns for multi-select), then press R. The mod follows the game's own rule: it toggles every selected pawn that shares the first pawn's draft state, so one press drafts the stragglers. You will hear a summary like "Everyone drafted" or "Everyone except Dan drafted."

A few things to know:

• Only colonists who can be drafted respond to R. A pawn who is downed, in a mental break, or otherwise unable to fight will not draft.
• R only drafts when you are on the map with a pawn selected and no menu open. If a dialog is open, R does whatever that dialog uses it for.
• Drafting does not equip a weapon. A pawn fights with whatever they are already holding. To hand someone a weapon first, stand on the weapon's tile, select the pawn, and use the context menu to equip it.

See the Drafting page on the RimWorld wiki for more on the game's drafting rules.

Moving a drafted pawn

With a pawn drafted, move them by pointing the map cursor at a destination tile and giving a "go here" order.

The thorough way is the context menu. Move the cursor to the destination tile and press ]. A menu opens listing what the pawn can do at that spot, with "Go here" usually at the top. Arrow to it and press Enter.

The fast way is [ (left bracket). It fires the top option in that same menu immediately. Over an empty tile "Go here" is normally first, so [ is a quick "walk there." You will hear the pawn's name and the order, for example "Dan: Go here." Be careful with [ when an enemy is on the tile: the first option is then likely an attack order (fire at or melee), not "Go here," so the fast key may issue an attack you did not intend. With an enemy present, prefer the ] menu so you can see which order is at the top.

Hold Shift when confirming an order to queue it instead of replacing the current one. You can tell a pawn to move to one spot, then Shift+confirm a move to a second spot, and they will do them in sequence. The mod adds "Queued" to the announcement. Queuing works from both the ] menu (Shift+Enter on the option) and the [ shortcut (Shift+[).

Cover

Standing in the open during a firefight is how colonists die. Cover cuts the chance an incoming bullet connects, so where you park a drafted pawn is most of the fight.

Move the cursor onto a pawn and the mod reports how much cover whatever they are standing behind provides: either "no cover" or something like "behind sandbags (blocks 65%)." Scout a tile before confirming a move to see what cover it offers.

Cover comes from how solid the nearby object is (its fill percentage), not from one specific kind of thing:

• Sandbags and rock chunks are reliable cover.
• Walls fill the tile completely, so they give the most cover. Funneling enemies past a wall at a chokepoint is effective for this reason.
• Plants and other partial obstacles give partial cover: a saguaro cactus around 35%, trees around 25%, bushes around 20%.

The percentage the mod reads is a best case. Actual cover in a fight depends on where the enemy is standing relative to the object, so the same wall or sandbag protects against fire from one direction and not another.

The full cover rules (which objects count, how shooting angles interact with cover) live on the Cover page on the RimWorld wiki.

Ordering an attack

There are two ways to order an attack, depending on how much control you want.

Quick attack from the context menu

Put the cursor on the enemy and press ]. With a drafted pawn selected, the menu includes attack options such as "Attack [target]" for a ranged shot or a melee swing, depending on what the pawn is holding and how close they are. Arrow to the option you want and press Enter. Hold Shift to queue it after another order.

This is the order-and-forget approach: the pawn attacks that target and keeps attacking until it is down or out of reach.

Fire at and melee behave differently, and the difference decides where you have to stand your pawns:

• Melee makes the pawn run to the target and fight it in close. The pawn moves on its own to reach the enemy.
• Fire at makes the pawn stand still and shoot from where they are. The pawn will not move to get the enemy into range or into line of sight. If they cannot see the target or it is out of range, they do nothing. You position the pawn for cover and a clear line of fire yourself, then order the shot.

Aimed targeting with gizmos

For more control, especially with a specific weapon or a psycast, use the gizmo menu. Select a drafted pawn, press G, and arrow to the weapon's attack command. Press Enter to start targeting mode.

The mod hands the cursor back to you with a prompt such as "Bolt-action rifle attack. Use map navigation to select target, then press Enter." Move the map cursor with the arrow keys to the tile you want, then press Enter to issue the order. Press Escape to cancel targeting without attacking.

While in targeting mode, press R to announce the distance from the pawn to the cursor and whether the target is in range, for example "Distance: 12 tiles, IN RANGE" or "Distance: 35 tiles, OUT OF RANGE (max 28)."

Targeting mode can aim at things the ] order menu will not, including friendlies, walls, doors, and any other object. If you need to shoot a door open or fire on a friendly, this is the way to do it. Be deliberate about where you point it.

This targeting flow applies to ranged weapons, melee, mortars, and psycasts (Royalty). Whatever the source, you move the cursor and press Enter.

Some gizmos also carry their own shortcut key. When one does, the mod announces it right after the gizmo's name as you arrow through the G menu. You fire it with Shift plus that letter (for example, Shift plus the attack command's key starts targeting without opening the menu), because RimWorld Access keeps the plain letters for its own navigation. See gizmos for how this delegation works.

Targeting stays open when a shot fails

In vanilla RimWorld, clicking an invalid target exits targeting mode immediately, and in vanilla you would simply click again. Getting dropped out of targeting on every failed attempt would be tedious.

When you press Enter on a target that does not work, the mod explains why and keeps targeting open. You will hear something like "Out of range. Distance: 35, max range: 28" or "No line of sight to target," and the cursor stays put so you can adjust and try again. When you land a valid target, the pawn takes the order and targeting closes.

Reading the fight

A firefight is fast, and you cannot see the bullets. A few tools help:

• Cover: move the cursor onto a pawn and the mod reports how much cover whatever they are behind provides (described above).
• Alt+H reads a pawn's health: injuries, blood loss, whether they are down. Works on colonists, enemies, and animals, prioritizing whoever is under the cursor. Use it to tell whether a raider you have been shooting is actually taking damage.
• Alt+B reads the selected pawn's combat log: recent shots, hits, and misses involving them, grouped by battle.
• The scanner finds hostiles on the map so you can locate the threat before it reaches you.

Tips

• Ranged pawns do not automatically move into range or line of sight. If a pawn is not shooting, check that they can actually see the target from where they are standing.
• Guns can be used as melee weapons when the enemy is adjacent. The pawn will automatically switch to a melee attack at point-blank range.
• Melee pawns absorb fire and protect ranged colonists behind them. Placing melee fighters in front of shooters at a chokepoint concentrates fire while keeping your shooters out of reach.
• Letting enemies come to you through a narrow entrance is generally more effective than charging into an open field. Spread out pawns give enemies multiple targets to choose from; concentrated fire on a single enemy brings it down faster.
• Kiting (moving a colonist away while the enemy follows, buying time for other pawns to shoot) can turn a dangerous fight. A fast pawn can lead melee enemies around a corner while others fire. Movement speed decides who can kite whom: check a pawn's moving capacity with Alt+H, or open its info card with Alt+I for the full move-speed stat.
• The difficulty setting affects how raids scale. Starting on a lower difficulty while learning combat is reasonable.

For the mechanics, the wiki is thorough:

• Combat for the overall system.
• Cover for positioning.
• Weapons for what each gun and blade does.
• Shooting and Melee skills determine how well a given pawn fights.

Related pages

• Checking on pawns for selecting pawns and reading their health, mood, and skills.
• The context menu for the ] order menu used to move and attack.
• Gizmos for the G menu where weapon and ability targeting lives.
• The map for cursor movement, which is how every order is aimed.
• Learning RimWorld for tactics and the wider game.

Prisoners and wardens

Prisoners are people you have captured: raiders you knocked out, downed visitors, anyone you would rather hold than kill. You keep them to recruit into the colony, to ransom or release, or for other purposes. This page covers how to take a prisoner, where to put one, and how to manage them.

If you are new to the game's prisoner rules, the wiki's Prisoner page is the full reference.

You need a prison first

Build a cell before the fight. A prison is a normal room with a bed set for prisoners. There is no special "prison" building.

Build it the same way you build any room: walls, a door, a roof, and a bed inside. See walls, doors, and rooms for the room basics and the Architect menu for placing the bed.

To mark a bed as a prison bed:

1. Move the cursor onto the bed.
2. Press G to open the bed's gizmos.
3. Find the bed ownership gizmo and open it with Enter.

The bed has a dropdown that lets you choose whether beds in this room are used by colonists, prisoners, or slaves. Set it to Prisoners to make it a prison bed. With the Ideology DLC active, the Slaves option also appears in the dropdown; without Ideology, the choice is a simpler colonists/prisoners toggle. Once a bed is set for prisoners, the room it sits in becomes a prison.

A prisoner will not share a cell with a non-prisoner, and the game refuses the setting if the bed has no roof above it. The wiki explains what makes a good cell on its Prison section.

Capturing a downed pawn

Capturing goes through the context menu.

1. Select a colonist who can do the carrying (comma/period to cycle colonists, or pick one another way).
2. Move the cursor onto the downed pawn you want to capture.
3. Press ].
4. Arrow to the Capture option and press Enter.

Your colonist picks the pawn up and hauls them to an open prison bed. If there is no free prison bed, the capture is refused and the game says so. Build a cell first.

The option itself tells you useful things as you arrow onto it: if the target can never be recruited, it is flagged "unrecruitable," and capturing a member of a non-hostile faction warns you it will damage relations with them. The wiki covers capturing in more detail.

Opening the prisoner tab

Once someone is in a cell, open their inspection tree: move the cursor onto them and press Enter, or select them and press Ctrl+Alt+Enter. In the inspection tree, start typing "Prisoner" (or "Slave" for an enslaved pawn) to jump to that node, then press Enter to open the prisoner tab.

The tab opens with the pawn's identity, their current interaction mode, and their medical care setting. Press Escape to close it.

Moving around the prisoner tab

The tab is split into sections. Move between sections with Left and Right arrows, and move within a section with Up and Down.

• Information: read-only stats. Arrow down to hear recruitment resistance, prison-break chance, market value, what releasing them would do to faction relations, and more. With Ideology active you also hear their will level.
• Medical care: a radio button for the care level, from no care up through the best available medicine. Arrow to the level you want and press Enter to select it. This controls how much medicine your doctors spend treating this prisoner.
• Interaction modes: the main choices, a separate set of radio buttons. Arrow to the one you want and press Enter to select it. Only one is active at a time.
• Non-exclusive modes: extra options that layer on top of the interaction mode, handled as checkboxes. Press Space to toggle the current one.

As you arrow through interaction modes, each one reads its name, whether it is currently selected, and a description pulled from the game in your language.

The interaction modes

These are the orders you give your wardens. The exact list adjusts to your situation and DLCs, but the common ones are:

• Reduce resistance: wardens talk the prisoner down until their resistance reaches zero, with no recruitment attempt.
• Recruit: wardens chip away at resistance and, once it is low enough, try to recruit the prisoner into the colony.
• Release: let them go. The Information section tells you ahead of time whether releasing improves relations with their faction.
• Reduce will and Enslave (Ideology): break a prisoner's will and turn them into a slave.
• Execute: have a warden kill the prisoner. The option description warns you if no warden on the map is both assigned to wardening and able to do violence, which is the usual reason an execution order sits there doing nothing.
• Convert (Ideology): wardens work to convert the prisoner to one of your ideoligions. If you run more than one ideoligion, choosing Convert opens a short list to pick which one; arrow to it and press Enter, or press Escape to back out. The tab warns you if no warden follows that ideoligion, since then nobody can do the converting. See factions and ideology for more on ideoligions.

To learn more, see Recruitment and Resistance on the wiki.

Who does the work: the Warden

Nothing in the prisoner tab happens on its own. A colonist with the Warden work type does it: feeding prisoners, chatting to reduce resistance, recruiting, converting, enslaving, and executing. No warden, no progress.

Warden is a Social-skill job, so a colonist with high Social makes a far better recruiter. Enable it for at least one colonist in the Work tab, and raise its priority if you are trying to recruit someone quickly. Some jobs, like executions, also require a warden who is willing to do violence.

See the Warden section of the Work page on the wiki.

DLC notes

The prisoner tab adjusts to whatever DLCs you have:

• Ideology: adds will, the Reduce will and Enslave modes, and the Convert mode with its ideoligion picker. Slaves get their own version of the tab (suppression, terror, rebellion chance, and slave-specific modes).
• Biotech: bloodfeeder-related options appear when relevant, including a hemogen-farm mode.
• Anomaly: studiable captives show study interval and knowledge-gain information in the Information section.

If a mode exists for your prisoner, it will be in the list when you arrow through.

Learn more

• Prisoner: the full reference for prisoner rules, prison layout, resistance math, and prison breaks.
• Recruitment and Resistance: the mechanics of turning a prisoner into a colonist.
• Walls, doors, and rooms: room-building basics.

History and messages

Press F9 to open the History screen. From there, Tab switches to the Messages tab, which holds the running archive of every letter and notification the game has sent you.

The History screen

History is a flat list of colony statistics and records. Arrow up and down to move through it. Type ahead to jump to an entry by name. Home and End jump to the ends of the list. For general list navigation, see navigating menus.

The letters screen: L key

For the live list of current letters and alerts, press L on the map. This opens the notification menu directly without going through History first.

The L key collects all current messages, letters, and alerts and presents them as a list:

• Up/Down move between items in the list.
• Home/End jump to the first or last item.
• Type ahead to search: start typing to jump to a matching item.
• Enter opens the full detail view for the current item. In detail view, arrow up and down through the content line by line. After the last line you reach the buttons at the bottom. Not every letter has buttons.
• Left/Right move between buttons when you are in the buttons section of the detail view. Press Enter on a button to activate it.
• Escape goes back from detail view to the list, or closes the notification menu from the list.
• ] (right bracket) deletes the currently selected item. Only letters can be deleted; alerts cannot be removed this way.

Deleted letters still live in the F9 History archive, so deleting one here only clears it from the current notification list.

The Messages archive: F9 then Tab

The Messages tab in the History screen (F9, then Tab) is a persistent archive. It includes letters and messages you have already dismissed.

When the Messages tab is open:

• Up/Down navigate the list; Enter opens the detail view for the selected item.
• Alt+L toggles whether letters appear in the list. Letters are shown by default.
• Alt+M toggles whether messages appear in the list. Messages are hidden by default.
• Alt+J jumps to the location associated with the current item, if it has one, and closes the History window.
• Alt+P pins or unpins the current item.
• In detail view, arrow up and down through the content, then through the buttons. Left/Right move between buttons; Enter activates the focused button.

What gets deleted and what stays

Pressing ] on a letter in the notification menu (L key) removes it from the current notification stack. Alerts cannot be removed this way. The History archive (F9) keeps a record of past events regardless of dismissal; items there are not affected by deletion in the notification menu.

Learn more

For what specific event letters mean and how to respond to them, the Events page on the RimWorld wiki covers individual events in depth.

Factions and ideology

The Factions screen shows every group in the world: who likes you, who wants you dead, and everything in between. The Ideology screen covers belief systems, both your colony's and other factions'. Neither screen has a hotkey in the base game, so the mod gives them one.

Press F12 to open the Extra Menus picker. This small menu lists Factions (always available) and Ideology (only if you have the Ideology DLC). Choose one to open it. If only Factions is available, F12 opens it directly with no picker.

Factions

The Factions screen is a tree view. Each item in the tree is a faction. Expand a faction with Right to reveal its details, then arrow through them: relationship, goodwill, who their leader is, and the rest of what the game tracks.

If you are new to tree views, see navigating menus for how expanding and collapsing work, including the simplified navigation mode.

Ideology

(Ideology DLC) The Ideology screen is a two-tab tree view.

The first tab is a flat list of every ideology in the game. Arrow through it to select one. This includes your colony's ideology and the ones other factions follow.

Press Tab to move to the second tab, which holds a large tree view of the selected ideology: its memes, precepts, rituals, and so on. Expand items and arrow through them the same way as any other tree view.

Ideology mechanics run deep (memes, precepts, roles, rituals). See the Ideology page on the RimWorld wiki to learn more.

Building and Production

The Architect menu

The Architect menu is where you issue every build, mine, chop, haul, and zone order on the map. RimWorld calls each orderable action a "designator." Walls, doors, stockpile zones, "chop this tree," and "expand the home area" are all designators, and they all live here.

Opening the Architect menu

Press Tab to open the Architect menu.

It is a tree view organized by category: Structure, Zone, Production, Temperature, and so on. Right arrow expands a category, Left arrow collapses it, and Up and Down move between items.

You almost never need to crawl the whole tree. Type-ahead works here, so start typing what you want and the menu jumps to it. Type "wall" for walls, "stock" for stockpile zones, "chop" for the chop-wood order, "expand" for expand-home-area. Find the designator you want, then press Enter to start placing it.

Designators are shape-based

Once you pick a designator, you place it using a shape. Most designators support more than one shape and start on a sensible default. For something physical like a wall or door, you choose the material first (see "Choosing a material" below), and then you pick the shape. Press Tab to move to the shape menu, then Up and Down to change shape, or type the shape name (for example "empty" for an empty rectangle) and press Enter.

Three shapes cover most work:

• Filled rectangle. You set two corners and it fills the whole interior. Use this for zones, like a stockpile covering a 12-by-12 area.
• Empty rectangle. Same two corners, but only the perimeter is placed. Use this for walls, since you want the outline of a room, not a solid block.
• Manual. Place one object at a time. Use this for single items like a door.

Placing a shape

The placement flow is the same every time: pick a starting point, pick an ending point, confirm.

1. Move your cursor to where the shape should begin and press Space to set the first point.
2. Move the cursor to the opposite corner. Use the arrow keys for one tile at a time, or jump modes (below) for precise distances.
3. Press Space again to set the second point.
4. Press Enter to confirm and place. The mod announces what was created, for example "12 by 12 stockpile zone created."

For a manual designator like a door, the flow is shorter: position the cursor, Space to place, Enter to confirm.

Shift+Space removes the last point you placed, or removes a blueprint when the cursor is over one.

Jump modes for precise distances

The same four jump modes are available during building. The two that matter most for laying out a shape:

Preset distance (the default) moves the cursor by a fixed number of tiles per Ctrl+arrow press.

• Shift+Left and Shift+Right decrease or increase the preset distance by 1.
• Shift+Ctrl+Left and Shift+Ctrl+Right decrease or increase it by 10.

So to lay out a 12-tile wall: set the preset distance to 12 with Shift+Right (pressing it until the mod announces 12), press Space to set the first point, then Ctrl+Right to jump 12 tiles east, Space again, and Enter to place.

The jump distance counts the starting tile, so a distance of 13 moves the cursor 14 tiles including the start. To enclose a 12-by-12 interior, set the jump distance to 13: the walls form a 14-by-14 exterior, and the two wall tiles on each side leave 12 by 12 of open floor inside.

Impassable jumps the cursor to the last tile a colonist could walk to in that direction, which is handy when you want to pick up exactly where an existing structure ends. Terrain and Structure jump to the next tile whose ground or building is different, which is the quick way to find the far corner of a room or the end of a wall you already built. See the map page for all four.

Shift+Up and Shift+Down cycle through all available jump modes. These keys change the mode; they do not move the cursor.

For jump modes in other contexts (navigating the map outside of building), see the map.

Building more than one shape at once

• Press = (equals) to add another shape to the current order. Already-placed shapes stay put, and you start positioning a new one. Repeat as needed, then Enter to confirm them all.
• Press - (minus) to remove the last shape you placed. If a rock or other obstacle blocks part of your placement, minus removes a shape, but you then press = (equals) to add one back. With zero shapes there is nothing left to confirm.

Select all

Some designators, like Chop Wood or Mine, can apply to many targets at once. Press Ctrl+A to select all: the first press grabs everything in the current enclosure, a second press extends to the whole map. Ctrl+Shift+A steps back out one level if you went too far. Press Enter to confirm.

Inside a room, Ctrl+A selects its interior, which is useful when you want to zone or order everything inside a building without painting tiles one by one.

Choosing a material

When you build something physical like a wall or door, the game presents a material list. You choose the material first, then the shape. Type to filter the list or arrow through it, then Enter to choose. Stone blocks and wood are good choices for walls and doors. Avoid steel for walls and doors: it is wasteful, and steel is better saved for machines and other components.

If the list says None available, you have no stored stock of that material. Selecting it is still valid: place the blueprint, and pawns will deliver the material once they gather or haul it. This lets you stage large projects: lay out the whole structure now, and construction proceeds as materials arrive. You can also pick a material you have on hand to start immediately.

Related pages

• Gizmos: the contextual commands on something you have already built.
• The context menu: bulk actions on a designation type, like canceling every chop order at once.
• Walls, doors, and rooms: how buildings become enclosed spaces.
• Zones and stockpiles: laying out and configuring storage.

Walls, doors, and rooms

In RimWorld you do not pick a "bedroom" or a "kitchen" from a menu. You build walls and doors yourself, and the game figures out what the room is from what you put inside it. Drop a bed in a walled space and it becomes a bedroom. Put a stove in another and it becomes a kitchen. (A butcher table also belongs to food prep, but avoid putting stoves and butcher tables in the same room: the mess from butchering hurts the cleanliness that cooking depends on. Keep them separate.)

All of this is placed from the Architect menu.

Building an enclosure

To make a room, build a connected enclosure of walls with at least one door. The game continuously checks enclosed spaces and labels them based on their contents.

The placement flow for walls:

1. Open the Architect menu with Tab and type "wall" to jump to the wall designator. Press Enter to select it.
2. Choose your material from the list that appears. Material is chosen first, before you draw the shape.
3. If the list says None available for a material, you can still select it. Pawns will deliver the material when they have it. Choose a material you already have if you want construction to start immediately.
4. The shape selector defaults to empty rectangle, which is what you want for a room outline. Press Tab to change shape if needed.
5. Move your cursor to one corner of the intended room and press Space.
6. Move to the opposite corner. Use Ctrl+arrow to jump by the preset distance (set the distance with Shift+Left / Shift+Right) for precise placement.
7. Press Space to set the second corner, then Enter to confirm.

The mod announces the result, for example "14 by 14 wall blueprint placed."

Shift+Space removes the last placed point. If you have already confirmed a blueprint and your cursor is on it, Shift+Space removes that blueprint.

Do not choose steel or a single material by default if you have stone blocks available. Stone walls are stronger and do not burn; they are worth the extra cost for permanent structures. The choice depends on what materials are at hand.

Filled vs. empty rectangles

The shape matters:

• Empty rectangle places only the perimeter. Use this for walls.
• Filled rectangle places the entire interior. Use this for zones and floors, not for walls (a filled rectangle of walls would solid-block the interior).

Press Tab while a designator is active to cycle through available shapes.

Doors

A door replaces one wall cell. Build your walls first, then add doors where pawns need to pass. To place a door:

1. In the Architect menu, type "door" and press Enter.
2. Choose a material first, the same as with walls. Stone blocks or wood work well; avoid steel here too.
3. The shape defaults to Manual (one tile at a time), which is correct for a door. In manual mode, Space places one door per press, and placing over an existing wall replaces it.
4. Move the cursor to the wall cell where the door goes, press Space, then Enter.

There is a faster way. Move the cursor onto an existing wall, press G for its gizmos, and turn that wall straight into a door. This skips the Architect menu entirely.

Colonists can open and close doors automatically as they pass. You need at least one door in any enclosed space, or colonists cannot enter or exit.

Building over existing walls

You can run a build order straight over walls that are already placed. The game skips cells that already have the structure you asked for. If you specify a different material than what is already there, the game treats it as a replacement order and rebuilds in the new material.

Roofs

Once you enclose a space with walls, the game roofs it automatically. A wall supports roof for up to 6 tiles out from itself. The practical limit for an unsupported room is roughly 12 tiles on the short side. A 14-by-14 outer footprint gives a 12-by-12 interior, which is close to the maximum for a single open room.

Only the short side is limited. A 12-by-50 hall roofs without issue, because no interior point is more than 6 tiles from a wall. For larger open spaces, add interior columns or short walls to give the roof additional support.

Electricity and conduits

A generator powers machines near it. Power-consuming buildings do not need to be placed directly on a conduit: the game auto-connects any building to the nearest power transmitter within 6 tiles. To carry power further, run conduits from your generator outward. In practice, lay conduits as an unbroken run of adjacent tiles leading away from the generator, so the grid reaches wherever you need it.

Hidden conduits (in the Architect menu under Power) are built underground so they do not show as objects on the map. They cost 2 steel each, compared to 1 steel for a regular conduit. For permanent installations inside buildings, hidden conduits are the cleaner choice. For water crossings, waterproof conduits are available at a higher material cost.

Selecting a room's interior

Press Ctrl+A while your cursor is inside a room to select the entire interior. This is useful for placing a zone or issuing an order across the whole inside of a building without painting each tile.

Learn more

Room mechanics go deeper: roof support math, room roles, beauty, wealth, temperature, and cleanliness. See the Walls and Room articles on the RimWorld wiki for the full picture.

Zones and stockpiles

A stockpile zone is a patch of ground you mark for storage. Colonists haul loose items into it. A stockpile is just a designated area, not a building, so you can place one anywhere, including inside a temperature-controlled room (a freezer, for instance, is a stockpile in a cooled room).

Creating a stockpile

Open the Architect menu with Tab and type "stock" to jump to the stockpile zone. Press Enter to start placing it.

A stockpile uses the filled rectangle shape, since you want the whole area covered. Set the first corner with Space, move to the opposite corner, Space again, then Enter to create it. The mod announces the size, for example "12 by 12 stockpile zone created." To make a non-rectangular stockpile, press = to add another rectangle to the same zone before confirming.

Inspecting and configuring a stockpile

To see a stockpile's settings, move your cursor onto it and press Enter. This opens the stockpile's inspect view, the same inspect screen used for any selected object. Inside the inspect view you will find "Storage settings" as one of the options. Press Enter on it to open the storage settings.

Storage settings contain three main controls.

Priority

Stockpiles have a priority level. When an item could go into more than one stockpile, colonists fill the higher-priority one first. This steers items toward the storage you intend for them.

Be careful with food and freezers. It is tempting to set a freezer higher than a general dump so food always ends up cold, but once the freezer fills, the overflow spills into the warm pile and spoils. Size your freezer for the food you keep rather than relying on priority to protect it.

Allowed items

A list of every item type, grouped by category, with each item toggled allowed or forbidden. It is a tree view, so Right arrow expands a category, arrow through its contents, and toggle individual items. There are shortcuts to clear everything (allow nothing) or allow everything, which you can use as a starting point before fine-tuning. A common setup: clear all, then allow only the one category you want this stockpile dedicated to.

Durability and quality filters

A durability (hit points) filter lets the stockpile refuse items below a percentage of their max condition. Quality filters work similarly when they appear.

Checking what is stored

Storage settings control what a stockpile is allowed to hold, not what is in it. To see what your colony actually has in storage, press I to open the inventory screen, which lists every stored item across the whole colony regardless of which stockpile holds it. To find where a particular thing is sitting, use the scanner.

Learn more

See Stockpiles on the RimWorld wiki for strategy on how to organize stockpiles effectively.

Allowed areas

An allowed area is a part of the map you can tie a pawn or animal to, restricting where they will go. An allowed area is one kind of zone (the game groups areas, stockpiles, and growing zones together as zones), which is why you manage it from the Zone category of the Architect menu. You assign areas to pawns and pets from the Animals menu (F4). To learn more, see Allowed areas on the RimWorld wiki.

The classic use: keep a pet out of the freezer while letting it roam everywhere else.

Creating and expanding an area

Open the Architect menu with Tab, then navigate to the Zone category. There you will find "Expand allowed area." Press Enter and choose which area you want to expand. From there, paint tiles onto the area the same way you place any designator: Space to set points, Enter to confirm. See the Architect menu for the full placement flow.

If you have not made any areas yet, you will need to create one first (see Managing areas below).

Managing areas

In the Zone menu, navigate to Manage areas. This is a flat menu of your areas. Press ] (right bracket) to open the actions for one:

• New: create a new area and type a name for it.
• Rename: give an area a new name.
• Expand: add tiles to an area.
• Shrink: remove tiles from an area.
• Invert: flip the selection so every tile that was not in the area now is, and vice versa.
• Copy: duplicate an area.
• Delete: remove an area entirely.

The ] menu announces each option as you arrow through it, the same as any context menu.

The invert-then-shrink pattern

To restrict a pet to the whole colony except one room, building the area tile by tile across the entire base would take a long time. The faster approach works backwards:

1. Make a new area (Manage areas, ], New, type a name).
2. Invert it. An empty area becomes the entire map in one step.
3. Shrink it, painting over the room you want to exclude.
4. Open the Animals menu with F4 and assign the area to the animal.

The invert step is easy to forget on first use. If the concept is not clicking, see Allowed areas on the RimWorld wiki for a fuller explanation.

Bills and workbenches

A bill is a standing order to produce a specific item at a workbench: cook meals, butcher corpses, tailor a parka, smith plate armor. Bills differ from designators, which are one-off map orders. A designator says "build a wall here." A bill says "keep making this until I say otherwise."

Every crafting workbench uses bills: the stove, butcher table, tailoring bench, smithy, fabrication bench, and so on.

Adding a bill

1. Move your cursor onto a workbench and press Enter to open its inspect screen.
2. Navigate to Bills.
3. Choose Add bill.
4. A flat menu lists every product that bench can make. For a stove, that includes simple meals, fine meals, lavish meals, vegetarian and carnivore variants, and batch versions.
5. Press Enter on the item you want. It joins the bench's bill list.

For how flat menus work in general (arrow keys, type-ahead, Home/End), see navigating menus.

Bill order matters

Bills run top to bottom, most important first. A pawn does the first bill that still has work to do. You can reorder bills in the bill list.

Editing a bill

Press Enter on a bill to open its options. The fields are presented in the order below. Most adjust with Left / Right; many also accept Enter to type a value directly.

Recipe info

A read-only summary of the recipe: name, description, work amount, and skill requirements.

Suspend / Resume

Press Enter to toggle the bill between active and suspended. A suspended bill is skipped by all workers until you resume it.

If the bill is currently auto-paused (it reached its target and paused itself), an Unpause item appears just below this. Press Enter on it to resume manually.

Repeat mode

Controls how long the bill keeps running:

• Do X times: make the product a set number of times, then stop. When this mode is active, a Repeat count field appears below where you set the number.
• Do until you have X: keep production topped up to a target count. This opens a block of additional fields (see Target count through Pause when satisfied below).
• Do forever: never stop. Useful for chores with no real target, like butchering corpses.

Target count

Applies in "do until you have X" mode. This is the X. Adjust with Left / Right, or press Enter to type a number.

Currently have

A read-only readout showing how many you currently have versus the target, for example "currently have 0 of 51."

Within this block you may also see:

• Include equipped: count weapons or apparel that are currently equipped by pawns (appears for weapon and apparel bills).
• Include tainted: count tainted apparel (appears for applicable apparel bills).
• Include source: choose whether to count from all storage or a specific stockpile.
• Hit points filter: only count items above a percentage of their max condition.
• Quality range: restrict which quality levels count toward the target.
• Limit to allowed stuff: only count items made from your allowed materials.

Pause when satisfied

A toggle. When the target count is reached, the bill pauses rather than sitting idle. It resumes once the count drops to the Unpause at threshold, which appears just below when this toggle is on. This prevents pawns from repeatedly starting and stopping at the boundary.

Destination

This is the store-mode field. It controls where the finished product goes after it is made. Press Enter to choose:

• Drop on floor: the item lands at the bench. No hauling trip needed if your bench is near storage.
• Take to best stockpile: a pawn hauls the item to the appropriate stockpile.
• Your defined storage groups and stockpiles may also appear here as options.

This field is labeled based on the current store mode, not "product destination."

Worker

Choose which pawn or pawn type is allowed to work this bill. Options include any worker, any slave, any mech, any non-mech, any human, or a specific pawn by name. This is the field literally labeled "Worker" in the game.

Skill min / max

Two separate items that set a skill level range. Only pawns whose skill level falls within the range may work the bill. These appear when no specific pawn is set (the Worker field is on "any" rather than a named pawn) and the recipe has a relevant skill.

This is a distinct filter from Worker. Worker controls who by type; skill range controls who by level.

Ingredient search radius

How far pawns will travel to gather ingredients for this bill. Reduce it to prevent pawns from hiking across the map for a single ingredient. "Unlimited" is the maximum.

Ingredient filter

Choose which ingredients the bill may use. The standard example is excluding human meat from a cooking bill, so colonists do not accidentally prepare long pig.

Rename

Give the bill a custom name so it is easier to identify in the list.

Learn more

Bills are simple individually but combine in complex ways. For strategy on setting up reliable production chains and managing target counts, see the Bills article on the RimWorld wiki.

Moving, reinstalling, and deconstructing

Most furniture and buildings can be picked up and moved. Anything you no longer want can be torn down. Both actions are gizmos: contextual commands you reach by pressing G on the selected object. Deconstruct also lives in the Architect menu (under the Orders category) as a paint-over-an-area order, but the G gizmo on the object itself is usually faster for both reinstalling and deconstructing.

• Reinstall picks the object up and puts it into placement mode so you can set it down somewhere else. Use it when reorganizing, for example moving beds into a freshly built bedroom.
• Deconstruct removes the object entirely, usually returning some of the materials. Use it when scrapping something permanently, for example clearing out a low-quality bed to build a better one.

How to do it

1. Move your cursor onto the object.
2. Press G to open its gizmos.
3. Choose Reinstall or Deconstruct and press Enter.

For deconstruct, that is all. The object is marked for removal and a pawn will tear it down.

For reinstall, the object enters placement mode. Move the cursor to the new location and confirm, just like placing a manual designator. The jump modes available in building mode work here the same way. See the Architect menu for the full placement flow.

Gizmo shortcuts

Gizmos can carry their own keyboard shortcuts, so you can trigger Reinstall or Deconstruct without opening the menu. For how those shortcuts work, including what happens when two gizmos share one, see gizmos.

Forbidding and the home area

Two housekeeping systems control what colonists are allowed to touch and which part of the map they treat as home.

Forbidding

A forbidden item is one colonists will leave strictly alone. They will not haul it, eat it, equip it, or use it for building until you un-forbid it.

Everything that lands with you at the start of a game is forbidden by default. Colonists will wander around looking idle while standing next to a pile of their own supplies, because that pile is off-limits from their point of view.

Press Alt+F on the map to un-forbid everything at once. The mod announces a count, for example "57 items un-forbidden," and colonists can get to work.

To forbid or un-forbid a single item, move the cursor onto it and either press G for its gizmos and toggle the Forbid command, or just press F to toggle it directly. This is useful when you want colonists to ignore one specific thing without changing everything else.

Play Settings

Play Settings is a small set of toggles that change how the colony runs automatically. Open the pause menu with Escape and choose Play Settings to reach them. Two are worth knowing:

• Auto-rebuild. When on, colonists automatically queue a rebuild for any structure that gets destroyed, so a raider that knocks down a wall does not leave a permanent hole.
• Auto-expand home area. On by default. The next section explains the tradeoff.

The home area

The home area is the part of the map colonists treat as theirs. Inside it, they repair damage, fight fires, and clean up filth. Outside it, they do none of those things.

By default the game expands the home area as you build, which is usually helpful. The problem appears when you build something far from the main base. That distant structure becomes part of the home area, and colonists will trek all the way across the map to sweep its floor instead of doing useful work nearby.

Many players turn auto-expand home area off in Play Settings and add to it manually only where they want coverage.

To extend the home area yourself: open the Architect menu with Tab, go to the Zone section, and choose "Expand home area" (type "expand" to jump straight to it). Mark the area the same way you place a stockpile zone: set two corners with Space, then Enter. Press = to add a second rectangle if one shape is not enough.

When your cursor is inside a finished building, Ctrl+A selects that room's interior, which is a quick way to mark the inside as home area without painting each tile. It selects the interior floor, not the walls, so add the walls separately with their own lines or a larger selection if you want them covered too.

Related pages

• The Architect menu for placing zones and using the shape tools.
• Gizmos for the per-item Forbid toggle.
• Zones and stockpiles for managing storage areas.

The World and Travel

The world map

The world map shows the planet your colony sits on. Press F8 to open it; press F8 again to return to your colony.

Moving around

Arrow keys move between tiles. The camera follows. When you enter a new biome, the mod announces the biome name and reads a short description.

Reading tile information

As you arrow around, the mod announces a summary for each tile, including terrain and biome. The number keys let you dig into specific details on demand:

• 1 = growing conditions: growing period, rainfall, forageability, whether animals can graze, stone types
• 2 = movement and travel cost: movement difficulty, terrain, hilliness, elevation, roads, rivers, coastal status (and route info if you're mid-route-plan)
• 3 = disease frequency per year
• 4 = time zone and global coordinates
• 5 = regions and landmarks

Press a number key when you want that detail; you do not need to press them after every move.

Entering a settlement or inspecting a caravan

Press Enter on a tile to open a selection menu for whatever is there. If the tile holds your own settlement, Enter lets you enter it. If a caravan is on the tile, Enter inspects it. Enter does not settle an empty tile; settling is done through a gizmo.

Searching the map

Press Z to search the world by name. Type a query and press Enter; the game finds matching tiles or sites.

The scanner also works on the world map, with world-specific categories including biomes, roads, and settlements. Switching the scanner to the settlements category is the practical way to find nearby factions and check whether they are neutral or hostile.

Faction proximity

When settling a new colony, place it at least 5 tiles from any other faction's settlement to avoid the crowding goodwill penalty. Beyond that distance the penalty does not apply, and being farther away does not improve relations further.

The route planner

Press R to open the route planner. Place waypoints with Space; the mod announces each one with the path and an estimated travel time. Press Shift+Space to remove the waypoint at the cursor. Press E to hear the estimated time of arrival, and Escape to exit.

The same route planner is used inside the form-caravan flow, so a route you plan here works the same way when you send a caravan. See caravans for that flow.

The context menu on the world map

] opens orders for the selected caravan at the current tile: travel here, trade with, attack, and so on. [ fires the top order immediately. See the context menu for the full model.

Related pages

• The scanner for finding tiles and sites quickly
• Caravans for forming a caravan and sending colonists out
• The context menu for tile orders

Caravans

Caravans are groups of your colonists (and any pack animals and goods they carry) traveling across the world map. Forming a caravan is one way to leave your colony: you also have transport pods and other options. Caravans let you explore, trade with other settlements, raid, and found new colonies.

Forming a caravan

There are two ways to begin. From the world map, navigate to your settlement's tile, press ] to open its orders, and choose to form a caravan. You can also use the caravan hitching spot from the Architect menu and form a caravan from there. Either way you land in the route-planning step.

Move with the arrow keys if you like, but most people switch to the scanner, jump to the destination, and press Space to set a waypoint there. Waypoint 1 is placed automatically at your settlement.

• Press Space to add a waypoint. The mod announces each one with the path and an estimated travel time, for example "waypoint 2 added, estimated travel time 0.2 days at average caravan speed."
• Press Shift+Space to remove the waypoint at the cursor.
• Press E to hear the estimated time of arrival.
• Press Enter to confirm the route and open the formation screen.
• Press Escape to cancel.

If you are not using auto-provision, set the single destination waypoint and press Enter. If you are using auto-provision, after the destination waypoint, return to your settlement and press Space to add another waypoint there. This does not make the caravan travel home; it tells the auto-provision system how long the round trip is so it can pack the right amount of supplies.

The formation screen

The formation screen is where you choose who and what travels. Left and Right move between the tabs (pawns, items, supplies). Press Tab to reach the summary and info view, and Tab again to return.

Choosing pawns and goods

On the pawns tab, Space or Enter selects a colonist or animal to bring. Animals with identical name, age, gender, and medical status are grouped into one entry; press Enter on a group to pick how many to take. Other animals each get their own slot.

On the items and supplies tabs, Space or Enter on an entry opens a quantity chooser. In the chooser, Up and Down change the amount by one, Home sets the minimum and End the maximum, or type a number directly; Enter confirms. Back on the list, Shift+Enter takes as many as you can carry within the remaining capacity. Pack animals such as alpacas and buffalo raise that capacity.

Load real food, medicine, and meals on the supplies tab. Colonists can forage in forests and shrublands, but rarely enough to feed the whole group, so pack food rather than relying on it.

The summary view

Press Tab to reach the summary view. It shows the numbers that decide whether the trip succeeds: total mass, carry capacity, speed, food on hand, foraging rate, visibility, and more. Press Alt+I on most values to open the info card for a breakdown.

Auto-provision

Press Alt+A to toggle auto-provision. When it is on, the game fills the Supplies tab based on the planned route and travel time; the tab is locked while auto-provision is active. Press Alt+A again to unlock and adjust supplies yourself.

Sending the caravan

Press Alt+S to send. A food-warning dialog may appear; confirm if the food you packed is sufficient for the trip. Your pawns then gather their gear and walk off the map.

Caravans on the world map

Selecting and inspecting

• Comma / Period: cycle between your caravans.
• Enter: on the tile where a caravan sits, inspects that caravan. From there you can inspect inventory, swap gear between pawns, or enter one of your own settlements on that tile.
• Delete on an item or pawn in the inspect view removes it. Removed items are destroyed. Removing a pawn from the colony is permanent, but it is not deletion: that pawn is not destroyed and may appear later in events, including raids.

Following a traveling caravan

A caravan in transit has its path drawn on the world map, and the mod describes it for the selected caravan. On the caravan's own tile, you hear the direction it is heading. Move the cursor that way and the mod keeps describing the path ahead toward the destination, so you can trace the whole route step by step.

Ordering a caravan

Select a caravan first with Comma or Period. Then press ] on a destination tile to open the orders that caravan can carry out there: Travel to, Trade with, Attack, Settle, and so on. [ fires the top option immediately. This is the same idea as ] on your home map: the selected caravan is the actor, and the cursor tile is the target. See the context menu for the full model.

The caravan's own orders come from its gizmos. Press G on a selected caravan for Settle, Split, Rest, Merge, and others.

• Settle: founds a new colony or camp on the current tile.
• Split: opens a formation-style dialog to divide people and items into a second caravan.
• Rest: pauses travel to let the caravan recover. Caravans rest automatically at night, so this is mainly for emergency stops mid-day.

Merging two caravans

1. Move both caravans to the same tile.
2. Select both: press Ctrl+Space on the first, press Period to move to the second, then press Ctrl+Space again.
3. Press G and choose Merge.

Camping

When a caravan enters a tile without an existing map, you can stop and settle temporarily. The tile becomes a small colony map where your pawns can hunt, mine, and gather before moving on. This is mainly a way to acquire resources from a tile and carry them back, so it works best with a caravan that has high carrying capacity. It is also there for rest or shelter when a trip runs long.

Getting home

Navigate to your colony's tile and press Enter to re-enter it, or press F8 to leave the world map and return where you were.

Moving between open maps

When you have more than one map open (your colony plus a camp or a second settlement), Shift+Comma and Shift+Period move between them. One exception: from a pocket map, such as one opened by a quest or event, you do not leave with Shift+Comma. The entry portal that brought you in has a gizmo to view the outer map instead. Press G on it.

Related pages

• World map for world navigation and tile reading
• The context menu for tile orders: Travel, Trade, Attack, Settle
• The info card for caravan stat breakdowns with Alt+I
• Transport pods for faster travel than walking
• Trading for what happens when you reach a settlement

Transport pods, shuttles, and gravships

Transport pods launch colonists and cargo across the planet much faster than a caravan can walk. You build pods, load them, and fire them at a destination tile.

Transport pods

To launch a group of pods, select a loaded transport pod and press G for its gizmos. RimWorld Access adds a gizmo called "Group all available pods" that selects every pod the current one can group with and opens the loading dialog, so you do not need to gather them one at a time.

Loading

Pod loading uses the same interface as caravan formation: the pawns, items, and supplies tabs, navigated the same way. Left and Right switch between tabs, Tab reaches the summary view, and Space or Enter selects a pawn or opens the quantity chooser for an item. Shift+Enter takes as many as you can carry. See caravans for the full rundown.

When packed, press Alt+S to launch.

Choosing where to land

After pressing Alt+S you pick a destination tile on the world map. What happens next depends on the tile:

• A tile your pawns already occupy: you can specify the exact landing position (for example, coordinates 50,50) to control precisely where the pods come down.
• A settlement: press Enter to choose whether you are arriving to trade or to attack, and where to land (center or edge).

What pods become on arrival

• Landing on a tile that holds one of your caravans merges the pod contents into that caravan.
• Otherwise, if at least one pawn is aboard, a new caravan forms where the pods land.

Shuttles

Shuttles work the same way: find the gizmo to start travel, load up, and send. The loading and destination flow follows the same pattern as pods.

Gravships

A gravship is a built structure that flies. You construct gravship panels around an engine, then launch using the engine or pilot-console gizmos, which run through the game's ritual system. If you have reached this point, the travel flow will be familiar from caravans and pods. See the RimWorld wiki's Gravship article for construction details.

Related pages

• Caravans for the loading interface and world-map navigation
• Gizmos for finding and firing the launch commands

Trading

Trading turns surplus goods into silver, and silver into things you need. In the trade window you browse goods, set quantities, check the running balance, and accept the deal.

For the game-mechanics side (which trader buys what, how prices and markup work, what is worth selling), see the RimWorld wiki's Trading article and Trade price improvement.

How trading starts

You never open the trade window directly. A colonist has to physically reach the other party first.

A trader visits your colony

Caravans from other factions sometimes wander onto your map. Select one of your colonists, then press ] on the lead trader to open the context menu and choose Trade. Your colonist walks over and the window opens when they arrive.

A higher Social skill on the colonist you send means better prices.

You visit a settlement

Send a caravan to a settlement. With the caravan selected on the world map, press ] on the settlement's tile. The orders there include traveling to the tile to visit and trade, and (for a hostile target) attacking. Choose the trade option, and the trade window opens when the caravan arrives.

Before making the trip, you can preview what a settlement is willing to buy. Navigate to the settlement on the world map, press G to open its gizmos, and choose Show Sellable Items. See Previewing what a settlement will buy below.

An orbital trade ship calls in

Build a comms console and an orbital trade beacon (both require the Microelectronics research), and trade ships passing overhead become reachable. When a ship is in range, send a colonist to the comms console: press ] on the console and pick the ship. Only items within range of a beacon can be sold this way; anything you buy drops in by pod onto the beacon's open tiles. See the wiki's Comms console article for details.

Inside the trade window

When the window opens, the mod announces who you are dealing with and the two keys you will reach for most, for example "Trading with Bob's Caravan (bulk goods trader). Alt+B for balance, Alt+A to accept." The game pauses while you trade.

There are two ways to look at the same window. The classic view is the default; press Ctrl+Tab (Option+Tab on macOS) to switch to the table view and back at any time. The mod remembers the view you used last, and Options > RimWorld Access has a Default Trade View setting as well.

The classic view

The window is organized into sections. Left and Right move between the three goods sections, with the trade summary in the middle. Tab and Shift+Tab hop between the goods area and the toolbar, and bring you back to the section and row you left:

• The trader's items (first section, named after the trader): what they have for sale. Entering it tells you how much silver the trader will have once the current deal goes through.
• Trade Summary: a running list of everything queued so far, plus a balance line. This section only appears once you have queued at least one item.
• Your items: what your colony or caravan can sell. Entering it tells you how much silver you will have after the deal.
• The toolbar (Tab): the game's two sort dropdowns, then Accept, Reset, Cancel, Sellable Items, the gift toggle, and Switch to Table View. Left and Right walk the buttons here, and Enter presses one.

Each section remembers your cursor position when you switch away and back. If the section you left has emptied in the meantime, you land at the top of the nearest one.

Browsing the goods

Up and Down move through the list. Home jumps to the first item; End jumps to the last. Start typing to jump to an item by name (typeahead works here as elsewhere); Backspace edits the search and Escape clears it.

Each item is announced with its name and anything you have queued on it, then the counts and prices, then the description. Items both sides carry show both prices at once so you can compare directions. When RimWorld colors a price as a good or bad deal in the visual window, the announcement says so: "great deal" or "pricey" when you are buying, "good offer" or "poor offer" when you are selling. The counts, prices, and description live in the details part of the announcement, so the Configure Spoken Announcements screen can move them or turn them off.

Reading prices and your silver

Silver is the currency for almost all trades. (Royal tribute collectors trade for honor instead; the mod says "favor" in place of silver in that case.)

To hear how much silver each side has, press Alt+B: "You have X silver. Trader has Y silver." Worth checking before a large buy, since a trader can only pay you with the silver they are carrying.

For the full reason behind a single item's price, put the cursor on the item and press Alt+P. That opens a navigable price breakdown showing the market value, trader markup, your colonist's Social bonus, and so on. In the trader's list it explains the buying price; in your list, the selling price. To open the full info card for an item, press Alt+I.

Buying and selling

Each item starts at a quantity of zero. In the trader's list, adding to the quantity buys; in your list, adding sells. The announcements say "Buying 10" or "Selling 5" plainly, followed by the running total, for example "Buying 10 Steel, value 43 silver."

Press Enter to drop into the quantity chooser for the current item. Inside it:

• Up and Down change the amount by one.
• Shift+Up / Shift+Down change it by ten.
• Ctrl+Up / Ctrl+Down change it by a hundred.
• Type a number to set that amount. In the trader's list a bare number buys; in your list it sells. Lead with - to sell or + to buy regardless, for example -10 sells ten. Backspace fixes a typo.
• Home sets the maximum sell amount; End sets the maximum buy amount.
• Enter or Escape returns to the list.

Without opening the chooser, - decreases and + (or =) increases the current item's amount by one, Shift+Up / Shift+Down by ten, Ctrl+Up / Ctrl+Down by a hundred, and Shift+Home / Shift+End jump to the maximum sell or buy.

To zero out an item, press Delete or Alt+R. To wipe every pending trade and start clean, press Shift+Alt+R.

Checking the running deal

Once you have queued at least one item, Tab to the Trade Summary section to hear the whole deal: what you are buying, what you are selling, and a balance line at the end. The balance reads "Net balance: Spending 50 silver," "Net balance: Receiving 100 silver," or "Net balance: Balanced trade," and Enter on it reads both sides' silver. If you remove the last queued item, this section empties and the mod returns you to the goods.

The table view

The table view is the same window as one sortable list laid out the way the game draws it. Up and Down move through the rows, Left and Right move between the columns (name, your count, sell price, trade amount, buy price, the trader's count, mass, market value), and Enter on a column header sorts by that column. Every trading key above works here too.

Completing the trade

Press Alt+A to accept. The mod confirms with "Trade completed successfully," your colonist hands over the goods, and anything you bought is delivered. You can also close the window and return to the same trader later while they are still around.

If the trader does not have enough silver to cover what you are selling, the mod warns you and asks for confirmation before proceeding. A trader can only pay with the silver they are carrying. They pay what they can, and you do not receive goods to make up the difference, so check their silver with Alt+B before a large sale.

To leave without trading, press Escape. (If you are in the quantity chooser, the first Escape closes it; the second closes the window.) The mod announces "Trade cancelled."

Giving gifts

Press Alt+G to toggle gift mode. In gift mode you hand items over for goodwill rather than silver, so the mod moves you to your items, and silver itself joins that list so you can gift some. The balance line shows the goodwill you will gain, for example "Goodwill +15." You cannot gift to a hostile faction or while trading for royal favor, and the mod will tell you if you try.

Previewing what a settlement will buy

Before sending a caravan on a long trip, you can check what a settlement wants. On the world map, navigate to the settlement, press G for its gizmos, and choose Show Sellable Items. This opens a read-only list:

• Tab / Shift+Tab: switch between category tabs.
• Up / Down: move through items; Home and End jump to the ends.
• Type to search by name; Backspace edits the search; Escape clears it, then closes the window.

The window also shows when the settlement last restocked (or that it has not been visited yet), so you can judge whether the trip is worth making.

Learn more

We handle the buttons; the wiki handles the strategy. For trader types, markup rates, what sells well, calling orbital traders, and the comms console, read the RimWorld wiki's Trading article. For price bonuses from Social skill, see Trade price improvement.

Related pages:

• Caravans: how you reach other settlements to trade with them
• The context menu: the ] key used to start a trade
• The info card: Alt+I for an item's full stats during a trade

Reference

Keyboard reference

Every key the mod uses, grouped by where you use it. The same key can do different things depending on the screen you're on, so this page is organized by context. One short note on context-sensitivity appears at the end.

Global

These work most of the time while a game is running.

Key	What it does
Tab	Open the Architect menu (build)
F1	Work tab
F2	Schedule tab
F3	Assign tab
F4	Animals tab, or Mechs, or a chooser if you have both
F5	Wildlife tab
F6	Research tab
F7	Quests tab
F8	Toggle the world map on or back off
F9	History tab
F12	Extra menus picker: Factions, plus Ideology if that DLC is active
Space	Pause and unpause
Shift+1	Normal game speed
Shift+2	Fast game speed
Shift+3	Superfast game speed
T	Announce the current time, date, weather, and season
Alt+T	Announce current game speed, whether the game is paused, and performance (ticks per second)
?	Open the Learning Helper (RimWorld's built-in tutorial tips)
Z	Search by name (on the map, feeds the scanner)
Escape	Cancel, close, or back out

On the map

These act on the tile under the cursor, or on the selected pawn.

Moving around

Key	What it does
Arrow keys	Move the cursor one tile; the camera follows
Ctrl+Arrow	Jump using the current jump mode
Shift+Up / Shift+Down	Cycle the jump mode forward or backward (the cursor does not move)
Shift+Left / Shift+Right	Adjust the preset jump distance by 1 (Preset Distance mode only)
Shift+Ctrl+Left / Shift+Ctrl+Right	Adjust the preset jump distance by 10
Ctrl+G	Open the coordinate jump dialog. Type X, then press comma or Space, then type Z. Blank field keeps the current coordinate. Prefix with + or - for a relative offset

Four jump modes are available: Preset Distance (the default), Impassable, Terrain, and Structure. Cycle between them with Shift+Up / Shift+Down. See the map page for what each one lands on.

Tile info (number keys)

The mod announces much of this automatically as you arrow around. These keys are on-demand spot checks for the detail you want.

Key	What it reads
1	Items and pawns at the cursor
2	Terrain (label, fertility, smoothness, beauty, cleanliness, path cost)
3	Harvestable things: plants (species, growth, harvestable or dying); with the right DLC and equipment, also fish and deep-scanner mineral targets
4	Light, brightness, and temperature
5	Room stats
6	Power
7	Areas this tile belongs to

On the world map the number keys mean different things. See World and caravans.

Selecting pawns

For the full walkthrough, see Selecting pawns.

Key	What it does
Comma / Period	Cycle to the previous or next colonist
Alt+1 ... Alt+0	Select colonist 1 through 10
Alt+Down	Page to colonists 11-20 (then Alt+1-0 to select within that page)
Alt+Left / Alt+Right	Move through pawns on the colonist bar
Ctrl+Alt+Left / Ctrl+Alt+Right	Reorder the selected pawn along the colonist bar
Alt+Space	Multi-select (mainly for combat; multi-select breaks many gizmos that expect a single pawn)
Ctrl+Shift+F1-F4	Save the current selection as a combat group
Ctrl+F1-F4	Recall a saved combat group
/	Focus the cursor pawn on the colonist or mech bar
Alt+C	Jump the cursor to the selected pawn and keep it riding along (or open a chooser if several are selected)

Pawns at a glance

These prioritize whatever is under the cursor, then fall back to the pawn selected with comma/period or Alt+number.

Key	What it reads
Alt+H	Health
Alt+M	Mood
Alt+N	Needs
Alt+G	Gear
Alt+K	Top 3 skills
Alt+P	Skills table for all colonists
Alt+B	Read the selected pawn's combat log (10 most recent battle entries)

Alt+H, Alt+M, Alt+N, and Alt+G work on your pawns, enemy pawns, and animals. Alt+P opens a sortable table covering every colonist.

For checking on pawns in depth, see Checking on pawns.

Acting on the map

Key	What it does
Alt+F	Un-forbid every item on the map at once
Alt+A	Assign an allowed area to the selected pawn (prioritizes the cursor)
Alt+I	Open the info card for whatever the cursor is on, or for the item referenced in a menu
G	Open the gizmo menu for the object under the cursor
]	Open the context menu for the tile under the cursor
[	Carry out the top context-menu option immediately
Shift+[	Queue the top option instead of replacing the current one

Drafting and giving orders

How you control pawns in a fight. The combat page covers these in depth.

Key	What it does
R	Draft or undraft the selected pawn

Targeting a weapon or ability

After starting an attack from the gizmo menu (G, choose the attack, then Enter):

Key	What it does
Arrow keys, then Enter	Move the cursor to the target, Enter to fire
Escape	Cancel targeting
R	Announce distance, whether the target is in range, and line of sight
T	Announce who is caught in an area-of-effect ability at the cursor

Targeting stays open if the target is invalid or out of range, and tells you why, so you can adjust and retry.

Opening detail screens

Key	What it does
Enter	Inspect the thing under the cursor
Ctrl+Alt+Enter	Open the inspect view for the selected pawn (the one chosen on the colonist bar)

The scanner

The scanner steps through categories, subcategories, item types, and individual instances, then lets you jump straight to a target.

Key	What it does
Ctrl+Page Up / Ctrl+Page Down	Move between categories
Shift+Page Up / Shift+Page Down	Move between subcategories
Page Up / Page Down	Move between item types (ordered by distance)
Alt+Page Up / Alt+Page Down	Move between individual instances within a group
Home	Jump the cursor to the nearest tile in the current target. Press again while standing on the target to jump to its center
End	Announce distance and direction to the scanner target
Alt+Home	Toggle scanner auto-jump mode (the scanner jumps the cursor automatically when you change categories)

Home also pairs with the search: run a Z search, press Enter to focus the scanner on the result, then Home to jump to it.

Building placement

Once you have picked a designator in the Architect menu, place it on the map with these.

Key	What it does
Space	Set a point (first corner, then second)
Shift+Space	Remove the last placed point or blueprint at the cursor
Enter	Confirm and place the designation
= (or +)	Add another shape, keeping the blueprints already placed
-	Remove the last placed segment
Ctrl+A	Select all: steps from the enclosing area, to the whole map, to nothing
Ctrl+Shift+A	Step back one level of select-all scope
Tab	Switch the designator's shape (filled rectangle, empty rectangle, manual)

The jump-mode keys from Moving around (Ctrl+Arrow to jump, Shift+Left/Right to adjust the distance) are how you extend a shape to an exact size before setting the second point.

Menus and tables

These apply across the mod's menus, tree views, and tables.

Key	What it does
Tab / Shift+Tab	Move between the panels of a screen
Up / Down	Move between items or rows
Left / Right	Move between columns or categories; in a tree, collapse or expand
Home / End	Jump to the first or last item
Type any text	Type-ahead: jump to the matching entry. Works in every menu and list
Enter / Space	Select, deselect, or toggle a checkbox
Alt+S	In a table: sort by the selected column. In a dialog or filter: save, confirm, or advance
Shift+8 (asterisk)	Expand all sibling nodes at the current tree level

The Enter versus Alt+S rule

In a screen where Enter selects and deselects items, Alt+S is what confirms the screen and moves forward. If Enter does nothing special on that screen, Enter finishes it. See Navigating menus for the full story.

In tables specifically

Tables typically show pawns as rows and attributes as columns. On top of the keys above:

Key	What it does
Alt+S	Sort by the selected column; press again to toggle descending, ascending, then clear
Shift+Up / Shift+Down	Paint the current cell's value onto the rows above or below
Shift+Home / Shift+End	Paint from the current row to the top or bottom
Ctrl+Shift+Home / Ctrl+Shift+End	Paint the column across every row
= / -	Adjust a numeric cell by one (Enter to type a number)
]	Open a context menu for that column, category, or cell

World and caravans

On the world map (F8), several keys take on travel-specific meanings.

Tile info (number keys, world map)

Key	What it reads
1	Growing conditions: growing period, rainfall, forageability, grazing, stone types
2	Movement and travel cost: difficulty, terrain, hilliness, elevation, roads, rivers
3	Disease frequency (and pollution or haze fields with the right DLC)
4	Time zone and global coordinates
5	Regions and landmarks

Biome is announced when you arrow onto a tile, not via a number key.

Travel and caravans

Key	What it does
C	Start choosing a caravan route (add one or more waypoints)
R	Open the route planner to preview paths and travel times
Space	Set a waypoint (or re-announce the current tile during site selection)
Enter	Inspect a caravan or enter your own settlement at the cursor. During site selection, confirm settling there
Comma / Period	Cycle between your caravans
Ctrl+Space	Add or remove a caravan from a multi-selection (then merge them with the caravan's G gizmo)
Alt+A	Toggle auto-provision (lets the game pick supplies)
Alt+S	Send the caravan
]	Act on the tile: travel to, trade with, attack, settle, and so on
G	Open the selected caravan's gizmos: settle, split, rest, merge
Delete	Remove a pawn or item from the caravan
F8	Toggle the world view off and return to the colony
Alt+Home	Jump to your colony
Alt+J	Toggle world-map scanner auto-jump mode
End	Announce distance and direction to the world scanner target
Alt+End	Jump to the nearest caravan

Enter does not settle a tile from the in-game world map. Settling is done via a gizmo on the caravan. See Caravans and The world map.

Trade window

When trading with a visiting trader, a settlement, or an orbital trader, the trade screen uses these. The classic view (the default) is three sections you Tab between; the table view is one sortable list with a column cursor.

Key	What it does
Up / Down	Move through the goods, or adjust the quantity by 1 in the quantity chooser
Left / Right	Switch sections in the classic view (the trader's items, the trade summary, your items); move between columns in the table view; walk the toolbar
Tab / Shift+Tab	Hop between the goods and the toolbar, returning to the section and row you left
+ / -	Adjust the quantity by 1
Shift+Up / Shift+Down	Adjust the quantity by 10
Ctrl+Up / Ctrl+Down	Adjust the quantity by 100
Shift+Home / Shift+End	Max sell or max buy; plain Home / End do the same inside the quantity chooser
Home / End	Jump to the first or last item
Enter	Open or leave the quantity chooser for the current item; on the balance line, read both sides' silver
Type a number	In the quantity chooser, set a quantity (lead with - to sell, + to buy)
Ctrl+Tab	Switch between the classic and table views
Alt+A	Accept the trade
Alt+B	Announce the silver (or favor) on each side
Alt+P	Price breakdown for the current item
Alt+I	Info card for the current item
Alt+L	Open the trader's sellable-items list
Alt+G	Toggle gift mode (give goods for goodwill)
Delete or Alt+R	Reset the current item; Shift+Alt+R resets everything
Escape	Close the trade

Context-dependent keys

A handful of keys do different jobs depending on where you are. This is normal behavior shared by most applications; the list below is for reference when a key does something unexpected.

• R: on the colony map, draft or undraft; on the world map, jump to a random tile (site selection) or open the route planner; during targeting, announce distance and range.
• Alt+F: on the colony map, un-forbid every item; during pawn creation, open the reroll filters.
• Alt+A: on the colony map, assign an allowed area; in caravan formation, toggle auto-provision; in the Quests tab, accept the quest; in a trade, accept the trade.
• Alt+M: on the colony map, read a pawn's mood; in the Work tab, toggle between manual and basic priority mode.
• Alt+B: on the colony map, read a pawn's combat log; in a trade, announce the silver/favor balance.
• Alt+G: on the colony map, read a pawn's gear; in a trade, toggle gift mode.
• Alt+P: on the colony map, open the skills table; in a trade, show the price breakdown.
• Alt+R: during pawn creation, reroll the current pawn; in a trade, reset the current item.
• Alt+S: in a table, sort by the selected column; in a dialog or filter, save or advance; in caravan formation, send the caravan.

Mac users: see Playing on Mac for how modifier keys map on macOS.

Settings

RimWorld Access has its own options panel, separate from RimWorld's standard mod settings. Reach it from the main menu under Options, then RimWorld Access. The panel is available both at the main menu and in-game, so changes take effect immediately.

Wrap navigation

Default: off.

When on, menus loop from the last item back to the first, and from the first back to the last. When off, navigation stops at the boundaries and plays a short tone to tell you the cursor could not move, rather than reading the same row to you again.

Announce position

Default: on.

When on, announcements include a position indicator such as "3 of 7." Turn this off if the count feels like noise.

Show pawn activity on map cursor movement

Default: on.

When on, arrowing over a non-colonist pawn (an animal, visitor, raider, or other non-colonist) announces what activity that pawn is performing. This information is inferred from the pawn's current state. If it feels like an unfair advantage, keep it off.

Show cover info for drafted and hostile pawns

Default: on.

When on, cover information is included in the cursor announcement for drafted pawns and hostile pawns. For example: "Bob, behind sandbag (good cover), melee attacking." Applies during combat.

Announce terrain on cursor movement

Default: on.

When on, the terrain name is spoken each time the cursor moves to a new tile. The terrain sound effect plays independently of this setting.

Announce depth levels in treeviews

Default: on.

When on, moving deeper into a tree view announces the level number, for example "level 2." Turn this off if you navigate tree views fluently and find the level announcements redundant.

Rashad Hates Treeviews (submenu-style navigation)

Default: off.

This is a toggle that changes how tree views behave across the mod. Named after another accessibility-mod developer, Rashad, who is not a fan of the traditional tree-view interaction pattern. (His own mods use tree views all over the place, just under other names, but the name stuck.)

Off (standard tree view):

• Right arrow on a collapsed item expands it, revealing its children alongside the parent.
• Right arrow on an already-expanded item moves into its first child.
• The parent stays visible in the list alongside its children.

On (submenu mode):

• Right arrow on an item expands it, hides the parent, and places you directly on the first child. It feels like stepping into a submenu.
• Left arrow collapses back to the parent.
• Your last position inside each parent is remembered when you return.

There is no wrong choice here, just preferences. Submenu mode keeps lists short and moves you forward quickly. Standard mode keeps parents and children visible together, which can help with orientation in a large tree. Try both.

For how tree views work in general, see Navigating menus.

Default Work Menu View (F1)

Default: Focused.

Determines which view opens when you press F1.

• Focused: a priority-grouped per-pawn view. Lower verbosity; well suited for checking on individual colonists.
• Table: pawn rows by work-type columns, mirroring vanilla. Supports sorting and painting.

You can switch between views at any time from within the Work menu using Ctrl+Tab (or Option+Tab on macOS). The setting updates automatically to remember your last choice.

Announce forced slowdowns from threats

Default: off.

When on, the mod announces when the game forces Normal speed because of a nearby threat ("Game slowed down by presence of threat") and again when the slowdown lifts. This only fires if your chosen speed is faster than Normal.

To check the current game speed at any time, press Alt+T.

Announce selected pawn activity

Default: off.

When on, the mod narrates what the selected pawn is doing, for as long as they stay selected: each new job as it starts ("Cutting plants", "Hauling steel to stockpile"), and each named room or zone they walk into ("in kitchen", "in growing zone 1"). Outdoors, and in rooms the game gives no role to, nothing is spoken.

Moving the map cursor ends the narration. Select the pawn again with comma, period, or the colonist bar to pick it back up, or press Alt+C to send the cursor to them, which keeps the narration going while the cursor rides along. See Selecting pawns.

---

Setting tooltips are expanding as localization work continues. If a setting's in-game tooltip is not yet in your language, the English tooltip is still shown.

Playing on Mac

This page covers the keyboard differences between Windows and macOS. All other documentation uses Windows key names. Substitute as described here when reading any other page.

General modifier substitutions

Windows	macOS
Ctrl	Cmd
Alt	Option

These substitutions apply throughout the mod. For example, where the docs say Ctrl+Alt+Enter, on Mac you press Cmd+Option+Enter.

The Ctrl+Tab exception

One shortcut does not follow the Ctrl-to-Cmd pattern: Ctrl+Tab (used to switch views in the Work menu and similar panels) maps to Option+Tab on macOS, not Cmd+Tab.

This is because Cmd+Tab is reserved by the operating system as the app switcher and cannot reach the game, and physical Ctrl+Tab is also not reliably deliverable on Mac through Unity. The mod handles this automatically: when the current key is Tab, pressing Option acts as the Ctrl substitute. No configuration is needed.

So on Mac:

Windows	macOS
Ctrl+Tab	Option+Tab
Ctrl+Shift+Tab	Option+Shift+Tab

All other Ctrl shortcuts use Cmd as normal.

Frequently asked questions

Common questions about what the mod does and doesn't do, and why.

Can you add support for [some mod]?

Probably not, and almost certainly not any time soon. Here's the reasoning.

A lot of content mods, meaning mods that add new items, animals, events, or factions without building their own custom screens, are already largely accessible.

The trouble is mods that build their own UI. When a mod adds a custom screen that doesn't follow how vanilla RimWorld does things, the mod's screen gets no accessibility treatment from RimWorld Access. Making it accessible isn't a matter of flipping a switch. It means installing the mod, building a save that actually exercises that UI, writing and testing new Harmony patches for it, and then maintaining those patches whenever the mod updates. And that's for one mod.

Every time a new mod gets support, it opens the door to requests for the next one. The queue is effectively infinite. People in the Discord are finding new mods every week. I can't keep up with that, and trying to is how burnout happens.

There's also a localization problem most people don't think about. Many mods haven't been translated into the languages RimWorld Access supports. When a mod's text isn't localized, players hear the raw English strings, and the question comes back to me rather than to the mod author. That's not something I'm willing to volunteer for.

The codebase also isn't in a state right now where I can safely take outside pull requests for mod accessibility. That may change. Even if it does, though, I have no interest in becoming a code reviewer for mods I may not even have installed. Reviewing a contribution properly would mean installing whoever's mods to test the change, and I'm not going to approve work I can't check. So even down the road, this may simply not be something I take on. We'll see.

None of this is permanent. Once the core RimWorld experience is solid, I'll probably give some mods attention. The Vanilla Expanded series is a likely candidate, because those authors do careful work and their content fits naturally with what the mod does. I may also cover mods I personally find interesting. Eventually, once I'm more comfortable taking this on, I might set up community polls so players can weigh in on which mods matter most to them to see made accessible. I'd like people to have a say in what I work on, if I ever get there.

But the baseline answer is: if a mod adds its own custom screens, don't expect support for it.

Why doesn't Alt+H read out every health condition?

Alt+H is a quick readout for what matters in a hurry: consciousness, movement, manipulation, and bleeding status. Those four things tell you most of what you need to know when something urgent is happening.

The request that comes up most often is adding infection status to that readout. The trouble is length. If a pawn has several infections or conditions, hearing them all in one announcement is slower than just searching for the one you care about. And searching is something the mod is already good at.

Type-ahead is, more or less, a search filter, and it's basically a mouse for blind people. Once it clicks, you'll use it everywhere. Here's how it works for health. Press Enter on the pawn under your cursor, or Ctrl+Alt+Enter on a pawn you've selected from the colonist bar, to open that pawn's inspect screen. Then just start typing. Type "inf" and you land on infections. Type "leg", "arm", or "head", or even just "hea", and you land on everything wrong with that part. The arrow keys step through the other matches. It's faster than any fixed readout could be, because you go straight to what you asked for.

That said, I'm still thinking about how best to surface every status condition through another shortcut, probably Alt+Shift+H. I'm not against the idea. It just feels redundant when type-ahead already gets you there so quickly. If you've leaned on type-ahead and still feel something is missing, that's worth telling me.

Is there a guide to laying out a base?

Not in this documentation, and that's deliberate. Base layout is genuinely hard to describe in text. A kill box or a storage warehouse has a visual logic that's difficult to convey through written coordinates and dimensions, and advice that sounds simple on paper ("make your bedrooms seven by seven on the exterior, five by five inside") can be tricky to apply in practice.

What this documentation covers is the mechanics: how to place buildings, how rooms work, what the Architect menu offers, how to use the scanner to survey your map. The strategy of what to build and where is a harder problem.

The colony building guide on the RimWorld wiki is a good place to start. It's written for players generally, and the advice translates.

For the "how does this actually look in practice" question, the goal is eventually to collect save files from community members that demonstrate well-built bases, so you can load them up and explore. That's not ready yet. The best current resource is the RimWorld Access Discord, where players share their approaches and can answer specific layout questions.

Can I play with other mods?

You can, but it's unsupported. When something breaks in a modded game, it's very hard to tell whether the issue is with RimWorld Access, with one of the other mods, or with a combination. Isolating a bug officially means testing with only Harmony and RimWorld Access active, and if you're playing a modded save, that's not easy to do without starting over.

This doesn't mean you should avoid mods. Plenty of players run large mod lists without problems. But if you run into a bug and want to report it, you'll likely need to be able to reproduce it in a clean environment before it can be investigated. See reporting bugs for what that looks like.

The mod doesn't police what you install. It just can't take responsibility for what other mods do.

Should I use permadeath (commitment mode)?

You can, but go in knowing the risks. In commitment mode, if your colony ends, the save is gone. Software crashes, screen reader hiccups, and bugs in any of your mods can all end a run without warning. The mod is stable enough that many players use commitment mode without incident, but "stable enough" and "completely safe" aren't the same thing.

If you're new to RimWorld, the bigger risk is just the game's difficulty. Losing a long permadeath run to a game mechanic you didn't know about yet is frustrating in a way that reloading from a normal save isn't. Most experienced players recommend playing without commitment mode until you understand how to handle raids, disease, and starvation.

If you want to use it, go for it. Just keep in mind that no software is crash-proof, and that mod updates, game updates, and screen reader updates can all introduce unexpected behavior.

Some text isn't in my language. Why?

RimWorld Access supports several languages, and text that comes from the mod itself (menu labels, navigation announcements, and the descriptions I write) should appear in your language where it has been translated. Localization is still fairly new, though, so some of the mod's own text may not be translated yet, and there are still genuine localization bugs to work out. If you hear English where you expect your own language in a base-game or RimWorld Access screen, please report it. See reporting bugs. That kind of report genuinely helps.

Some text can also come from another mod you have installed. Mods are responsible for their own translations, and when a mod author hasn't provided one for your language, that text falls back to English. That part isn't mine to fix, since the translation isn't mine to provide for content I didn't write. It isn't always obvious which mod a piece of text comes from, which is why these questions often land here, but the place to ask for a mod's translation is with that mod's author.

Where to learn RimWorld

These docs teach you the mod: which keys do what, how the screens work, how to drive RimWorld from the keyboard. They are not a strategy guide. RimWorld is a deep game, and the learning resources that exist for it are extensive. This page points to the ones I recommend.

My tutorial video

I recorded a walkthrough of my first accessible game. It covers the early colony arc from landing through first threats, narrated as I go.

Watch the RimWorld Access tutorial

The RimWorld wiki

rimworldwiki.com is the authoritative reference for game mechanics. It covers everything: temperature and food spoilage, what each trait does, the mood system, the health system, how raids scale. It is large and actively maintained. RimWorld Access mirrors vanilla RimWorld closely, so the learning resources written for the wider community work for you too.

The wiki's own Basics overview is a good first read if you want an overview of the game's flow before diving in. A few articles I find myself returning to:

• Work: how work priorities and job types interact
• Recruitment and Resistance: getting prisoners and downed enemies to join
• Trade price improvement: what actually moves prices
• Comms console: calling traders and contacting other factions
• Allowed areas: restricting where colonists can go
• Ideology: the belief-system and ritual mechanics (DLC)
• Health and Medicine: how treatment, injuries, and diseases work

RimWorld YouTubers

For strategy and a feel for how experienced players think, RimWorld has a large community of creators on YouTube. Narrated playthroughs work well by ear: the player talks through priorities, explains decisions, and signals when to worry and when to relax. Putting a beginner playthrough on in the background is one of the faster ways to absorb the game's rhythms.

I learned the game from sighted players and YouTubers before this mod existed, and that approach still holds up.

Prior art in blind gaming

Before RimWorld Access, blind players had very few games of this depth to play. If you are coming from the blind gaming community, the closest familiar reference is Castaways by Aprone, a survival and colony game that has long been a well-regarded option for blind players. Castaways is available here.

Other complex management games, like Oxygen Not Included, became accessible after RimWorld Access. If you have played one of them, the genre's logic will carry over.

Start gentle

The single best piece of advice for a new player: start on a low difficulty or peaceful.

RimWorld's difficulty range is enormous. On peaceful, raids are infrequent and mild, and there is breathing room to learn the controls and the rhythms of colony life without a crisis every few minutes. Once the keyboard feels natural and you have run a colony for a while, a harder start will make a lot more sense. There is no reason to learn the controls and survive a death spiral at the same time. You do not need to start a new game to raise the difficulty later: you can adjust it in settings on a running save.

Your first colony is supposed to be a bit of a mess. That is how it goes for everyone.

Reporting bugs

Found something broken? A clear report gets it fixed faster, and it does not take much.

First, isolate it

Test with only Harmony and RimWorld Access enabled, and no other mods. Other mods can change how the game behaves in ways that look like a RimWorld Access bug but aren't. If the problem still happens with just those two mods, it's a real report.

This is genuinely hard once you have other mods installed: stripping them out can break the save you were playing, so reproducing a problem in a clean setup takes real effort. RimWorld Access officially supports only Harmony plus itself, so a report from a clean save is the most useful kind, but do what you can.

What to include

A good report answers three questions:

• What you did. The screen you were on and the keys you pressed, step by step. "On the Work tab, I pressed Alt+M, then..." is the right level of detail.
• What was announced. What your screen reader actually said.
• What you expected instead.

If you can, include your screen reader, your operating system, and which DLC was active. The more reliably you can reproduce it, the easier it is to fix.

Attach your log file

RimWorld writes a log every time it runs, called Player.log. It records errors that never appear on screen, so attaching it often points straight at the cause. The file is replaced each time the game launches, so grab it after the problem happens and before starting the game again.

It is located here:

• Windows: %localappdata%low\Ludeon Studios\RimWorld by Ludeon Studios\Player.log
• macOS: ~/Library/Logs/Ludeon Studios/RimWorld by Ludeon Studios/Player.log

You can paste either path as-is to reach the file. On Windows, paste it into the Run dialog (Win+R) or the File Explorer address bar. On macOS, paste it into Finder's Go to Folder box (Cmd+Shift+G).

Where to file it

The easiest place is the #bug-reports channel on the RimWorld Access Discord server.

If you know your way around GitHub, you can also open a GitHub issue instead.

Changelog

Everything new in RimWorld Access, newest first.

Older changes (before version 2.0) are in the pre-2.0 changelog archive.

[2.0.0] - 2026-09-14

Version 2.0 is a rebuild of RimWorld Access from the ground up.

Screens are far more consistent than they were. The same keys and the same announcement grammar carry across the main menu, world creation, every tab, every dialog, and most third-party mod screens.

You can also always reach a screen's buttons. The game's toolbar is shown on every screen and Tab will eventually carry you to it, so you should no longer get stuck wondering which key moves you forward.

Menus and dialogs are now the game's real windows instead of invisible copies, so they appear on screen exactly as the game draws them. Someone watching can see where your cursor is, and can use the mouse alongside you.

Some popular mods now have dedicated support, and mods without it are covered by a reader that handles most windows on its own.

Also new: text the game only shows under the mouse pointer is now spoken, developer mode is fully accessible if a little clunky, there are five new languages, and an optional mouse mode reads whatever the pointer touches.

Behind the scenes, rebuilding how one screen works went from about three days to about twenty minutes, so screens should improve a lot faster from here.

Added

• Many popular mods now have dedicated support. Character Editor got the most work: the whole editor is a proper screen, covering appearance, health, needs, social, inventory, genes and xenotypes, the browsers, presets, and the def editor. Also supported: RimWorld Together, Colony Manager Redux, Vehicle Framework, A RimWorld of Magic, Simple Sidearms, the Vanilla Expanded mods, Hospitality, RimTalk, Interaction Bubbles, Allow Tool, Alpha Memes, Dubs Bad Hygiene, the Progression mods, and anything built on JecsTools, HugsLib, or XML Extensions. The experience may not be as nice as the vanilla game experience, but I've done what I can. I can't play every mod out there, nor do I have the money to fix them all, but tools will be coming soon so mod builders can add accessibility for their own mods. Stay tuned!
• Mods without dedicated support are now covered by a generic window reader. It makes settings pages, dialogs, and custom windows navigable, and it recognizes every element type RimWorld supports, and a few others too! Page Up and Page Down jump between a page's sections, and disabled controls say why they are disabled. It is always on, and dedicated support simply takes over where something better exists.
• Inspection tabs added by mods are now readable and usable, on pawns, buildings, items, and zones. Buttons activate, checkboxes toggle, sliders adjust or take a typed value, and text fields edit. Tabs also gained an "Also shown on this tab" section, listing anything the visual tab draws that the accessible version does not.
• Text the game only shows while the mouse rests on something is now spoken. Character card entries, ideoligion rows, transfer lists, the quests tab, pawn summaries in the work and animal tables, meme details, and stat entries all read their explanatory text with the row it belongs to. Installed mods get the same treatment. Bare icons are no longer silent either, and labels cut short by a narrow column now read in full.
• Anyone watching your screen can now follow along. The map cursor is drawn as a highlighted cell, every screen outlines the row or cell you are on and scrolls it into view, keyboard placement draws the same preview a mouse drag shows, targeting draws its range circle, and the research tree scrolls to the project you are reading. Since dialogs and menus are now the game's real windows, a sighted person can also just use the mouse alongside you.
• The trade window now has two views, and Ctrl+Tab switches between them on the open window with your choice remembered. The classic view is the three-list design that has always been here, holding the trader's goods, the pending deal with its running balance, and your goods, moved between with Left and Right. The new one is a table view laid out the way the game itself draws the trade screen. Some testers found the table harder to get around, so classic is still the default, and there is a Default Trade View setting in Options. Both views share the same reading and editing: each row reads its name, what you have queued, both prices with the game's own good-deal and bad-deal wording, and the running total, and Enter opens the quantity chooser, where Up and Down step by one, Shift or Ctrl with the arrows step by ten or a hundred, and typing a number sets the amount.
• A new experimental mouse mode, off by default in Options. With hover speech on, whatever the pointer moves onto is read: controls and their tooltips, map cells with their terrain sounds, letters, the colonist bar, and the command bar. Clicking says what got selected, and drags speak their size and result. Two keys bridge the pointer and the cursor: Alt+J sends the pointer to your cursor, and Alt+Shift+J pulls your cursor to whatever the pointer is on. Alt+Shift+K makes the pointer follow the cursor continuously, and Alt+Shift+M toggles hover speech. Pointer movement is well tested on macOS and newly available on Windows and X11 Linux.
• A new Configure Spoken Announcements screen, the top item in Options under RimWorld Access. Every part of an announcement (name, shortcut, control type, control state, position, tree level, description, hints) can be switched off or reordered. Control type and state are separate parts, so you can hear the type like "checkbox" without the state like "checked", or reorder them independently. You hear each change as you make it, and Restore Defaults puts everything back. It is now the one place the announcement format lives, and every screen follows it right away.
• Five new complete translations: French, Turkish, Castilian Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and European Portuguese. Each covers every interface string and the in-game documentation, using the game's own official wording for that language. Simplified Chinese, Russian, Latin American Spanish, and Ukrainian are complete again and cover everything new in this release.
• Developer mode is now fully accessible. The debug action menu, debug output tables, the log window with full messages and stack traces, the inspector, tweak values, the def editor, and the map and world debug tools all read and work, with typeahead search throughout. With dev mode on, the mod also reads the extra detail sighted developers see, like exact hediff severities and world tile IDs.
• New: a combat autopilot for drafted pawns. Assign a combat policy and the pawn fights on its own; leave it on None and it only follows your direct orders. Abilities can be autocast, all at once or one at a time. A Pause checkbox suspends everything without losing the setup, and the checkboxes apply to your whole selection at once. What the autopilot is doing becomes the pawn's job, so cycling colonists or arrowing over a pawn tells you the tactic: "moving to cover", "holding position and firing", "attacking Raider". It is entirely optional, and a settings switch removes it completely. Drafted mechanoids, modded draftable animals, and Vehicle Framework vehicles are all supported.
• Combat policies are named sets of fighting behaviors, one checkbox each, managed in a real policy window just like drug or food policies. Assign them from the combat policy column in the Assign tab, or from the Animals and Mechs tabs for draftable pawns. Three presets ship: Full control, Fight nearby, and Stay safe. Every choice has a plain-language tooltip saying exactly what it turns on. Optional safety behaviors are part of a policy: keeping distance from melee attackers, falling back when badly hurt, and running clear of explosives. Retreats say why they happened, for example "badly hurt, falling back to 120, 45".
• Drafted pawns take three new kinds of order. Engage target sends a pawn after one specific enemy until it is down, available as a command or from the right-click menu on anything attackable. Search and destroy sends a pawn hunting hostiles on its own. Patrol (Shift+T) picks an area for a pawn to walk a beat in, stopping to fight anything that comes into range. A new Mark for attack designator on the Orders tab marks single targets or sweeps whole areas, and pawns on search and destroy go for marked targets first. Every autopilot command has a rebindable shortcut behind Shift, and each wears its own icon so they are easy to tell apart on screen.
• Drafted pawns can hunt. A Hunt animals checkbox on any drafted pawn makes it chase and kill wild animals the way sighted players hunt with drafted colonists. Hunting policies, managed like food and drug policies, decide which animals each pawn may go after, with a revenge-chance slider and a species filter. Two presets ship: Safe game and Any animal. Hunting stands down while any hostile threat is on the map.
• Pawn dialogue from Interaction Bubbles and RimTalk is now narrated as it happens, including lines you type as your colony's persona. Settings control whether it is announced, whether vanilla interactions count, and at what priority. A new Dialogue Log screen, on F12 when either mod is installed, lists every recorded line newest first and carries the related controls.
• Placing a building tells you much more. The notes the game draws beside the cursor are spoken as they change: which facilities the building would link to, how far the nearest one of its kind is, and substructure footprints. Areas with their own requirements, like the moving water a water mill needs, are described with size, direction, and whether the current spot will do. A temporary Placement spots scanner category lists the nearest positions where the building actually fits, closest first, and Home jumps you there with the rotation already set. In god mode, placement warns before destroying whatever is already there.
• The mod now tells you when it has updated. A What's New reader on the main menu presents the release notes you have not read yet, oldest first, with a link to the full changelog. The reader and the website are linked from the main menu and the pause menu, and a setting turns the popup off.
• The History tab is now covered in full, including the Graph page. Every recorder in every graph group (wealth, population, colonist mood, and any a mod adds) is summarized with its current value, range, and trend over the chosen dates, with a day-by-day drill-in. The Messages page now includes quest dialogs, caravan encounters, and narrative entries alongside letters.
• The credits screen, including the victory text after launching the ship or reaching any other ending, is now fully readable. It reads as one document with jumps between sections, the visible scroll follows your position, and skipping says so instead of just going quiet.
• Commands reach further. The inspection tree gained a Gizmos node carrying the same commands the G menu offers, each read as the control it really is, with disabled ones kept in the list along with the game's reason. Marking commands like Chop Wood, Mine, or Hunt now say how many things they marked. Enter works with Shift, Ctrl, or Alt held, for tools that change under modifier keys, and a tool's extra options open on the right bracket key.
• The research detail view now shows everything the game shows: tech level and exact progress, required benches, facilities, and techprints as their own rows with info cards, the unlocks the game itself computes, which mod or expansion the project comes from, and the dev-mode finish and techprint actions.
• Dozens of controls that used to be mouse-only now work from the keyboard. Among them: the auto-refuel checkbox on fuel gizmos, renouncing a royal title, the ideoligion hair, beard, and tattoo style editors, the xenotype icon picker, custom xenotypes in the starting-pawn picker, the mechanitor recharge threshold, quest reward preferences, the Work table's copy and paste column, the Mods screen's Workshop upload button, the saved preferred names list, and info cards for filter items, drug policies, and starting-pawn possessions.
• Gene rows now say what the game's own hover text says about conflicts. When several genes compete for the same slot, the one that applies reads as "active" and the others name the gene suppressing them, so a list of four skin colors no longer sounds like four equal choices. Genes the game picks between at random name the whole pool. A pawn's own gene rows now read complexity, metabolic efficiency, and the description too.
• Two new sounds. Moving the keyboard cursor plays the game's own soft mouseover click, because I love the game's UI sounds. And there is now, finally, a sound for when menus and screens wrap.
• The flight recorder now ships in the release build, for your bug reports. (There won't be any, of course, because RimWorld Access is perfect!) Press Alt (Option on a Mac) plus the game's screenshot key (F10 by default) to start recording from anywhere, and press it again to stop. It captures what the mod heard and said, never anything outside the game. When you stop, a dialog tells you where the file was saved with a button to open the folder. Attach that file to a bug report and we can see your exact session.
• Typeahead search in tables now finds columns, not just rows. Typing a column name, like "tame" in the Animals tab or a work type in the work table, moves you to that column and keeps you on the row you were on. Cell contents are searchable too, ranked below column and row names, so you can type a master's name and land on the cell that holds it.
• The game's color pickers, for allowed-area colors and lamp glow, are now full keyboard screens: a palette of named colors with Default and Darklight rows, Hue and Saturation rows standing in for the color wheel, a readback of the current and old color, and the real Cancel and Accept buttons. Shift+Enter accepts.
• Ctrl+C copies a colonist's work priorities and Ctrl+V pastes them onto another, in both the focused view and the table view.
• RimWorld Access can keep the game paused when it matters. New games start paused and quiet, opening the research screen from a finished-research popup stays paused, and the game stays paused after you close a trade. Each is a setting you can switch off.

Changed

• Navigation is consistent within each kind of screen now, instead of being reinvented screen by screen. Several shapes remain, because the game's own interface has several: trees, tables, screens whose sections you move between with Left and Right, and screens whose sections you move between with Tab. What is shared is everything inside them. Every row announces the same way, in the order you choose. Checkboxes say checked or not checked and toggle with Space or Enter, dropdowns open on Enter, sliders and steppers adjust with Left and Right and accept a typed value, radio buttons select as you arrow onto them, tables read cell by cell under sortable headers, and disabled controls stay in the list and say why.
• You can always reach a screen's buttons. The game's own toolbar is now shown on every screen and Tab walks every button on it, so you should not end up stranded on a screen not knowing which key moves you forward. Shift+Enter presses the screen's next button from anywhere on it, whether that is Generate, Save, Done, or Accept. Enter on something that is not an interactive control names the button a second Enter would press, so you hear the consequence before committing to it.
• Dialogs and menus are now the game's real windows instead of invisible keyboard overlays. Confirmations, letters and choice dialogs, order menus, renaming, the options screen, save and load, the schedule table, bed assignment, and the pause menu all appear on screen exactly as the game draws them, with a highlight following your cursor. Because they are the real thing, they pause the game by the game's rules, play its own sounds, and take mouse clicks alongside the keys.
• Typeahead search is stronger everywhere. Multi-word queries work: pressing Space extends the search, so "left arm" finds the Left arm row, and shorthand like "ga pi" reaches gas pipe (thanks to Rashad's OniAccess mod for the pattern). Ranking favors the row you actually named, and a search reaches everything on screen including section headers and toolbar buttons. Home and End jump between matches without ending the search. Enter activates what the search found; Shift+Enter lands on it without activating, for when you want to hear where you are first.
• Map scanner improvements. Cycling categories now only recalculates the one you land on, so it is much faster on big or busy maps. Vehicles and other controllable units get their own category and their own section of the colonist bar. Things are sorted by the game's own data rather than by their label text, so modded races, debris, and buildings file correctly in every language. The scanner also keeps working while you pick a transport pod or shuttle landing spot. A category now reads its name and a real count, followed straight away by its first item: a group of twelve steel stacks counts as twelve, and destroyed things are not counted. Auto-jump is now a saved setting, so it stays on between sessions.
• Wherever the mod used to keep its own hand-written copy of something, it now reads the game's live data instead: the main menu, material menus, order menus, table columns, tab lists, scenario parts, and more. In practice this means content added by mods or by future game updates shows up automatically, in the same order sighted players see it, without waiting for RimWorld Access to catch up.
• Far fewer "tab" announcements. Opening a screen speaks the focused item directly, pressing Tab speaks the section's name and where you landed, and the word "tab" is now reserved for real tab strips, the way NVDA treats them. The optional count on entry says "2 sections" instead of "2 tabs". On a screen with only one section, Tab does nothing rather than re-announcing everything. Screens whose section names already tell you where you are, like the work tab's priority levels, no longer add "section 2 of 5" after them.
• Ctrl and an arrow key now has four jump modes instead of two, cycled with Shift and Up or Down. Preset distance is unchanged. The old "Adjacent to wall" is now Impassable, and Structure jumps to the next tile whose building differs, so a run of marble wall or a stretch of sand crosses in one press. A jump also says how many tiles it covered.
• Target sliders on command buttons now adjust with Left and Right directly in the command menu, with Shift for bigger steps, and each press applies immediately. The separate right-bracket adjustment mode is gone. Enter on these buttons still does what it always did. While the command menu is open, arrow keys belong to the menu alone and no longer move the map cursor underneath.
• Arrow keys that run into an edge now play a short tone instead of re-reading the row you were already on, anywhere navigation does not wrap. This covers rows, table columns, toolbar buttons, tree views, command menus, the colonist bar, and the work tab in both its views.
• Rename dialogs now submit when you press Enter after typing the new name, matching how the game behaves for sighted players. Shift+Enter also presses OK from anywhere in the dialog, and Escape still closes without renaming. Enter now expands and collapses read-only tree branches too, such as scenario parts and detail sections, instead of only re-reading them.
• Manage Areas is now the game's real dialog everywhere: the Animals, Mechs, and Schedule area pickers, the per-pawn area menu, and the architect area tools all open it. It reads as a table with one row per area and one column per control: color, expand, shrink, invert, rename, copy, and delete, each announced as the button it is. Inverting an area now reports the resulting size instead of the vague "All cells toggled".
• The learning helper got a round of work. It now opens with ? from any screen, including every world-generation step and while configuring an ideoligion, and Escape dismisses it. Its lesson-mode control is now a "Show all lessons" checkbox you flip with Space or Enter, matching the game's own plus/minus toggle, instead of a dropdown you had to open. Escape from a lesson's Mark Learned button now returns to the lesson list rather than closing the helper, and a lesson no longer marks itself finished and drops off the list the moment you reach its last line; it leaves the active list only once you step back to the lesson list.
• The ideoligion appearance editor now behaves like every other tree in the mod. Category rows like Minimal or Punk announce as expandable tree items, individual styles as combo boxes, Left on a style collapses its category, and the tree respects your submenu navigation setting.
• Arrowing down onto the buttons at the bottom of a reader screen, such as a letter, a quest, or the learning helper, no longer plays the tab-switch sound or announces a new section. The buttons read as a continuation of the text above them, so the whole thing feels like one strip. Tab still treats them as their own section where a screen offers that.
• The main menu's Tutorial button is now hidden for keyboard users, since RimWorld's built-in tutorial depends on mouse-only, exact-placement steps a screen reader cannot follow.
• Smaller changes: skill names are capitalized wherever they are read, matching the game; leaving placement mode with nothing pending says "Exited placement mode" rather than "Placement cancelled", making clear that confirmed work is kept; message and confirmation dialogs no longer prefix their text with the word "Description", and no longer announce "Dialog opened" first; menu rows that toggle something are now real checkboxes that keep the menu open; right-click and pop-up menus share the full search grammar; the Anomaly playstyle choices select on arrival like every other radio group; the storyteller page opens on the game's own fallback difficulty; and the flight recorder's saved-recording dialog is one clean button strip.

Removed

• The text panels the mod used to draw over the screen are gone: the world map information box, the landing-site panels, and the placement instruction box. The game's own highlights and windows carry that information now, and nothing is spoken any differently.

Fixed

• Speech no longer goes silent on Windows. Machines with AVX-512 processors were rejecting any announcement containing a non-ASCII character, so an accented letter, a curly apostrophe, or CJK text produced silence while plain English spoke normally. Announcements carrying stray invisible characters from mod content were dropped outright. Both are fixed, and any remaining speech failure now logs the exact text so it can be diagnosed from your log file.
• Actions now go through the game's own rules everywhere, closing a long list of cases where this mod could do something the game would refuse, or skip a warning it would show. Among them: drafting respects downed pawns and mech overseer range; taming and slaughter show their bond, faction, and veneration confirmations; surgeries respect availability and speak the game's reason when refused; caravan equipping shows the persona weapon warning; accepting a quest shows the royal favor warning; research honors benches, techprints, and prerequisites; bill counts follow each recipe's limits; and name fields cap at the lengths the game really accepts.
• Playing in a language other than English is far more reliable. Several features recognized things by matching English text on screen, including notification buttons, caravan destinations, stat breakdowns, scanner classification, and storage commands, and they broke quietly in translation. They now use the game's own internal names. Remaining hardcoded English was made translatable, names joined into lists follow each language's own word order, and spoken key names like Enter and Page Up translate too.
• Cycling colonists with comma and period no longer freezes the game when a connected display has no signal, a common setup for players who do not need the picture. Unity reports a garbage screen size in that case, which sent the game's own colonist bar layout into a loop with no way out. It is guarded now, and colonist cycling keeps working with no display attached.
• Fixed a crash to desktop during startup when an installed mod ships optional hooks into another mod that is not loaded, for example Progression: Core with VFE Tribals disabled. The tooltip scanner now skips anything it cannot safely inspect instead of taking the game down with it.
• One broken mod can no longer take the reader down with it. A mod shipping an assembly that will not load on your platform used to silently disable command announcements for the whole game, and an error inside a screen's reader support left a silent window swallowing keystrokes. Both now contain themselves: the offending piece is skipped, or the screen says it failed and steps aside.
• A family of focus bugs is gone, where a window opened from another screen came up buried underneath it, unreadable, with Escape closing the wrong thing. Naming a newborn from its birth letter, a confirmation from the Animals table, and an info card from the Factions tab were all affected. Windows opened from anywhere now speak and take input, and dialogs that pop up on their own, like the debug log after a mod error, no longer silence whatever is underneath.
• Escape while editing a text field on one of the new game pages now only cancels the edit. Cancelling a colonist's name used to back out of the page underneath as well, and sometimes the page before that too. Enter behaves the same way: confirming a seed or a name finishes the edit without also advancing to the next page.
• The xenotype editor and gene assembler got a round of repairs. Toggling a gene no longer collapses every category and throws the cursor to the top. Loading a xenotype now refreshes the selected-genes list and gene library immediately, and uses the same accessible file list as saving a game, with Delete removing a file after a confirmation. Collapse all and Expand all now move the categories the screen reader navigates too, and categories visibly open and close on screen. The unlabeled "..." button announces itself as "Name suggestions". Shift+Enter presses Save and apply, and Delete removes the focused gene. Save and apply now confirms the character was regenerated and reads their new details, matching the change a sighted player sees.
• Columns that mods add to the Animals, Wildlife, and Mechs tables used to announce their cells as unavailable. They now read generically whenever the mod's column is built on a standard game column type, including each cell's tooltip. Enter also works on those cells now, so a dropdown column a mod adds opens its menu. The Traits column from Animal Traits System reads every animal's traits with their full descriptions, and the Spare Traits column says whether an animal is protected from auto-slaughter or marked for cull.
• Empty screen sections no longer trap you outside them. Entering an empty list, such as the mods screen's disabled column when every mod is enabled, used to throw the cursor into another section and drop the empty one from the Tab cycle. Empty sections now stay reachable with Tab and announce themselves as empty.
• Some mods add a search box to a dialog and hand it the keyboard the moment the dialog opens. That box then swallowed every arrow key and the dialog went completely silent; the bed assignment window from Sensible Bed Ownership was the first confirmed case. The mod now keeps the keyboard on every dialog it drives, whatever a mod focuses. Typing a name in that window jumps to the colonist, and Tab moves between the list and Close.
• Acting on letters no longer discards them. Jumping to a letter's location or viewing its quest leaves refugee, visitor, birth, and other offer letters in the stack until you actually answer them, matching how the game itself treats each kind.
• Forming a caravan from the world map no longer reads out the caravan dialog before it appears. The game hides that dialog while you pick a destination on the planet, so the mod now stays quiet about it until the route is confirmed and the dialog is really on screen.
• In the precepts editor, setting or removing a precept keeps the cursor in the section you were working through and moves it to the next issue there, instead of following the issue into its new section. The announcement still says where the issue went, and the cursor only follows when the section you were in has emptied.
• The pawn filter's reroll no longer strips what other mods give pawns at creation. The fast reroll loop rebuilt candidates without ever calling the full generator, so mods that hook it never ran: with Intimacy's Gender Works enabled, a health filter produced starting pawns the mod treats as sterile. When any mod hooks pawn generation, the reroll now regenerates each candidate through the same complete pipeline as the Randomize button. Searches run a little slower in heavily modded games.
• Buttons that jump you to a thing's inspect tab now open the inspection tree with your cursor already on that tab's section. This covers vanilla's own jumps, like a death letter opening the combat log or a character card's social link, and mod buttons like Character Development's character rows; they used to open the tab visually and announce nothing. A button inside an inspect tab that opens a different main tab, such as Character Development's Add quirks, now opens that tab and hands it the keyboard, instead of bouncing back to the inspect pane or opening behind the tree. The tree keeps its place and returns when that tab closes.
• Character Development's Characters tab is much improved. Enter on a character opens it for inspection with the cursor on their Wants section, instead of closing the tab and dropping you back on the map in silence. The tab now follows the mod's per-pawn reward points setting, so rewards no longer read as unavailable, each character's own points are spoken, and characters holding points with no wants are listed. Its Wants inspect tab reads properly too: the points bar is no longer three bare numbers, and every want and quirk is its own entry carrying its description and reward, with actions to reroll a want, dismiss it, add quirks, or remove one.
• Progression: Education reads correctly now. Its Education tab reads the empty-class message, the classrooms description, and each classroom's color; the Knowledge panel reads a proficiency track even before a pawn has been granted a tier; and Enter no longer also creates or saves the class while you are assigning a teacher or student in its dialogs.
• Form controls on a mod's own dialog now reach you complete. In the Additional controls section, a control with a very short label could be dropped, and a control drawn with its name beside it could arrive unnamed. Progression: Education's class dialog showed both, losing its subject picker and class hours outright and leaving its name, skill, and classroom fields unnamed. Nothing is dropped now unless we are certain it is already spoken elsewhere.
• A slider whose ends are labelled with its own minimum and maximum now reads as a slider with a value, instead of reading those end labels as its name and setting. Progression: Education's semester goal slider announced "1,000 xp, slider, 100,000 xp" no matter where it was set, which made the target look like something that could not be changed.
• A button that opens a mod's own window from one of our full-screen readers now hands that window the keyboard. Vanilla Factions Expanded - Tribals' Cornerstones button on the Factions screen was the clearest case: the window opened and read itself, but every key afterward still went to the faction list behind it. This is fixed for every screen at once, for any mod window that does not declare itself a modal dialog. The Tribals cornerstones window also announces your faction name and tells you the new ethos when unlocking a cornerstone rewrites it.
• In the classic trade view, Enter on an item now opens the quantity chooser instead of arming the Accept confirmation. The Default Trade View and Default Work Menu View setting descriptions were rewritten for clarity, the classic view description no longer wrongly says Tab moves between the lists (it is Left and Right), and each view's description is read aloud when you open the picker to choose one.
• Quieted spurious startup errors. The harmless missing-texture errors logged when playing without the Biotech DLC are gone, and errors on the storyteller selection page when another mod rewrites it are now warnings in the log rather than errors read aloud.
• A batch of smaller fixes: opening a drug's settings in the drug policy manager reads each row as the checkbox, stepper, or slider it is instead of repeating the drug's name; drawing a straight line with the empty rectangle shape counts its cells once rather than twice; picking a new thing to build from a blueprint's gizmo menu right after placing something now places what you picked, not the previous building; the research tree moves a project into In progress once you start it instead of leaving it stuck under Available; saving your game returns you to the game rather than stranding you in the pause menu; and Page Up and Page Down on a starting character's skill land on that same skill for the next or previous character instead of jumping to the top of the list.
• Dozens of other bugs were squashed, but this changelog is unreasonably long as it is. So why not play the game and find the new ones I left just for you? Yes, you, brave human, who managed to read through the entire changelog!

Changelog Archive (Pre-2.0)

The history of RimWorld Access before version 2.0, from the "Aaron's Unofficial Patch" era, preserved verbatim. Newest first.

06/26/2026

CHANGES

• Fixed digits typed into a quantity chooser also passing through to the screen behind it. Typeahead no longer leaks past quantity choosers.
• Fixed the inventory showing item locations ("on", "carried by", etc.) in English for non-English players.

06/24/2026

CHANGES

• Fixed a freeze in the custom ideoligion builder where, after typing a name, adjective, or member name in Simplified Chinese and pressing Enter, the mod stopped responding to keys until you switched windows and back.
• Fixed body parts in the health tab reading their condition and injuries twice.

06/22/2026

CHANGES

• Fixed the background music not starting after you create a new world and colony. You no longer have to restart the game for it to play.
• Fixed entering custom numbers for bills at a workstation. Typing a quantity now goes into the number field instead of being swallowed by the menu's typeahead.
• Fixed the research detail view mixing up which buildings were available. A bench you have built now reads as available even when a required facility like the multi-analyzer is missing, and each facility reports its own status: available, present but inactive, or not available.
• Terrain sounds no longer play for tiles you have not discovered yet.
• The world map tile information (press 4) no longer reads the internal Tile ID, which was developer data not meant for players.
• Styling stations are now fully accessible. Tab moves between the hair, beard, face tattoo, body tattoo, and apparel color sections, and the arrow keys (with typeahead) browse the options. Enter applies a style and opens a color list so you can set its color in one step. Alt+S applies all your changes; Escape cancels.
• Plans are now fully accessible. A new Plans scanner category groups your plans by color into subcategories, and after placing a plan you can configure it from the gizmo menu.
• Every hairstyle, beard, and tattoo now has a written description of what it actually looks like, so you are no longer choosing by name alone.
• Pawns now have an Appearance section in their inspect screen, listing hair and hair color, beard, tattoos, and favorite color in one place.
• The paint designator's color picker is now accessible, and painted floors and buildings announce their color as you move the cursor over them.
• Added a Roofs category to the scanner, covering both thin rock roofs and overhead mountains.
• The Learning Helper now includes RimWorld Access lessons, and most of the game's own lessons have been edited with the mod in mind. Suggestions for more are welcome.
• With a drafted pawn selected on the colonist bar, pressing 1 on a tile holding another pawn reads the game's shooting accuracy tooltip.
• Removed the old unsupported cursor jump modes; only "preset distance" and "adjacent to walls" remain.
• The mod info panel now shows the project website (rimworldaccess.com) as a link, and the description was rewritten to be shorter.
• The mod is now available in Latin American Spanish and Russian. Like our other community translations, these are machine translations anchored to RimWorld's own official wording, so corrections from native speakers are welcome.

06/17/2026

CHANGES

• Added cursor sound for vacstone tiles.
• On space and asteroid maps, the tile info key that reports light and temperature (4) now also reports the vacuum level for the current tile, shown only when there is vacuum present.
• Fixed one more English leak reported by a Chinese player: the "X available" count on items in the form-caravan list now speaks in your language.
• Fixed the G gizmo menu after a Home-key or scanner jump: it now shows the gizmos for the tile you landed on, not a colonist you had selected earlier.
• Fixed the work priorities menu opening broken when a mech was selected; pressing F1 or Alt+W on a mech now opens on a real colonist instead.
• Fixed map switching (Shift+Period / Shift+Comma) skipping loaded maps with no colonists, mechs, or animals, such as a gravship map left holding only a grav anchor after everyone shuttled off.

06/16/2026

CHANGES

• Players using a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean input method can now search lists again. Instant type-ahead can't compose pinyin, so you open a search box on purpose: press / in a list menu (trade, animals, research, and so on) or Z for the map scanner, type your query, then press Enter or Escape to close it. Everyone else keeps the instant type-ahead they already had, unchanged.

06/15/2026

CHANGES

• Fixed Alt+letter shortcuts (Alt+B/Alt+A in trade, Alt+M in work priorities) breaking for players using a Chinese/Japanese/Korean input method.
• Translated two more spots that spoke English: the "active/not set" summary in the custom ideoligion precepts list, and the "material" cost word on the architect build menu.
• Fixed "Refuel from cargo" on passenger shuttles: typing an amount and pressing Enter once now correctly applies it and confirms.

06/14/2026

CHANGES

• Fixed type-ahead search in the info card. Some idiot (me) forgot to register the info card with the new type-ahead system I built, so typing a letter in the info card either did nothing (when opened with Alt+I) or jumped around the inspection screen underneath it. It is now registered and works correctly.
• Tracked down more places where the mod still spoke English instead of your language, thanks to reports from players running it in Chinese. Fixed: the expand/collapse state on memes in the custom ideoligion editor; the "Name" column header in the skills table and the assign menu; the generic "material" cost word shown for a wall or other stuff-built thing before you pick a material; the "Faction Name" text-box label when naming your faction; the "Rename" label on the zone and storage-group rename buttons; the sort direction ("ascending"/"descending") read out when you sort a table column; the on/off state on toggle buttons in command menus; and the "Preview/Stop ritual sound" option in the ideoligion editor. Keep the reports coming.
• The world route planner now reads its path directions in your language too. When you trace a planned route tile by tile, the "head north to waypoint 2" style guidance (and the "Destination" call-out at the end) was still coming out in English. The compass direction and the whole phrasing around it are now translated.

06/13/2026

CHANGES

• The Character tab now reads a pawn's age and birthday: their biological age (with chronological age alongside it when the two differ), the date they were born, and the full chronological and biological breakdown. It also now reads the rest of what the vanilla character card shows but we were leaving out: backstory title, what the pawn is incapable of, royal titles, ideoligion role, xenotype, and any abilities listed on the card. The pawn's info card ('i') Character tab gained the same age and birthday details, so both places match the game.
• You can now type Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean into the mod's text boxes and search fields. This is new, so if you use one of those languages, please let me know whether typing and searching work for you.

06/12/2026

ANNOUNCEMENTS

• Localization support begins today, as an early beta. The mod has been massively refactored so that everything it speaks can be translated, and two trial languages are included to start: Simplified Chinese and Ukrainian. A lot of strings are going to be missing translations at first (the mod speaks English wherever one is missing), so please report the ones you catch. I will not be expanding to more languages until players have caught most of them, because every missing string found later has to be fixed across every supported language at once. Once the trial languages stabilize, localization across all 29 of the game's supported languages is coming. To set expectations: the base game is not localized perfectly in all 29 languages, the DLCs are not localized in all 29 either, and neither are most third-party mods. I cannot help with any of that; the game's own localization is a community project, and the README document in the game's installation folder lists where to go if you want to contribute.
• I intend to release this update officially by Sunday, documentation included. Steam Workshop support may not make it by Sunday, but the release itself will be a complete, official update with everything here built in.

CHANGES

• Improved the process of planting Gauranlen trees and other plantable seeds. While planting, a temporary scanner category now lists every tile you can plant on, with a second subcategory holding only the spots far enough from buildings to avoid the reduced connection strength warning. Arrow keys call out each tile's plantability as you sweep, and cancelling that warning dialog now returns you to placement mode instead of throwing away the whole planting order.
• Anomaly entity suppression: you can now toggle auto-suppression on or off for a held entity. On its activity gizmo, Enter toggles auto-suppression and right bracket still adjusts the suppression threshold, matching the psyfocus gizmo's Enter-and-slider layout. Previously only the threshold was reachable.
• Potentially fixed situations where a pawn could still be reported as downed after reloading a save in which they are no longer downed. I was never able to reproduce the problem myself, so I cannot promise the fix works; if you have run into it, please let me know whether it is gone.

06/01/2026

CHANGES

• The slave tab is now properly wired. It was built, but not actually connected to the button!

05/31/2026

CHANGES

• The Archonexus relocation endgame is now fully keyboard-accessible: choosing your colonists and items, picking your new colony's world tile, and reforming your ideoligion all work with the mod.
• During that endgame you can create, load, or fully edit your new colony's ideoligion, just like the builder you use when starting a world.
• Arrow-key navigation now names the roof above you instead of a generic "roofed" or "underground", so a thin rock roof, a solid overhead mountain, and a player-built roof are easy to tell apart.
• Fish population reports moved from the terrain key (2) to the resource key (3), alongside plants and minerals. Key 3 now lists only the resources relevant to your tile.
• You can now banish a colonist, and execute a guilty one. Both live on the Social section of a pawn's inspection screen and on the Actions tab of their info card, each with the game's own warning about what will happen.
• The scanner now points you at the nearest tile of a patch (a biome, a vein of ore, a stretch of soil, a road or river) instead of its center, so you hear how far its closest edge is and whether you are already standing on it. Press Home to jump to that nearest tile; once you are on the patch, press Home again to jump to its center. The colony map and the world map work the same way.
• You can now load colonists and items into a map portal the same way you load a caravan or transport pod. This covers entering an ancient complex, going down an Anomaly pit gate or insect lair, and hauling your loot back out through the exit. The enter and exit commands now open a Pawns and Items screen with full keyboard navigation. Before, that screen opened silently and you could only move pawns in one at a time through the right-bracket menu, with no way to bring items along.

BUG FIXES

• In auto-jump mode, the scanner no longer reports every place it takes you as being right on top of you. It used to measure the distance after it had already moved you onto the target, so each jump sounded like it was zero tiles away. It now simply announces what is on each tile as you flip through the scanner.
• Cleaned up the building inspection menu: the "Power Control", "Breakdown Status", and "Power" items are gone. They either duplicated the Overview or let you do things you shouldn't (flip power instantly). Use the toggle power command (G) and a colonist will flick the switch as normal.
• Number keys, arrow keys, and letter shortcuts no longer "leak" through to whatever is underneath an open menu. With a menu open, pressing a number could announce tile info, and letter shortcuts (like Alt+A or the ] orders key) could fire or type into a search box. This is now theoretically fixed across every menu.
• Typeahead search now works the same in every menu. While you are searching, Up/Down step through the matches and Home/End jump to the first and last, all without clearing your search, and each tells you where you are (for example "match 2 of 3").
• Typing no longer jumps to the wrong list when one menu sits on top of another. Float menus opened over a menu (like the bills "add recipe" picker), menus opened over a pawn's inspection screen (Operations, surgery pickers, Health Settings), and the quantity boxes in caravan and pod-loading dialogs now all search the menu you are actually looking at.
• The pawn and building inspection screens now support typeahead. Start typing to jump through the tree, including weapons, apparel, and inventory items by name. Inspection search also matches what's inside a node, not just its name.
• In the drug policy editor, Escape now clears an active search before closing, and the drug list reports how many matches your search found. The growing-zone plant picker also steps through search results correctly.
• The saved-ideoligion load list no longer locks up when it's empty; Escape closes it normally.
• When editing an ideoligion's base precepts (cannibalism, corpses, drug use, and the like), you can now press Delete to remove a precept you set, following the game's own rules about which can be dropped.
• Fixed Alt-key shortcuts like Alt+R not working on some non-US keyboard layouts, including AZERTY.

05/25/2026

This is a milestone beta release for me. As of this update, every RimWorld DLC is essentially fully accessible with the mod. Anything still rough is either a convenience (mostly around gravship building) or a bug, and bugs get fixed as they come in. The headline this time is the custom ideoligion builder, but it was only possible because of a big overhaul to how text boxes work, so let's start there.

CHANGES

• Text boxes are now real text boxes, or as close as we can get. There is an actual cursor you can move through your text with the arrow keys, or jump word by word by holding Ctrl. Hold Shift while moving to select text, and Backspace removes the character before the cursor (or whatever you have selected). The mod now also knows the difference between a single-line box, like a name, and a multi-line box, like a description, so in a multi-line box you can press Shift+Enter to start a new line. When you finish editing with Enter, the mod reads back what the field now says. Typeahead should also work on non-English keyboard layouts now, though I have not been able to test that myself.
• The big one: you can now build your own custom ideoligions, just like sighted players do on the ideoligion setup screen. This has been a long time coming. The builder has two tabs, and you switch between them with Tab. The first tab lists every ideoligion in the game; the second tab shows whichever one is selected. Select your own ideoligion and the second tab becomes a full editor; select someone else's and it is a read-only viewer. The editor is one big expandable list. The game crams an enormous amount of information onto this screen, so when you expand an item you can arrow through it line by line and hear all of it at your own pace. Most items can be changed by pressing Enter on them, including your ideoligion's name and descriptions, so when in doubt, press Enter and see what happens. To move on to the next setup screen, press Alt+S. The right bracket key ( ] ) opens a menu of extra options, including saving an ideoligion you have built so you can load it again in future games.
• Fair warning: building an ideoligion is genuinely complicated, even for sighted players. There are a LOT of moving parts. If you are new to the game, you may want to get comfortable first. But I'm not your mom. Do whatever you want!
• Fluid ideoligions work the same way in-game. Once yours has earned enough development points to reform, open the ideoligion viewer and press Enter on the item that shows your development points to begin.
• The focused Work view now reads the selected colonist's name when it opens.
• The colonist skills table (Alt+P) now tells you how much experience each skill has toward its next level, not just the level. On a paused game you can rest on a skill and hear the numbers change as colonists learn.
• The starting characters screen now gives each colonist a Relations category, listing who they're tied to in your starting group and how
• "Daughter," "Lover," and the like - with each pawn's opinion in the tooltip. Press Enter on a relation to jump straight to that pawn.
• That same screen now has a Team Skills tab. Press Tab to switch to it for a quick rundown of which starting pawn is best at each skill.
• The world map scanner now finds rivers, not just roads.
• Walls (built walls, natural rock, and closed doors) now play their own navigation sound instead of the sound of the ground beneath them. Terrain sounds were also evened out so the volumes are more consistent.

BUG FIXES

• Returning to the main menu from inside a game while on the world map no longer leaves the menu unresponsive. The Enter key works again right away, so you can pick a menu option without getting stuck.

05/24/2026

BUG FIXES

• Screen reader speech works again on setups where JAWS (or another reader) had gone silent. A recent version of the underlying Prism speech library began treating NVDA as available even when it wasn't running, so on machines without NVDA active it selected NVDA and spoke nothing. The mod is now pinned to the last known-good Prism version until the upstream fix ships.

05/23/2026

BUG FIXES

• A pawn's Relations now show family ties correctly from both sides: a parent now lists their child as "Daughter" or "Son" instead of "Friend," and the opinion breakdown lines up. Thanks to BlindGuyNW for the PR.
• Forming a caravan from a hitching spot now works correctly. I had no idea hitching spots had a form caravan gizmo till recently!
• The Left and Right arrow keys no longer move the map cursor while the F12 menu (Factions and Ideology) is open.
• The biosculpter pod's "Nutrition storage" option now opens the

correct filter when activated. Previously, pressing Enter on it did nothing.

• When a targeting action is rejected for the same reason more than once in a row (for example, casting an ability on a pawn with no healable injuries), the screen reader now repeats the specific reason instead of falling back to a generic "Invalid target." The game suppresses duplicate on-screen messages, which previously hid the reason from screen reader users on the second and later tries.

05/12/2026

BUG FIXES

• Scanner now works when launching a shuttle from a caravan on the world map.
• Picking a landing cell after a shuttle launch no longer announces "Select pawn to target".

05/03/2026

CHANGES

• Sanguophage accessibility pass:
• Deathrest Capacity gizmo now reads its progress, bound building count, description, and the names of bound deathrest buildings.
• Hemogen bar now reads its full tooltip (drain rates, consumption threshold, description).
• On the Hemogen bar, Enter toggles "Allow hemogen packs"; right bracket sets the target value.
• Bloodfeed and other ability targeting now announce cursor- side warnings like "Will kill" or "Will cause serious blood loss" before you confirm the action.

04/30/2026

CHANGES

• Ctrl+A in shape placement now steps through scopes. The first press still selects the current enclosure (room or blueprint flood); a second press expands to the entire map. Ctrl+Shift+A steps back to the previous scope. Any manual point change clears the step history.

BUG FIXES

• The resurrector mech serum (and other dual-target psicasts like Skip) now works correctly when picking a destination tile.
• During targeting, picking a different pawn from the colonist bar (comma/period, Alt+1..n, Alt+Left/Right) used to interrupt the cast. Those hotkeys now move the cursor to that pawn instead, so you can press Enter to target them.

NOTE

The targeting system received deeper rework today. If you hit any new oddities mid-cast, please report them.

04/29/2026

CHANGES

• Bills now read the produced item's full description (e.g. "Make duster... Makes 1 Duster, Work amount: 167, Crafting. {full description}") in both the recipe picker and the active bill row.

BUG FIXES

• Health conditions in character creation no longer announce a stray "newline-period" between mechanical effects and the description.
• Escape with an active typeahead in character creation now clears the search instead of opening the "discard starting colonists" dialog.
• The pause menu cursor resets between game sessions, so reloading after "Quit to main menu" no longer lands the cursor on "Quit to main menu".
• The schedule menu (F2) no longer says a trailing "." when the Announce Position setting is off.
• The 5-key room info no longer reads role-relevant stats as "star, star, star..."; instead, those stats are suffixed with "Important for this type of room."
• The storage settings screen now uses the modern treeview (matching sounds, Rashad Hates Treeviews submenu mode, search auto-expansion). Priority lives as a node at the top.
• The bills' ingredient filter and the apparel/food/reading-policy filters also use the modern treeview, with the standard expand sound (replacing the old click sound).
• Typeahead in filter screens now announces the full label and description (not just the bare label) plus the match position.
• Pressing Enter or Space on a filter row clears the typeahead buffer, so the next Down arrow walks the full list.
• "Allow rotten" / "Allow fresh" are now hidden in the bills' ingredient filter when no allowed ingredient could ever match — matching vanilla (e.g. minigun, bionic eye recipes).
• Space and Enter now behave identically across all filter screens.

04/28/2026

CHANGES

• Starting-pawn selection now folds each pawn's quick stats into the collapsed treeview label instead of announcing them only on Alt+R. Arrowing onto a collapsed pawn reads name, title, age, gender, traits, and top five skills with passions; expanding the pawn collapses the label back to just the name and title so the screen reader does not re-read the long form on every category visit. Alt+R no longer appends an extra summary — the rebuilt tree re-announces the new pawn automatically.

BUG FIXES

• Pressing Home on a captured Anomaly entity in the scanner (e.g. a sightstealer on a holding platform) now jumps the cursor to the platform instead of saying "Item no longer exists". Distance and direction announcements for held entities are also now reported relative to the platform.

04/26/2026

BUG FIXES

• Gizmos for minified items at the cursor (e.g. an unloaded bedroll on a quest map) now announce "Install" the first time you open the gizmo menu, instead of incorrectly saying "Reinstall at...". The same fix applies to the Shift+letter hotkey collector, typeahead search, and the multi-match disambiguation menu, so any vanilla command whose label depends on the live selection (Designator_Install and similar) now resolves correctly in every announcement path.
• Alt+Space when only one pawn is selected now starts multi-select with that pawn as the first item, instead of silently re-selecting them and announcing "deselected, selection cleared". Multi-select is now a sticky mode you enter and leave deliberately: pressing Alt+Space on the last remaining pawn in the multi-select list exits the mode, as does pressing control alt space. More specifically, control alt space will toggle between selecting all and selecting none.

04/24/2026

The headline change: you can finally name your saves. The pause menu and the save/load screens also got a thorough polish pass.

NEW FEATURES

• You can now type a custom save name. The save menu drops you in a text field pre-filled with your faction name -- type to replace it, or press Down arrow to pick an existing save to overwrite.
• Save and load menus now announce each save's game version and flag autosaves, matching what sighted players see. Loading a save from a different version (or with a different mod list) now goes through RimWorld's compatibility warning dialog, and pressing Escape on that dialog returns you to the save list instead of dropping you out to the main menu.
• Anomaly research projects announce their tier (basic or advanced) while you browse the research menu, so you know which kind of entity you'll need to study to advance them.

PAUSE MENU POLISH

• Cursor position is preserved when you Escape out of a sub-menu (Save, Load, Options, Play Settings, Review Scenario), so you land back on the item you just used. Closing the pause menu with Escape resets the cursor for next time.
• Quit to Main Menu and Quit to Desktop now use proper confirmation dialogs (matching the rest of the mod), and cancelling either one returns you to the pause menu where you left off.
• Play Settings now returns you to the pause menu on Escape instead of kicking you out entirely.
• Home and End jump to the first and last items in the pause menu.

More BUG FIXES

• Starting an Anomaly research project no longer falsely claims your regular research project was paused -- Anomaly and regular research run on separate tracks, and the mod now only mentions a previous project when one was genuinely replaced.
• Several save/load labels that were hardcoded English (Overwrite, Load, Save, "please enter a name", delete confirmation) now use RimWorld's translation keys, so non-English players hear them in their own language.

RimWorld Access - Changelog for Aaron's Unofficial Patch

04/23/2026

The big one: broad Anomaly DLC support. Psychic rituals, turret packs, the Entity Codex, and the monolith dialogs all now work with Rimworld Access. The scanner grew an Entities category and an Unexplored category for fog-of-war areas. Alongside that, reverse designators like Cancel Orders finally respect their keyboard shortcuts, the mech bar is ordered like the mechs menu, tile-info hotkeys repeat without lag, and both the local and world map scanners are faster. Huge thanks to OlegTheSnowman for the Entity Codex and the unexplored-areas scanner contributions.

NEW FEATURES

• Anomaly DLC support: a big accessibility pass across the DLC. Most of the DLC's content should be accessible now, but please reach out if something doesn't work. Psychic rituals (and Ideology rituals) now announce their expected duration and outcome description when the dialog opens, with cleaner per-pawn readouts. Turret packs and any other ranged targeting source (including modded ones) are caught by a generic targeting handler that announces label, target type, range, and offers R for distance/line-of-sight. Invisible entities are now actually invisible to the scanner and cursor, matching what sighted players see. The held-entity tab gained a full keyboard menu covering every vanilla row -- Containment Strength, Escape MTB, Study Interval, Knowledge Gain, Allow Medicine, Containment Mode, Extract Bioferrite -- with the vanilla mouseover tooltips read out as well.
• Entity Codex (Anomaly DLC): keyboard-navigable with Up/Down, Home/End, and typeahead on entry name. Discovered entries announce category, description, and linked things; undiscovered entries use the vanilla "undiscovered" wording. Alt+I on a selected entry opens a picker over linked things (info card) and discovered research projects (jumps straight to the project in the research menu). Thanks to OlegTheSnowman for the PR.
• Anomaly Settings dialog at character creation: When the DLC is enabled, you can access its settings by tabbing past the save mode setting during story teller / difficulty selection.
• Scanner "Entities" category (Anomaly DLC): Has subcategories for captured entities, as well as hostile ones.
• Scanner "Unexplored" category: fog-of-war regions are groupable scanner targets now ("unexplored area: 42 tiles, 15.2 tiles northeast, area 2 of 7"). Regions refresh as your pawns explore, and they are excluded from the scanner search (so typing a room name doesn't get drowned in fog results). Thanks to OlegTheSnowman for the PR.
• Targeting announces min range and explosion radius: when a verb has a minimum range or an AoE radius, those are spoken alongside the normal range readout, so you know up front whether you're inside your own blast radius or too close to fire.
• The Diabolus's health sphere cannon is now correctly supported by the mod.

BUG FIXES

• Reverse designator shortcuts work now: gizmos like "Cancel", "Uninstall", and other reverse designators for the selected thing were silently ignoring their keyboard shortcuts. They now fire on their hotkey like every other gizmo.
• Ideology convert on prisoners: selecting "Convert" on a prisoner was supposed to switch the interaction mode to Convert and confirm the target ideology -- instead the choice was ignored. It now applies the mode and confirms the ideology as expected.
• Mech bar ordering: the mech bar was listing mechs in a different order than the mechs menu, and two-digit counts sorted wrong (mech 10 before mech 2). Now the bar matches the mechs menu order, and numeric labels sort numerically... or at least in the same order the mech menu sorts them.
• Tile-info hotkey repeat: hitting 1 (or any tile-info number) twice in quick succession used to drop the second press for ~300 ms. That rate limit is gone; the key repeats the readout immediately every time you press it.
• Inspection screen and quest labels localized: the top-level category headers and quest labels on the inspection tab were hardcoded English. They now use RimWorld's translation keys, so non-English players hear their own language again.
• Fog of war no longer leaks info: pressing tile-info hotkeys on a fogged tile used to announce terrain, temperature, and contents that sighted players couldn't see. Fogged tiles are now suppressed to match vanilla -- no more peeking through the fog with a screen reader.
• Scanner performance (local and world map): The scanner should be more responsive on busier maps. Auto jump mode should work once more.
• Global shortcuts during rename dialogs and the Work table: typing a letter in a rename field or the Work table used to sometimes fire a global hotkey (e.g. hitting tab would open the architect menu). Global shortcuts are now blocked while those inputs have focus.
• Alt/Ctrl character suppression: holding Alt or Ctrl and hitting a letter used to dispatch both the modifier combo and the bare character, so Alt+F could trigger F's unmodified action as well. The bare character is now suppressed when a modifier is held.
• Multi-select survives save/load: loading a save while multiple pawns were selected sometimes left a stale ghost selection. The multi-select is now cleared on load.
• Outfit stands groupable: The mod now supports grouping outfit stands, and it works identically to grouping shelves. Have fun grouping!

RimWorld Access - Changelog for Aaron's Unofficial Patch

04/19/2026

A short round of fixes: C now forms caravans properly on the world map, the Work tab stays tidy when a colonist is lost mid-session, geyser overviews don't claim negative health, and Alt+B on veteran pawns is much snappier.

BUG FIXES

• World-map caravan formation (C): the shortcut was announcing "Reform caravan only works on temporary maps" and then doing nothing else. It now falls through to the real world-map behavior, so pressing C at a selected settlement forms a caravan like it always should have. On actual temporary maps, C still reforms the caravan.
• Work tab ghost rows: when a colonist was captured, killed, or otherwise left the player's faction while the Work tab was open, their slot stuck around -- tabbing onto them landed silently or broke the announcement. Both the focused and table views now refresh the colonist list on the fly, so lost colonists drop out immediately and the cursor stays on whichever pawn should be next.
• Geyser health line: inspecting a geyser (or any other indestructible object) was displaying "Health: -1 % (-1 / 100)", because those things don't track hit points. Indestructible objects no longer get a health line at all, matching vanilla.
• Alt+B combat log, much snappier: on pawns with long combat histories the log used to take half a second to render. The mod was formatting every past entry just to throw away all but the 10 most recent. It now only formats the 10 it actually shows -- a roughly 50x reduction of wasted work for veteran colonists.

RimWorld Access - Changelog for Aaron's Unofficial Patch

04/18/2026

Two new table views (Work and Skills), Ideology's Gauranlen tree change-caste dialog is now keyboard-navigable, a handful of cursor tricks, and a healthy stack of fixes. Oleg is back with dryad caste accessibility -- thank you, Oleg.

NEW FEATURES

• Dryad caste dialog (Ideology DLC): the Gauranlen tree change-caste dialog is now keyboard-navigable. Up/Down through the castes, Home/End to jump, Enter to select, and typeahead search on caste name. Each caste announces its details. Full vanilla translations

throughout, including game-provided descriptions like "dryads produce X every Y." Big thanks to OlegTheSnowman for the PR.

• Work table view (Ctrl+Tab (Option+Tab on Mac OS) to swap): a full 2D view of every colonist against every work type, alongside the existing focused view. This table view is exactly how sighted people would see this screen. Sort by Alt+S, paint priorities down a column with Shift+Up/Down or Shift+Home/End, and set a priority for everyone with Shift+0-4. Ctrl+Tab (Option+Tab on Mac) swaps between focused and table views anywhere in the Work tab. The default view is saved in Options > RimWorld Access, so whichever you prefer can be your home.
• Pawn skills table (Alt+P): a read-only 2D table of your colonists against all their skills. Columns are skills in vanilla order, cells announce level, passion, and descriptor ("medical: 15, burning passion, excellent"). Alt+S sorts by the current column (passion breaks ties, disabled pawns sink to the bottom). Typeahead on pawn name. At long last, a way to answer "who's actually good at medicine" without pressing enter on every colonist.
• Need tooltips in the Needs tree: each need under the pawn Needs category is now expandable and announces what sighted players see on hover. Descriptions (with tags stripped), where the need comes from (trait, gene, ideo, hediff), joy recreation tolerances and on-map joy sources, caravan joy gain, mood break thresholds, food level in raw units where that's meaningful (e.g. Thrumbos), learning activities -- all now in the tree.
• Shift+ finds gizmos without selection: gizmo hotkeys used to only fire while the owning thing was selected, which meant cursor-navigating over a bed and hitting Shift+ silently did nothing. Now Shift+ checks both your selection and whatever is under the cursor. One match fires directly; multiple matches open a float menu with each option labelled by gizmo, owner, hotkey, and description. (Reform Caravan moved off Shift+C to plain C so Shift+C is free for any gizmo bound to C.)
• Ctrl+A in shape placement: fills both corners of the current shape for you. Inside an enclosed room, it matches the room extents. Inside an area ringed by walls or blueprints, a flood-fill finds the interior. Otherwise it takes the whole map. Great for a single Chop Wood order across the entire map. (This doesn't work with line shapes for obvious reasons!)
• K on the local map announces the current cursor coordinates.
• Alt+1-0 double-tapped jumps to that colonist: first tap still selects them on the bar; a second tap within half a second moves the cursor, snaps the camera, plays terrain audio, and announces "Jumped to {pawn}. {tile info}". Works in multi-select mode too, so you can jump to a specific pawn without having to pick them in the menu.
• Pawn location now rides along with job announcements: Alt+1-0 and comma/period now include the room, zone, or stockpile a colonist is standing in (e.g. "Bob, in kitchen, cooking meals").
• Active-quest deadlines: the quests list shows "Expires in X" for accepted quests with a bad-outcome deadline (taking priority over "Accepted X ago"), and the detail view now pulls in every activity and expiry block vanilla shows on hover. Not-yet-accepted quests get the localized expiry string too.
• Threat slowdown announcements are now opt-in: Options > RimWorld Access > Announce Forced Slowdowns (default off). If you liked hearing "slowed by threat" every raid, turn it on; otherwise, peace.

BUG FIXES

• Ideology preset chooser: Create Fluid, Create Fixed, and Load Saved are announced as "Accessibility coming soon" and blocked rather than silently dropping you into an inaccessible page. The one working option, Simple ideoligion, still works as before.
• Prisoner tab: arrow keys, Enter, and Escape no longer leak into the inspection tree underneath. Hardcoded English labels swapped for vanilla translation keys, royalty recruitment offset surfaced, Anomaly study/knowledge info included, medical care section hidden for slaves (vanilla only shows it for prisoners), and executing a slave from a neutral faction asks for confirmation first.
• Scanner search deduped: a single fence could show up three times in search results (once per subcategory it belonged to). Map search now reads from a single canonical list. World search also collapses landmarks whose labels differ slightly across the "All" and type subcategories down to one entry.
• Typeahead ranking: the shortest-name tiebreaker used to treat a whole item label ("Butcher table: 75 wood. A heavy table for cutting...") as the "name," so typing "table" ranked anything whose description mentioned a table alongside items actually called table-something. Labels are now split at the first ": " / ". " boundary -- the name tiers only look at the actual name, and cost annotations and descriptions fall through to the Description tier. "Wall" still ranks before "Wall lamp."
• Plants no longer claim a Growth Info tab. Vanilla doesn't have one. Growth %, conditions, blight, ready-to-harvest, and dying-reason details are already in the Overview category via the game's own inspect string. The invented tab was also displaying plant age as raw ticks ("1164000 / 90.4 days").
• Full-map shape placement lag: rect/oval placement over large areas (a Chop Wood across the whole map, ~65k cells) used to freeze the game for a second or two. This was a mod bug, and has been fixed.
• Work tab polish:
• Pressing numbers while in basic view no longer secretly adjusts priorities in manual mode.
• Quite a few tool tips were missing, the mod now reads them out.
• Manual-mode disabled labels use "Priority 0" / "0" (vanilla's scale) instead of "off" / "Disabled".
• 2D tables announce only the axis that actually changed: moving up/down in Animals, Wildlife, Mechs, Assign, Work table, Pawn Skills, Schedule, or AutoSlaughter no longer repeats the column name on every row change, and moving left/right no longer repeats the pawn name. Initial entry, post-sort, restore, and typeahead jumps still get the full context, since those are re-orientation moments.

RimWorld Access - Changelog for Aaron's Unofficial Patch

04/14/2026

Bug fixes, typeahead and navigation improvements, character creation polish, and a couple of new keyboard shortcuts. The spatial audio footstep system introduced on 04/10 has been removed.

A NOTE ON FOOTSTEPS

The positional footstep system from the 04/10 patch has been removed in this release.

After living with it for a few days, I couldn't get footsteps to the quality bar I wanted to put my name on. RimWorld's sound stage fights the integration: footstep positions don't track with a pawn's other sounds (so a cooking pawn who starts walking sounds out of place relative to its cooking sound), and reverb behavior was inconsistent in ways I couldn't tame. I had hoped the feature would be most useful in combat, but even after a lot of time tuning per-category volume sliders, footsteps either drowned out game audio, shattering immersion, or were too quiet to carry information. There was no middle ground I was happy to ship.

Huge thanks to OlegTheSnowman, who did the original contribution this system was built on. Oleg is of course free to continue this work in their own mod, as they were doing before. I may return to positional audio later, but for now I'd rather focus on the systems and DLC coverage already in the mod, documentation, and the long tail of bugs.

BUG FIXES

• Prison beds: marking a bed for prisoners through the accessibility menu now updates the room's cached "prison cell" flag immediately. Previously the game didn't recognize the cell until you reloaded the save, which made "capture" and "arrest" jobs report "no available prison cells" even when you'd just set one up.
• Mortar shells filter: the Shells tab wasn't opening when pressing Enter because of an internal name mismatch. Filtering which shells mortars will load works again.
• Scanner category counts: each category's announced total was double- counting (sometimes more) because items appear in both their specialized subcategory and the "All" bucket. Counts now match what Page Up/Page Down can actually reach. Same fix applied on the world scanner.
• Health capacity breakdown: expanding a capacity node (e.g. Moving, Manipulation) on the health tree now correctly announces what's affecting it -- the "Affected by" list of hediffs, injured body parts, and pain. An early-return bug had been silently dropping it.
• Float-menu targeters accessible: second-stage targeting started from a float menu option (most visibly "Force target to wear/equip [apparel]") used to open silently with no screen reader feedback. Now announced and routable through the standard item targeting state. Generalizes to modded options that use the same pattern.
• Submenus no longer close the inspection tree: opening a submenu (Bills, Range Edit, ThingFilter, Flickable, Refuelable, Breakdownable, Door Control, Forbid Control, Fishing Zone, Storage, Plant Selection, Bed Assignment, Owner Assignment, Prisoner tab, Info Card, etc.) used to dump you back to the map on Escape. You now return to the inspection row you launched from.
• Refuelable buildings use the game's real fuel label: mortars show "Barrel durability", uranium slug turrets show "Uranium slugs", foam turrets show "Foam", deathrest caskets show "Hemogen", etc., instead of a generic "Fuel Settings".
• Inapplicable ThingFilter options hidden: filters like "Allow rotten" and "Allow fresh" are hidden when no allowed item in the filter can ever rot. The mortar shells filter in particular now hides hit-point and quality options that don't apply to ammunition.

CHARACTER CREATION

• Escape on the starting-pawns screen now asks for confirmation before discarding your rolled colonists.
• Pawns and hediffs in char gen are no longer marked inspectable -- the tree already surfaces every stat inline, so the extra info-card step was redundant. Hediffs now announce their full description directly. Items and xenotypes are still inspectable.
• ] context menu in char gen now routes reroll and rename through the same code path as Alt+R / Alt+N, so filter-aware announcements and

pawn filters now work correctly.

• Reroll no longer loses your tree position when filters are active and the first attempt matches, and no longer loses position in "Rashad Hates Treeviews" submenu mode.
• "Selected" and "Left behind" section headers now announce as info-card-style section boundaries only when you cross between sections, instead of taking up a navigable row each.

WORK, SCHEDULE, ASSIGN

• Work menu now plays the same audio cues as vanilla. E.g. when you prioritize a job for which a pawn is ill suited.
• Work, Schedule, and Assign all order pawns by their colonist-bar position now.
• Assign also pulls in off-map colonists (caravans, travelling transporters) to match the vanilla Assign tab.

TYPEAHEAD SEARCH

• Shorter names now rank first within each match tier across all menus that use typeahead. Typing "wall" lands on "Wall" before "Wall lamp".
• Architect tree (Tab) and colony inventory (I) now auto-expand structural nodes on the first typed character so search reaches the whole tree without pressing '' first. The original tree shape is restored on Escape, Home/End, or deleting back to an empty query. Committing to a result (Enter, Left/Right, '') keeps the expansion.

NEW KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

• / (slash): focus the colonist/mech bar on whichever pawn is under the map cursor. Selects them, jumps the camera, and syncs the bar position so subsequent comma/period/Alt+arrow navigation picks up from the cursor. Announces "Not on colonist bar" if the cursor isn't on a bar pawn.
• [ (left bracket): execute the TOP option of the context menu ] builds. Shift+[ queues the order (same as shift-click queueing in vanilla). Announces "PawnName: action" on single selection, and the familiar "Everyone X" / "Only A X" wrapping on multi-select.
• Terrain announcements on cursor movement can now be toggled off under RimWorld Access (default on). When off, terrain names are suppressed from tile summaries during arrow-key movement, scanner Home jumps, bookmark jumps, and Go To. Terrain sound effects are unaffected.

GIZMO HOTKEYS NOW REQUIRE SHIFT

Bare-letter gizmo hotkeys no longer fire -- you must hold Shift (e.g. Shift+K to build a wall). This frees up bare letters for other accessibility shortcuts and prevents accidental gizmo activation during navigation.

• Draft (default R) is exempt. R still drafts/undrafts without Shift, since players rely on that muscle memory and no other gizmo shares R on a draftable pawn.
• The hotkey is now announced immediately after the gizmo title, before the description and any cost/range/cooldown info, so you don't have to wait through a long description to hear the key.
• Shift+T previously announced performance stats. Performance stats have moved to Alt+T so Shift+T can reach gizmos bound to T.

RimWorld Access - Changelog for Aaron's Unofficial Patch

04/10/2026

Spatial audio footsteps, a major scanner rework, new inspection tabs, health overhaul, Mechs tab, gizmo slider/right-click support, mods menu redesign, and numerous fixes.

This patch has a lot of changes under the hood, so it may be a bit less stable than some of the others. I will release hot fix patches as needed throughout the weekend to ensure people can play comfortably!

SPATIAL AUDIO (FOOTSTEPS)

A new positional audio system lets you hear pawns moving around your colony. Based on original work by OlegTheSnowman.

• Terrain-aware footsteps: dirt, stone, wood, metal, carpet, bridge, water, snow — over 100 terrain types mapped via defName
• Animal footsteps: light and heavy categories based on body size
• Mechanoid footsteps
• Stereo panning based on screen position relative to camera
• Distance-based volume with near/mid/far field zones
• Wall occlusion: sounds muffled through walls via low-pass filter, open doors partially restore clarity
• Room reverb using RimWorld's room/region system
• Interaural time delay for spatial precision
• Zoom-level volume scaling
• Per-category volume sliders (human, animal, mechanoid)
• Performance mode with priority-based throttling (18/tick cap), prioritizing selected, drafted, and hostile pawns
• Master "Enable Sound Effects" toggle
• Cursor terrain sounds now share the same .ogg pool as pawn footsteps with room-aware reverb
• All settings accessible via the keyboard-navigable options menu

SCANNER REWORK

Major rework of the map scanner with better categorization, live updates, and smarter navigation:

• New "All" top-level category listing every item closest-first
• Each category also gets an "All" subcategory — Ctrl+PgDn lands on the All view, Shift+PgDn drills into specialized buckets
• Pawns now split by faction: Colonists, Prisoners, Slaves, Guests, Hostile, Player Mechs, Hostile Mechs — raids during friendly visits no longer mix raiders and visitors
• Many more natural terrain types show up (mud, moss, riverbank, lava, volcanic rock, etc.) — terrain detection uses fertility and pathCost instead of hardcoded English defNames, so DLC and modded terrain are caught automatically
• Dead pawns and destroyed items detected mid-navigation with an "Item no longer exists" notice
• Standing on a zone, stockpile, or terrain patch now reads "here" instead of pointing to the geometric center
• Multi-region terrain shows specific area info ("10x10, here, area 1 of 63") instead of misleading totals
• Page Up/Down preserves your position when the list re-sorts
• Stable sort tie-breaking: items at equal distance no longer bounce between each other on every press
• Harvestable subcategories now require plants to be fully mature
• Minified items (uninstalled beds, tables, monument markers) now show their real names instead of "minified thing"
• Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right adjusts preset jump distance by 10 tiles

HEALTH INSPECTION OVERHAUL

The health section of the inspection tree has been modernized to match vanilla's structure:

• Conditions grouped by body part instead of a flat "Conditions" list
• Pain and bleeding (including time-to-death) shown upfront
• Capacities use vanilla's pawn-type-specific labels and filtering
• Collapsed summaries show full content without needing to expand

Operations menu improvements:

• Typeahead search across all menu levels
• Ctrl+Up/Down to reorder operations
• Richer operation details: skill requirements, ingredients, replaced parts
• Self-tend validation matching vanilla behavior

Alt+H quick health:

• Now a focused combat triage readout: only sight, manipulation, and moving capacities are shown when not at 100% (the three that matter most for combat decisions)
• Only damaged body parts (with HP) and bleeding with time-to-death
• Bionics and chronic conditions filtered out

Localization improved throughout with vanilla translation keys.

NEW INSPECTION TABS

Seven inspect tabs upgraded from generic text to full treeview content:

• Feeding tab (Biotech babies): auto-breastfeed section with per-feeder mode selection (Never/Childcare/Urgent) and baby food toggles
• Art tab: title and generated description
• Book tab: benefits, dangers, and flavor text
• Bookcase contents: list of books with Delete key to eject
• Wind turbine auto-cut: toggle and Cut Now action
• Guest tab: medical care selection via float menu
• Transporter contents: items-to-load and contained-items with Delete to drop

Training tab (tamed animals):

• Master assignment and follow toggles
• Odyssey DLC behavior toggles
• Trainable skill management

MECHS TAB (Biotech DLC)

The Mechs tab is now fully accessible — the last main game tab to get screen reader support.

Press F4 to open. If you have only animals, it opens Animals. If you have only mechs, it opens Mechs. If you have both, a chooser menu lets you pick.

8 columns matching vanilla: Name, Energy, Draft, Auto Repair, Overseer, Control Group, Work Mode, and Allowed Area.

Interactive columns:

• Draft and Auto Repair: toggle with Enter
• Control Group: submenu to reassign between overseer's groups
• Work Mode: submenu to change control group work mode
• Allowed Area: submenu with Manage Areas support

Sorting via Alt+S. Full painting support via Shift+Up/Down and Shift/Ctrl+Shift+Home/End for Draft, Auto Repair, Control Group, and Allowed Area columns.

GIZMO IMPROVEMENTS

Right-click options:

• Right bracket on gizmos with right-click options opens them in a float menu (covers "Designate All", Command_Hide subclasses, and mechanitor control group gizmos)

Slider adjustment:

• Enter on slider gizmos (fuel, hemogen, pruning, mech carrier) enters adjustment mode
• Left/Right arrows step one increment, Shift for 5x
• Heat/Psyfocus gizmo uses right bracket instead (Enter toggles the neural heat limiter)
• Plays vanilla's DragSlider sound on each step

Also includes discoverability hints and psyfocus target value in announcements.

MODS MENU REDESIGN

The mods menu has been rebuilt as a navigable two-level interface:

List level:

• Up/Down to navigate, Left/Right to switch columns
• Space to quick toggle enable/disable
• Enter to open detail view

Detail level:

• Navigable content lines: author, ID, versions, warnings, errors, requirements, and description
• Action buttons: Enable/Disable, Mod Options, Website, Workshop, Open Folder, Unsubscribe
• Open Folder now works on macOS and Linux (not just Windows)
• Fixed Space quick toggle showing stale "Now on/off" announcements

TABLE SORTING FIX

Sorting in the Animals, Wildlife, and Assign tabs now uses the game's own PawnColumnWorker.Compare() method instead of custom string-based sorting. This fixes broken sorting for non-English players and ensures correct ordering (e.g., training progress by level, not alphabetically).

Also adds 3-state sort cycle matching vanilla: descending → ascending → clear (return to default order).

OTHER IMPROVEMENTS

• Shift+T announces game performance: current time speed, actual vs target ticks per second, percent of requested speed. When a combat threat forces normal speed, the announcement says "slowed by threat"
• Time control labels now use vanilla translation keys (ClockTime, ClockDate, Weather, AM, PM, etc.) for non-English players
• History messages tab: content announced first (then type, then date) so you can stop listening sooner. Alt+L/Alt+M filter hints announced on tab entry
• Schedule - Allowed areas column: Shift+Home/End bulk paints allowed area to all pawns above/below, Ctrl+Shift+Home/End paints to all pawns
• Bookmarks: double-tapping Ctrl+number now announces "Jumped" so you know you were moved
• Pawn group shortcuts changed: save groups now Ctrl+Shift+F1-F4, recall groups now Ctrl+F1-F4 (avoids Alt+F4 closing the game on Windows and Cmd+F5 toggling VoiceOver on macOS)
• Double-tap Ctrl+number to jump to bookmark as alternative to Ctrl+Shift+number (avoids keyboard layout switching conflicts)

SCREEN READER FIXES

• Optional Tolk fallback for Windows: players can place Tolk.dll at %APPDATA%..\LocalLow\Ludeon Studios\RimWorld by Ludeon Studios to use Tolk instead of Prism for screen readers not yet supported by Prism
• Fixed Prism config struct size for v0.11+ API (was causing initialization failure on all platforms)
• Angle brackets in speech text no longer trigger SSML parsing on macOS, fixing silent or broken speech output
• On macOS without VoiceOver, key presses now interrupt queued AVSpeechSynthesizer speech

BUG FIXES

• Fixed terrain sounds not playing in non-English languages (was matching against translated labels instead of defNames)
• Fixed non-Latin keyboard typeahead: Cyrillic and other non-Latin keyboard users can now search in menus (typeahead uses layout-aware character events instead of physical key codes)
• Fixed maps with only mechs or animals being excluded from Shift+comma/period map switching. Map switch announcement now describes what's on each map (e.g. "3 colonists, 2 mechs")
• Fixed input stealing during overlay/placement: float menus opened over placement mode now receive keyboard input correctly
• Fixed designator loss when selecting a pawn during shape placement
• Fixed "Unrestricted" area label not being localized in Animals tab

There's probably a lot more, honestly. It's hard to remember everything.

03/27/2026

Cross-platform support (macOS and in theory Linux), Rashad Hates Treeviews fixes, and info card announcement improvements.

CROSS-PLATFORM SUPPORT

RimWorld Access now works on macOS in addition to Windows. Linux is also supported in theory but has not been tested. The same mod package works across all three platforms — no separate downloads needed.

The mod has been migrated from the Windows-only Tolk library to Prism, a modern cross-platform screen reader abstraction layer. Prism auto-detects and uses the best available screen reader or TTS engine on your system:

• Windows: NVDA, JAWS, SAPI, ZDSR, possibly others.
• macOS: VoiceOver
• Linux: Orca (untested)

macOS keyboard shortcuts: All keyboard shortcuts work identically to Windows with two substitutions:

• Ctrl → Cmd (Command key)
• Alt → Option key

Everything else is the same.

macOS installation: Place the RimWorldAccess mod folder at: ~/Library/Application Support/steam/steamapps/common/RimWorld/RimWorldMac.app/Mods

Known issues on macOS:

• VoiceOver interruptions: incoming alerts and notifications will cut off whatever VoiceOver is currently reading. If you're in the middle of listening to something and an alert arrives, VoiceOver switches to the alert and you'll need to re-read the original content.

Rashad Hates Treeviews fixes

Several fixes to the submenu-style navigation mode:

• When opening inspection via Ctrl+Alt+Enter, the cursor now correctly lands on the first child item instead of the second
• Section boundary announcements are now spoken before the item instead of after (e.g., "Gear. Steel sword" instead of "Steel sword. Gear"), giving you context first
• Section names now use the short form instead of the full collapsed label, which could be very long for some categories
• Expanding a node or opening inspection no longer redundantly announces the section or parent name — you just chose to go there, so you already know where you are. Section announcements now only fire when navigating up/down across section boundaries.
• These fixes apply to both the inspect panel and the info card

03/26/2026

Treeview overhaul with unified navigation and audio feedback, a new submenu-style navigation mode, smart labels, multi-select, launch destination filtering, world map landmarks, and info card improvements.

MULTI-SELECT

A complete multi-select system that lets you select multiple pawns and issue group commands, eliminating the need to individually select and command each pawn one at a time.

Selection:

• Alt+Shift+Left/Right: extend selection to adjacent pawns
• Alt+Space: toggle individual pawns in/out of selection
• Alt+Ctrl+Space: select all colonists / clear all selection

Persistent groups (3 slots):

• Ctrl+Alt+F1 through Ctrl+Alt+F3: save current selection to a group
• Alt+F1 through Alt+F3: recall a saved group

Groups persist across save/load. Pawns on other maps are filtered out on recall and announced as unavailable.

Navigation in multi-select mode:

• Comma/Period, Alt+Left/Right, Alt+1-0, Alt+Up/Down all move focus without changing the selection
• Camera does not follow focus movement
• Focused pawn announces selected/not-selected status and current job

Group commands:

• R: draft/undraft (toggles pawns matching the first pawn's state)
• G: show gizmos for selected pawns (grouped like vanilla)
• Right bracket (]): context menu for selected group
• "Go here (formation)": line formation movement with two-point placement (Space to set points, Enter to confirm, Escape to cancel)

After issuing commands, you get smart feedback:

• "Everyone drafted" / "Everyone except Bob, Sarah drafted" / "Only Carol, Dave drafted"

Pawn info shortcuts (Alt+H/M/N/K/G/B) use the cursor pawn first, then show a pawn picker menu if multiple are selected. Alt+C opens a pawn picker for camera jump. All pickers support typeahead search.

TREEVIEW OVERHAUL

All treeviews across the mod now share a single unified navigation system. This means every tree in the game — architect menu, inspect panel, info card, ideology viewer, character creation, research menu, and more — behaves consistently with the same keyboard shortcuts and the same navigation rules.

Expanding and collapsing nodes now plays distinct sounds so you always know what just happened without needing speech. Especially useful for the new Rashad Hates Treeviews mode. Bulk-expanding with * plays a reverb version of the expand sound to signal that multiple nodes opened at once.

Rashad Hates Treeviews Mode (Optional Setting)

A new setting (off by default) transforms every treeview in the mod into submenu-style navigation for players who prefer an arguably better, but potentially more confusing, experience. When enabled:

• Right Arrow or Enter on a category opens it like a submenu — the category disappears and you land on its first child
• Left Arrow goes back to the parent, which reappears with the cursor on it
• The tree remembers where you were in each category, so re-entering puts you right back where you left off
• Crossing between expanded categories announces the new parent's name as a boundary cue
• All other navigation (Home, End, typeahead search, etc.) works as usual

This is dedicated to Rashad, whose passionate hatred of treeviews inspired me to bring this back! Enable it in the mod settings under "Rashad Hates Treeviews."

SMART LABELS

Data heavy Treeview nodes now show context-aware labels. When a node is collapsed, it shows a full summary of its contents. When expanded, it shows just the title — since you can already see the children. Expanding or collapsing always announces the short form so you're not overwhelmed with repeated information.

A new "Announce Levels" setting lets you toggle depth level announcements in treeviews (e.g., "level 2"). Turn it off if you find the level callouts distracting; turn it on if you want to stay oriented in deeply nested trees.

LAUNCH DESTINATION FILTERING

When launching gravships, transport pods, or shuttles, the world map scanner now only shows destinations that are actually in range of the launch point. Previously the scanner listed every settlement, site, and tile on the map regardless of whether you could reach it — now unreachable destinations are filtered out automatically.

As before, fuel cost to each destination is announced as part of the tile summary, so you can factor costs into your decision-making.

LANDMARKS (Odyssey DLC)

A new "Landmarks" category has been added to the world map scanner. This feature requires the Odyssey DLC — if you don't have Odyssey enabled, you won't see the Landmarks category in the scanner.

Landmarks are notable world features like mountain ranges, lakes, and volcanic fields. Each landmark's name is also included in the tile summary when you're standing on a tile that belongs to one. You can press 5 to learn more about the landmark.

INFO CARD IMPROVEMENTS

The info card now uses section-based navigation instead of showing category headers as separate items you have to arrow past. Sections like Basics, Combat, and Apparel are announced when you cross from one section into another (e.g., "Combat section. Armor — Sharp: 50%"). This reduces clutter and makes browsing stats faster.

Stat entries that duplicate their category name no longer show redundant text.

BUG FIXES AND SMALLER CHANGES

• Pressing Escape in the character creation pawn filter now saves your filters instead of discarding them
• World map layer cycling changed from L to Tab/Shift+Tab for better consistency with other navigation patterns
• Orbit (space) tiles no longer announce meaningless temperature and hilliness values
• Pressing Enter on a gravship ritual role now changes the role assignment instead of accidentally launching the gravship
• New pawns during character creation now announce their age, traits, and top 3 skills when rolled
• Fixed duplicate skill announcements in ritual pawn selection
• Fixed stale architect menu state persisting after switching to the world map

03/23/2026

Map bookmarks, a fully accessible Learning Helper, and keyboard input fixes for AZERTY layouts, auto slaughter typeahead, and health tab operations.

MAP BOOKMARKS

You can now save and jump to up to 10 bookmarked positions on each map. Bookmarks are saved per-map and persist across save/load.

• Ctrl+Alt+1 through Ctrl+Alt+0: Set a bookmark at your current cursor position. You'll hear a confirmation with the tile summary (e.g., "Bookmark 3 set: Steel wall, Home zone").
• Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+0: Announce a bookmark's info without moving. Reports the tile contents, distance, and direction from your current position (e.g., "grav engine, Gravship substructure, 189, 231, 13 tiles Southwest"). If the bookmark isn't set, you'll hear "Bookmark 3 not set".
• Ctrl+Shift+1 through Ctrl+Shift+0: Jump your cursor directly to the bookmarked tile.

Bookmarks are stored independently per map, so your colony map bookmarks won't interfere with bookmarks on other maps. They persist when you save and reload your game.

LEARNING HELPER

RimWorld's Learning Helper — the contextual tutorial that teaches game mechanics as you play — is now fully accessible via keyboard. When adaptive training is enabled (the default), new lessons are announced automatically through your screen reader as they activate during gameplay.

Press ? (question mark) to open the Learning Helper menu at any time while in-game.

The menu has two modes, toggled with Tab:

• Active Lessons (default): Shows only currently active or unlearned concepts — the ones the game thinks are relevant to what you're doing right now.
• All Lessons: Shows every tutorial concept in the game, with typeahead search so you can quickly find specific topics.

Navigation:

• Up/Down arrows: Move through the lesson list
• Enter: Open a lesson's detail view to read its content
• Tab: Switch between Active Lessons and All Lessons modes
• Home/End: Jump to first or last lesson
• Type letters: Typeahead search (in All Lessons mode)
• Backspace: Delete search character
• Escape: Clear search, or close the menu

Inside a lesson's detail view:

• Up/Down: Navigate through the lesson header, help text lines, and action buttons
• Enter: Activate the current button (e.g., "Mark as learned")
• Escape: Return to the lesson list

Each lesson shows its knowledge percentage (how much the game considers you've learned it). Arrowing through a lesson's detail view counts as interaction and increases your knowledge. You can also press Enter on "Mark as learned" to immediately complete a lesson.

Note: The Learning Helper requires adaptive training to be enabled in your settings. If adaptive training is off, the ? key will do nothing.

BUG FIXES

• Fixed auto slaughter typeahead not working: typing letters on the auto slaughter screen was navigating the animals menu instead. Typeahead now correctly searches animal rows on the auto slaughter screen.
• Fixed AZERTY keyboard support: the left ALT key should now work for all ALT shortcuts (Alt+N, Alt+H, Alt+M, Alt+B, etc.). Previously, only the right ALT key worked on AZERTY and similar non-US keyboard layouts.
• Fixed keyboard input leaking from the health tab operations menu: typing letters for typeahead search (e.g., 'R' or 'T') was accidentally triggering game shortcuts (drafting pawns, announcing time). Letters are now properly consumed by the menu.
• Added Enter-to-confirm-search behavior across tabular menus: in the auto slaughter, animals, and wildlife menus, pressing Enter while a typeahead search is active now confirms the search result and announces your current position, instead of triggering the cell action. Press Enter again (after search is cleared) to interact with the cell normally.
• Fixed IMGUI focus on character creation pages after closing the faction relations dialog

03/16/2026

Massive character creation overhaul, full Ideology DLC browsing, Odyssey gravship support, Royalty jump pack targeting, localization of 70+ hardcoded strings, and a new pawn filter system with RandomPlus compatibility.

Important Note: Creating custom ideoligions is not yet accessible. Do not select those options in the ideology screen or you will get stuck and have to restart the game. Support for this will come in a few days to a week.

CHARACTER CREATION — REDESIGNED

The character creation screen has been completely rebuilt as a treeview. Pawns are grouped under "Selected" and "Left behind" headers, with expandable categories (Bio, Traits, Skills, Health, Possessions) and full keyboard navigation.

• Page Up/Down preserves your tree position when switching between pawns
• Ctrl+Up/Down reorders pawns within the selected group
• Alt+R randomizes the current pawn
• Alt+N renames with a Title field
• Right bracket (]) opens a context menu with Biotech dev stage and xenotype submenus
• Typeahead search to find pawns by name
• Start-game confirmation now lists pawn names

Xenotype editor (Biotech DLC): The gene editing screen during character creation is now fully accessible. Tabbed treeview with Selected Genes, Gene Library (organized by category), and Controls (biostats, name, name lock, inheritable, ignore restrictions, load/save). Toggle individual genes with Enter, rename with a text input flow, and browse gene details with front-loaded biostats and descriptions.

Pawn filter system (RandomPlus Mod implementation) (Alt+F or context menu): A full pawn filter editor lets you set criteria for auto-rerolling pawns. Filters include per-skill level and passion requirements, total passion range, total skill points range, traits (required/excluded), age range, gender, health conditions, and work incapabilities. When randomizing, pawns are rerolled automatically until a match is found or the configurable limit is reached, with progress announcements for long searches.

RandomPlus feature parity: The filter system now matches the full RandomPlus mod feature set — gene-affected hediff exemptions, optional trait pools, skill counting options (highest attack only, passion skills only), and reroll limits up to 50,000. Filter presets save and load in the exact same format and location as RandomPlus, so blind and sighted players can share presets seamlessly.

WANDERER DIALOG

The post-colony-death settler creation screen (Dialog_ChooseNewWanderers) is now fully accessible, reusing the same chargen tree navigation and RandomPlus filter system. Alt+A to add pawns (up to 6), Delete to remove (minimum 1), Enter to confirm, Escape to close. The pawn filter and reroll work mid-game just like during initial character creation.

LOCALIZATION

Over 70 hardcoded English strings across the main menu, options menu, storyteller selection, scenario selection, and custom difficulty screens have been replaced with RimWorld's own translation keys. Tooltip announcements have been added for 14 settings that have game-provided tooltips (volumes, compression, camera, etc.).

The language selection menu and soundtrack submenu now route through the accessible float menu system instead of opening vanilla's inaccessible FloatMenu. Language names display in their native script (e.g., "Deutsch" instead of "German").

On/Off checkbox values, day labels, permadeath mode labels, and option category names are all localized.

BUG FIXES

• Map cursor now initializes at the camera position instead of (0,0) when loading a save
• Fixed a crash when the game's rendering code called TransportersInGroup() during gizmo announcement, causing a collection-modified exception
• Fixed incompatible trait degrees (e.g., Psychically Hypersensitive and Psychically Deaf) being selectable together in the pawn filter
• Fixed float menu input conflicts with IMGUI context on chargen pages
• Fixed favorite color translation crash due to missing named arguments
• Ideology tree expand/collapse actions now announce just the section name and state (e.g., "Memes, expanded, 3 items") instead of reading the full content

DLC FEATURES

IDEOLOGY DLC

Ideology tab (F12 > Ideology): The in-game Ideology tab is now fully browsable with keyboard navigation. A two-panel interface shows the ideology list on one side and a details tree view on the other.

The details tree includes all sections matching what sighted players see:

• Overview with leader title, worship room, adjective, member name
• Style categories with buildable/styled item lists and override tracking
• Memes as expandable nodes showing unlocked roles, rituals, traits, research, and conflicting precepts
• Precepts, roles, rituals, buildings, relics, weapons, animals, apparel
• Role required apparel with descriptions and Alt+I info cards
• Deities with name, type, gender, and related meme
• Fluid ideology development points

Note: Reforming fluid ideoligions is not accessible yet, nor is creating custom fluid or fixed ideoligions. This is coming soon.

• Appearance section with browsable hair, beard, and tattoo styles
• Ritual ambience sound preview via Enter key

Ideology preset selection during world gen: The ideology selection screen during world generation is now accessible. Two-tab interface with Options (Classic, Custom Fluid/Fixed, Load) and Presets (organized by Mild/Strong/Intense categories with expandable descriptions). Alt+S and Alt+Y open structure and style selection menus.

Favorite color: Pawn favorite colors now appear in both the info card Bio tab and the inspect treeview Character section.

ROYALTY DLC

Jump pack targeting: Jump Packs and Locust Armor jump abilities are now fully accessible. When entering jump targeting mode, you hear the ability name, range, and remaining charges. Each tile shows validity as you navigate, R provides detailed range info, and Enter gives specific error messages for invalid targets. This required special handling because Verb_Jump extends Verb directly rather than going through the ability system.

ODYSSEY DLC

Gravship support: Gravships (Odyssey DLC flying transports) are now fully accessible, including destination selection, landing placement with coordinate correction, layer cycling on the world map, and disconnected substructure detection with scanner integration.

The process of launching and landing gravships is heavily gizmo driven. Check gizmos (g key) for every gravship related object to learn how the system works.

• Fixed gravship checkboxes being incorrectly counted in ritual role assignments

02/28/2026

Permits are now fully usable from the keyboard, the scanner splits mechanoids into friendly and hostile, thing filter navigation gets several fixes, and a soft-lock with child growth moments is resolved.

PERMITS

Permits can now be accepted and returned directly from the Info Card's Permits tab. Each permit node shows its full details — title requirement, prerequisites, cooldown, favor cost, and description. Use Enter to accept an available permit, and "Return all permits" is available per faction with a confirmation prompt.

Permit targeting has also been fixed. Previously, using a permit that targets a map cell (e.g., calling a shuttle or an airstrike) was completely broken because the item targeting system was incorrectly intercepting permit workers. The permit name is now announced when targeting starts, and range validation accounts for weather conditions correctly — clear weather no longer blocks targeting due to a negative range cap.

SCANNER

• The Mechanoids scanner subcategory is now split into "Player mechanoids" and "Hostile mechanoids" so you can cycle through your own mechs without stopping on every hostile cluster

FILTER NAVIGATION (used with ingredient filters, stockpile zone filters, etc.)

• Pressing * (Shift+8 or numpad multiply) now expands all siblings at the current level, matching the standard tree view pattern used elsewhere in the mod
• Typeahead search now works in the policy editor's ThingFilter (outfit, drug, and food restriction editors)
• Fixed typeahead keys leaking through to game shortcuts — for example, pressing T to search would also trigger the time announcement

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a soft-lock in the growth moment dialog when a child turning 3 had no passion or trait choices available — the dialog would open but couldn't be dismissed

02/26/2026

Minor hotfix patch.

• Fixed ingredient filters (e.g., crematorium bills) not showing inherited special filters like "Allow rotten" and "Allow fresh"
• Colonist bar no longer announces "Start of bar" / "End of bar" when reaching boundaries — instead re-announces the current pawn

02/25/2026

Another big patch! The schedule menu assign menu have all been redesigned from scratch, column painting now works across every supported table in the mod, and there are a ton of bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements throughout.

MAP AND TILE INFORMATION

The way items on a map tile are reported has been completely overhauled. Previously, items were broken into separate categories (pawns, buildings, items, plants) with arbitrary caps — for example, only the first 2 buildings and 3-5 pawns would be announced, and plants were hidden whenever any other object was present.

Now, everything on a tile is announced with no truncation, sorted by the game's own AltitudeLayer priority system — the same system the game uses for visual rendering and click selection. Higher-priority things are announced first:

1. Blueprints (planned construction) 2. Pawns (colonists, animals, NPCs) 3. Items (resources, equipment) 4. Buildings (structures, furniture, doors) 5. Plants (trees, crops, wild plants) 6. Conduits (hidden infrastructure)

Player-placed orders (chop, mine, haul, etc.) are now announced alongside the thing they apply to — for example, "bamboo tree (chop wood)" — instead of appearing as a disconnected list at the end. Cell-targeted orders like mine or smooth floor are announced at the beginning since they apply to the tile as a whole.

This same ordering is now used consistently across tile info, Alt+I info cards, and the gizmo bar, so all three systems present things in the same order.

Other tile info changes:

• Polluted terrain now includes "Polluted" in the label, matching vanilla's display
• Alt+I can now inspect non-selectable things like filth and wild plants

SCHEDULE MENU (F2) — REDESIGNED

The schedule menu has been completely redesigned. It now uses a brush- based painting system that lets you assign jobs across hours quickly using keyboard shortcuts.

How it works: The schedule is a grid where each row is a pawn and each column is an hour of the day (0–23). Each cell can be set to a job type like Anything, Work, Sleep, Recreation, or Meditate (if you have the Royalty DLC).

Selecting a brush: Press number keys 1 through 4 (or 5 with Royalty) to select a brush. The brushes correspond to the available job types: 1 = Anything 2 = Work (if available) 3 = Sleep 4 = Recreation 5 = Meditate (Royalty DLC) The selected brush is announced when you pick it.

Applying the brush:

• Space or Enter: Apply the brush to the current cell
• Shift+Left/Right: Move to the next/previous hour AND apply the brush as you go — this is "painting." Hold Shift and arrow across hours to quickly set a range.
• Shift+Home/End: Paint from the current cell to the first/last hour of the row
• Ctrl+Shift+Home/End: Paint every row at the selected column with the active brush.

For example: Let's say you have three pawns, Bob, Alice and John:

It's currently 11:43 in the game, and they're all having a really difficulty day, so you want to allow them to have recreation time the next two hours. You'd press f2, hit the right arrow key once (to navigate to hour 12 then press 3 to select the recreation brush.

From here, you could do a few different things:

1. You could press space on hour 12 to paint that single tile with your recreation brush. 2. You could tap shift right arrow, to select both hours 12 and 1 with your recreation brush (for your first pawn.) 3. Or, you could press control shift end. This would paint hour 12 with your recreation brush for all three of your pawns. Then you'd just have to hit the right arrow key to select hour 13 and use control shift home to paint all three pawns with recreation for hour 13.

If you'd rather just use] space to set individual cells, that's perfectly fine too. You can also still use control c and control v to copy and paste schedules between pawns.

If this proves to be confusing for folks (I'm assuming it will) I can make a video about it if Liam doesn't! I also will be updating the README to describe this screen in more detail.

Feedback is always welcome!

Navigation:

• Up/Down arrows move between pawns
• Left/Right arrows move between hours
• Tab/Shift+Tab switches between Schedule and Allowed Areas columns
• Home/End jump to the first/last hour
• Typeahead search to find pawns by name

ASSIGN MENU (F3) — REDESIGNED

The assign menu has been completely rebuilt to match the game's actual table layout — the same column-based design used by the Animals and Wildlife menus. Each row is a pawn and each column is an assignment category (Outfit, Drug Policy, Food Restriction, Hostility Response, Medical Care, Allowed Area, etc.).

• Left/Right arrows move between columns
• Up/Down arrows move between pawns
• Enter or Space opens a submenu for the current column (e.g., a list of available outfit policies to choose from)
• Right bracket (]) opens a context menu with actions for the current cell
• Typeahead search to find pawns by name

Painting is fully supported (see Column Painting below). You can also jump directly into the policy editor for outfits, food, and drugs from within the assign menu, and when you close the editor, you're returned to where you left off.

COLUMN PAINTING (Animals, Wildlife, Assign, Schedule)

"Painting" is a new way to apply the same value across multiple rows in a column without having to change each cell individually. Think of it like drag-to-fill in a spreadsheet. This feature previously existed only when setting allowed areas. It now works across every supported column in the Animals, Wildlife, and Assign tabs as well.

How painting works: 1. Navigate to the cell whose value you want to copy 2. Hold Shift and press Down or Up to paint that value to the next or previous row 3. Keep holding Shift and arrowing to keep painting

Bulk painting shortcuts: Since only the schedule tab lets you paint in the horizontal direction, all other tables will happily let you bulk paint whether you use shift home and shift end, or control shift home and control shift end.

Paintable columns by tab:

Animals (F4):

• Training columns (Obedience, Release, Rescue, Haul, etc.)
• Checkbox columns (Slaughter, Sterile, Follow Drafted, Follow Fieldwork, Release to Wild, plus Odyssey columns like Animal Dig and Animal Forage)
• Master assignment
• Medical Care level
• Allowed Area

Wildlife (F5):

• Hunt and Tame checkboxes

Assign (F3):

• Outfit, Drug Policy, Food Restriction, Hostility Response, Medical Care, and other assignment columns

Schedule (F2):

• All hour cells (using the brush system described above)

Animals and cells that can't accept the value (e.g., an animal that can't learn a training skill) are automatically skipped. Each column type plays appropriate sound effects matching vanilla's behavior.

WORK MENU IMPROVEMENTS

• Shift+0 through Shift+4: Set the selected work type's priority for ALL compatible pawns at once. The announcement adapts based on how many were changed vs. how many are incapable of that work type.
• Tab/Shift+Tab now preserves your work type column when moving between pawns, so you can quickly compare the same job across all colonists (e.g., Tab through every pawn's Cooking priority without losing your column position).

INVENTORY IMPROVEMENTS

Consolidated item groups: All instances of the same item type (same material and quality) are now grouped under a single expandable parent node showing the total count and how many are being carried. Expand the group to see individual stacks with their storage locations (stockpile zone, shelf, building) or carrier pawn, plus forbidden and tainted indicators.

Material variant grouping: Items with multiple material or quality variants (apparel, weapons, furniture) are further grouped by their base type. For example, all parkas are grouped together under "Parka" regardless of material, with a summary showing total count and materials. Meal variants sharing the same tier (fine, lavish) are grouped by quality.

Context menus: Press right bracket (]) on any item to open a context menu with actions like Jump To, Drop, Install, and Show Info, with keyboard shortcut hints shown alongside each action.

BILL CONFIGURATION FIXES

• Store In dropdown: Previously only showed stockpile zones, completely missing shelves and shelf groups. Selecting a shelf showed "(No stockpile)". Now correctly lists all storage locations including shelf groups, sorted to match vanilla's ordering. Compatible locations are listed first, with incompatible ones marked.
• Look In dropdown (ingredient source): Previously showed every storage location as a flat list without grouping shelves that share a storage group. Now properly collapses linked shelves into single group entries.
• Auto-pause: Bills paused by the "pause when satisfied" feature now show "(Paused)" in the bill list, and the bill config menu gains an "Unpause" option that appears only when a bill is auto-paused.
• Approximately 40 previously hardcoded English strings have been replaced with the game's own translation keys, improving support for non-English players. Please let me know if the experience was actually made worse for you!

POLICY EDITORS (Outfit, Food, Drug)

The three policy editors now share unified keyboard shortcuts that work from both the table view and the dropdown selector:

• Alt+N: New policy
• Alt+R: Rename policy
• Alt+C: Copy policy
• Alt+E: Edit policy (opens filter)
• Delete: Delete policy

Context menu labels now show these shortcut hints.

Item filter improvements across all policy editors, storage filters, and bill ingredient filters:

• Categories now use tri-state toggling matching vanilla behavior. When a category is partially allowed (some items on, some off), toggling it turns everything ON instead of OFF.
• Smart category summaries now show exception counts and names instead of a misleading "allowed" or "disallowed" label. For example, "disallowed, except for: cloth, human leather."
• Navigation in subcategories should no longer get stuck when drilling into and out of nested filter trees.
• Asterisk prefixes on special filter labels are stripped for cleaner screen reader output.

Other policy editor fixes:

• Forced apparel is now listed in the outfit column values on the assign tab
• Closing a policy editor properly returns to the assign menu and re-announces your position

GIZMO BAR AND ORDERS

Reverse designator gizmos: Orders like Mine Vein, Strip Corpse, and other reverse designators are now accessible in the gizmo menu (G key) when you have a valid target selected. Mine Vein, for example, lets you place a mine order on an entire connected body of mineable tiles — select any tile in the vein, press G to open gizmos, and activate Mine Vein to mark the whole thing.

Ability cooldowns: Ability gizmos now announce their cooldown remaining when on cooldown, so you can tell when an ability will be available again.

Queued orders: When you give an order with Shift+Enter (to queue it rather than replace the current order), the announcement now confirms that the order was queued.

INFO CARDS AND INSPECTION

• Ctrl+Alt+I: New shortcut to open the info card for the currently selected colonist bar pawn, matching the existing Ctrl+Alt+Enter pattern for the inspection tree.
• Incapable Of section: The info card's "Incapable Of" section now shows WHY each work type is disabled (which backstory, trait, or gene causes it) and expands to list affected work types with descriptions, matching what sighted players see on the character card.

KEYBOARD AND INPUT FIXES

• Shift+Home/End on sliders: The direction of Shift+Home and Shift+End has been corrected across all quantity sliders (caravans, trading, bills, auto-slaughter, difficulty, fishing zones, quantity menu). Home now goes to minimum and End goes to maximum, matching standard keyboard conventions.
• Building mode no longer steals Escape when an overlay screen (inventory, gizmo navigation, inspection) is open on top of it. Previously, pressing Escape while viewing inventory during placement mode could discard your blueprint instead of closing the inventory.

AUTO-SLAUGHTER UX IMPROVEMENTS

• Tab/Shift+Tab now cycles between the Animals menu and Auto Slaughter screen, with Escape closing both screens entirely.
• Typing -1 in numeric input now sets the value to unlimited.

DLC FEATURES

BIOTECH DLC

Gene inspection for items: Embryos, genepacks, and xenogerms now have full gene inspection support. Previously, inspecting these items showed "Category not found." Now you can browse their gene lists in the inspection tree and see skin color shade descriptions (very light, light, fair, medium, etc.) in both overview and info card views.

Soft-lock fix: Fixed a soft-lock that occurred when baby naming or growth moment dialogs were force-opened by the game's timer (when the associated letter times out). Keyboard navigation would partially work but Enter and Escape failed, trapping blind players. Both dialog types now initialize correctly regardless of how they're opened.

02/20/2026

There's a lot of stuff in here, and it's not as organized as I would like, but just about every change should be documented!

COLONIST BAR NAVIGATION

Full keyboard navigation for the colonist bar, giving you quick access to any pawn without having to hit comma and period a million times.

• Alt+Left/Right navigates the bar linearly across page boundaries
• Alt+Up/Down moves between pages of 10 (colonist pages, then mechs)
• Alt+1-0 jumps to positions on the current page
• Ctrl+Alt+Left/Right reorders colonists within a page
• Ctrl+Alt+Up/Down moves colonists between pages
• Reorder announcements include neighbor context (e.g., "between X and Y")
• Ctrl+Alt+Enter opens the inspection tree for the selected colonist
• Comma/Period cycles through mechs when on the mech section. (Repositioning mechs on mech bar is coming soon, but it will take more time, because in Vanilla Rimworld, there is no such thing as a mech bar.)

COVER INFO

Drafted and hostile pawns now announce their cover status across the map cursor, scanner, and colonist bar (Comma/Period, Alt+number). Shows the best adjacent cover object and its base block chance percentage, e.g., "behind sandbags (blocks 55%)".

Note: reported percentages reflect the object's base block chance and may not match actual combat effectiveness, which varies based on shooter angle, distance, and diagonal positioning.

QUEST SYSTEM

The quest list now announces full quest info (name, difficulty, time limit, description, and rewards) when arrowing through entries, and you can press enter to drill into and arrow through details.

• Alt+A on multi-choice reward quests opens a menu for selecting between reward options
• Alt+I within that menu opens a nested item inspection sub-menu and Enter opens info cards for individual items
• Escape navigates back through each level
• Accept buttons in detail view now show reward descriptions
• Opening hint explains Alt+A, Alt+D, and Enter navigation on first open
• You can now choose which pawn will accept a quest for quests which require a specific pawn to accept them.
• When in the quest menu, you can press tab to configure desired goodwill / honor quest rewards per faction for future quests.

FACTIONS TAB (F12)

The in-game Factions tab is now accessible. Press F12 to open it (also works for the Ideology tab if that DLC is active). Though the ideology tab is not accessible just yet!

Each faction is a collapsible treeview node. Expanding reveals individual sections: type, leader, relations, goodwill with ongoing/recent event breakdown, ideology, enemies, and description. The description itself is expandable into individual lines for easier parsing.

• Typeahead search to find factions by name
• Alt+I for info cards on factions
• Standard WCAG treeview keyboard shortcuts (Right/Left expand/collapse, Home/End siblings, Ctrl+Home/End absolute, * expand all siblings)
• The pre-game faction landing page (F key during starting site selection) uses the same treeview navigation

This is a bit of an experiment. All the information is shown as you arrow through each faction, but you can optionally hit the right arrow key (since this is a tree view,) and arrow through the information if you want to receive the information in chunks. Annoyingly, when you do hit the right arrow key to expand the item, it will read the full text of the item again, so hit the down arrow key immediately after expanding. If people like this, I will add this functionality to other tree views throughout the mod, and I'll make it not announce long menu items when expanding / collapsing them.

BILL CONFIGURATION OVERHAUL

The bill configuration screen now has full feature parity with the vanilla Dialog_BillConfig, adding a bunch of previously missing options:

• Rename bills
• Include equipped / include tainted toggles
• Currently-have count display
• HP range and quality range filters
• Limit to allowed stuff
• Include from source stockpile selection
• Independent skill range min/max controls
• Ingredient search radius editing
• Recipe descriptions shown in bill config info
• Skill requirements now show actual minimums instead of learn factor
• Work amounts use the game's native formatting
• Home/End keys for bill config navigation
• DLC-specific options: slave/mech/non-mech workers (Biotech/Ideology), style selection (Ideology), wearable-by info (Biotech)

AUTO-SLAUGHTER OVERHAUL

The auto-slaughter settings screen has been completely rewritten with a clearer, more accessible interface.

New features:

• Inline quantity shortcuts: Shift+Up/Down (±10), Ctrl+Up/Down (±100)
• Direct number typing: Enter to activate, type digits, Enter to confirm
• Natural language announcements with descriptive column names (e.g., "Maximum allowed males: 5. Current population: 3")
• Slaughter preview per column ("3 will be slaughtered")
• Slaughter summary on close listing all animals marked across species
• Smart unlimited-to-limit transition: pressing + sets to current count + 1, pressing - sets to current count - 1
• Shift+Home sets column to unlimited, Shift+End sets to 0

Bug fixes from the original implementation:

• Counting logic now matches vanilla exactly: bonded animals excluded from category counts when bonded slaughter is disabled; pregnant females excluded from female/total counts when pregnant slaughter is disabled
• Pressing + at unlimited no longer incorrectly sets limit to 0

PEN MARKER / ANIMAL PENS

Pen marker accessibility has been aligned with the vanilla implementation:

• Pen animal filter now correctly shows only roamer animals instead of every animal in the game (same fix applied to storage and bill ingredient filters)
• Auto-Cut expanded from a single action to a menu with toggle, Cut Now button, and plant filter
• Pen Food now shows unenclosed check, pen size, stockpile duration, and example animals with live add/remove
• Pen markers can be renamed

Note: I meant to add pens to the scanner with their names, but I forgot. They'll be included in either my next test patch or my PR, whichever comes first.

BUILDING AND PLACEMENT

• Shift+R rotates buildings counter-clockwise during placement (R still rotates clockwise)
• In-progress buildings, unfinished crafted items, fermenting barrels, and gene assemblers now announce work remaining
• Buildings with multiple interaction cells (e.g., school desks with student/teacher spots) are now announced during placement and cursor navigation
• Facility linking is now accessible: placement announcements show facility bonuses and distance constraints, and a new "Linked Facilities" category in the inspection tree shows linked buildings, active/inactive status, compatible facilities, and stat bonuses. Applies to blackboards, tool cabinets, end tables, dressers, vitals monitors, and similar buildings
• Generic building owner assignment now works for any assignable building (meditation spots, thrones, graves, etc.), not just beds
• Meditation focus info tree node shows nearby focus objects with type, strength, distance, and line-of-sight info
• Building placement is blocked in meditation focus protection zones when the warning toggle gizmo is enabled, with announcements guiding you to disable it if needed

AREA ASSIGNMENT (Alt+A)

Press Alt+A on the colony map to quickly assign an allowed area to the pawn at cursor or selected pawn. Includes Manage Areas integration and typeahead search. This is the only way to set assigned areas for friendly mechs.

SCANNER

• Press Ctrl+Z to clear the scanner search filter

SOUND EFFECTS

The windowless float menu (right-click context menus) now plays the correct game sounds: FloatMenu_Open when opening, ColonistOrdered when executing an order, ClickReject for disabled options, and FloatMenu_Cancel when dismissing.

SPEECH AND KEYBOARD

• All screen reader output now passes through a centralized sanitization pipeline that automatically strips XML/color tags, fixes double periods and bad punctuation, and collapses extra whitespace
• AZERTY keyboard support: the asterisk key (* for expand all siblings in treeviews) now works on AZERTY and other non-US layouts where Unity reports the key differently

BUG FIXES

• Designators (e.g., mine orders) are now announced on fog-of-war tiles instead of being silently skipped
• Fixed keyboard input being consumed by world navigation when a dialog box appeared during starting site selection (e.g., pollution warnings)
• Fixed starting site selection state sync issues on initial Enter press
• Fixed site selection re-announcing the tile instead of confirming your choice
• Suppressed redundant site selection announcement when advancing to the next page
• Fixed IMGUI focus loss after opening the faction relations dialog during character creation, which caused complete keyboard unresponsiveness on subsequent pages
• Escape now properly navigates back from the pawn selection screen
• Fixed Alt+number keys conflicting with tile info and time control hotkeys (Alt+number now always targets the colonist bar)

DLC FEATURES

BIOTECH DLC

Xenogerm creation (gene processor):

• Full keyboard accessibility for the gene assembler dialog
• Tabbed treeview: Library, Selected Genepacks, and Controls
• tree view navigation for genepacks with expandable gene details
• Enter to add/remove genepacks, biostats updated live
• Controls tab: biostats, rename, name lock, randomize, save template, load template, start combining, close
• Save/Load xenotype templates

Growth moments (ages 7, 10, 13):

• Full keyboard accessibility for the child growth moment dialog
• Tabbed navigation for info, passions, and traits
• Growth tier gizmo now announces points, learning rate, next growth moment age, and tier reward details

Learning desires:

• Active learning desires for children are now shown beneath the Learning need in both the Alt+N quick needs readout and the inspect treeview

Mechanitor control groups:

• Two-page interface for mech control groups
• Settings page: work mode, recharge range, select all
• Members page: energy levels, reassignment between groups
• Rich gizmo labels and status in the gizmo bar

ROYALTY DLC

Meditation focus:

• Building inspection now includes a meditation focus tree node showing nearby focus objects with type, strength, distance, and line-of-sight
• Building placement respects meditation focus protection zones when the warning toggle is enabled

02/09/2026

GAME SETUP OVERHAUL

Parts of the character creation process have been cleaned up and modernized a little. This process is not yet complete!

• Difficulty selection screen now properly supports home / end, typeahead, etc. Additionally, commitment mode is now a list with two items, rather than a weird checkbox.
• Custom difficulty settings can be browsed and edited directly
• World generation screen redesigned for keyboard navigation, with the same controls now used for both world gen and in-game world map views
• Faction configuration screen (where you choose which factions appear in your game) is now keyboard accessible. Press tab while configuring world generation settings to access.
• Faction landing page (the screen shown while selecting your landing site) is now accessible by pressing 'f'.
• You can now view faction relations during starting site selection
• The scenario selection screen now announces helpful hints when it opens (Tab to switch panels, Alt+E to edit)
• The world generation settings screen now supports all of the settings available to sighted players, and the sliders mirror the range a sighted player would have. Previously, each slider only had 3 possible states. Now, most have 7.

OPERATIONS LIST

The operations list (health tab, Operations) has been rebuilt with typeahead search and filtering. Start typing to filter the list by name. Additionally, available operations now match those which the game shows a sighted player, rather than all in existence.

ITEM TARGETING

Items with "use on target" abilities (like sentience catalysts, and similar targetable items) now work with the accessibility cursor. When you activate one, it enters targeting mode just like abilities do.

SCANNER

• Scanner performance has been significantly improved, so PageUp/PageDown navigation should feel snappier on maps with lots of objects

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a long-standing crash/freeze that could happen when reloading a save while in-game
• Fixed world map showing fragmented biome regions instead of clean boundaries if you owned the Odyssey DLC
• Right bracket key should now work on non-US keyboard layouts (e.g., German)
• Scanner now correctly jumps to bulk groups with or without auto jump mode being enabled.
• Scanner bulk group jump no longer gets stuck or blocked by placement mode
• Tile announcements with designators no longer repeat the thing name (e.g., "wooden wall, deconstruct" instead of "wooden wall, wooden wall, deconstruct")

02/07/2026

INFO CARDS EVERYWHERE (Alt+I)

The biggest addition in this patch for Vanilla Rimworld: you can now press Alt+I in nearly any menu or screen to open the info card for whatever you have selected. Info cards are the detailed stat sheets that sighted players access by clicking the (i) button -- and until now, screen reader users had few ways to reach them. They're now available in 15 different contexts:

• Map cursor (when hovering over buildings, items, terrain, or pawns)
• Architect menu (get stats on a building before you place it)
• Plant selection menu
• Storage settings (check details on any item in the filter list)
• Bills menu and bill configuration
• Gizmo bar (abilities, build commands, and more)
• Colony inventory
• Research menu and research detail view (inspect unlocked items and recipes)
• Colony animals menu
• Wildlife menu
• Float menus (right-click context menus)
• Pawn inspection: gear, health conditions, and genes all support Alt+I
• Inside info cards themselves -- follow hyperlinks to drill into related entries

Some items (especially within info cards) that have an info card available will say "Inspectable" when you navigate to them, so you always know when Alt+I will work. I want to extend this across the entire mod, but right now, things that are very clearly items / buildings / plants don't say this since it should be assumed that you can press alt i.

Nested info card navigation:

• When an info card mentions another item (like a material or a research project), you can press Alt+I again to open that item's info card
• Press Escape to go back to the previous card -- your cursor position is remembered
• When a stat entry links to multiple items, a selection menu appears so you can choose which one to inspect

Stat entries that can be expanded now correctly detect whether they actually have explanation text, so you won't see "No items to show" on entries that have nothing to expand.

PAWN SKILLS SHORTCUT (Alt+K)

Press Alt+K while a pawn is selected to hear their top 3 skills along with passion levels. A quick way to check what a pawn is good at without opening the full character sheet.

ABILITIES AND TARGETING

Full keyboard-accessible targeting for abilities. This covers all ability types automatically, possibly including modded ones.

Targeting mode:

• Announces ability name, range, and effect radius
• Press R to check distance to cursor and line of sight status
• Press T to hear which pawns are in the area of effect (AOE abilities)
• Clear error messages for out of range, blocked line of sight, and missing targets
• Supports two-phase abilities like Skip (select target, then destination)
• Self-cast abilities announce "Casting [name]" for confirmation
• Touch-range abilities correctly announce "Touch range"

Ability gizmo announcements:

• Gizmos now announce their description, range, and effect radius when browsing

WILDLIFE MENU OVERHAUL

The wildlife menu has been redesigned to match what sighted players see:

• Predators are now clearly marked and sorted to the top of the list
• Columns now match the vanilla game: Manhunter on Damage and Manhunter on Tame Fail replace the old mod-added columns (Age, BodySize, Health, Pregnant)
• Column tooltips are announced when you move left/right between columns (but not when scrolling up/down through animals, so they don't get repetitive)
• Hunt and Tame columns now say "Yes" or "No" instead of showing blank text
• Press Enter on an animal's name to jump the map cursor directly to it

TOGGLE GIZMO DESCRIPTIONS

Toggle buttons on the gizmo bar (like "Animals attack: ON") now include their tooltip description, giving you the same context that sighted players get on hover. For example: "Animals attack: OFF. While this is on, mastered animals are sent forth to attack distant targets. While it is off, they remain near and guard the master."

PAWN INFORMATION IMPROVEMENTS

• Health capacity tooltips now show what's actually affecting the capacity (which hediffs, body parts, or genes are involved) instead of a generic description
• Skill passion indicators now say "Minor passion" and "Major passion" instead of * and **

TERRAIN AND MAP INFO

• Terrain fertility is now included in the tile info announcement (key 2), shown right after the terrain name. Example: "Rich soil (140% fertility)"
• Light info (key 4) now shows the light level as a percentage, matching what sighted players see

MAP AND SCANNER

• Doors now announce whether they're open or closed
• Example: "wooden door (open)" or "autodoor (closed)"
• Scanner (PageUp/PageDown) now shows pawn activity
• Example: "cooking four lavish meals" or "sleeping"
• Uses your existing ShowPawnActivityOnMap setting

COMMS CONSOLE

• Dialog navigation now works correctly when using the comms console. Selecting options that lead to sub-menus (like choosing a trader type) takes you to the sub-menu instead of closing the dialog.

BUG FIXES

• Fixed double periods appearing in some gizmo announcements
• Fixed rich text tags appearing in letter and message announcements (no more "(*Name)Bob(/Name)" -- now just shows "Bob")
• Zone rename no longer breaks in non-English translations
• Drafting/undrafting with R now plays the same sound as the UI button
• Targeting now correctly uses the accessibility cursor position instead of the mouse position

DLC FEATURES

ROYALTY DLC

Psycast targeting:

• Announces psyfocus cost and neural heat when targeting psycasts
• Clear messages for psychic immunity
• Works on the world map for abilities like Farskip

Psycast gizmo announcements:

• Psycast gizmos announce their costs when browsing. Example: "Vertigo pulse. Costs 2% psyfocus, requires 50%. Neural heat: 30. [description]. Range: 25. (M)"

Neural heat gizmo:

• Shows limiter state: "Neural heat: 0/80, Psyfocus: 39%, Limiter: ON"
• Press Enter on the gizmo to toggle the neural heat limiter

Permits overhaul:

• The permits screen now shows all available permits for each faction, matching what sighted players see
• Each permit shows its actual status: Granted, Granted (on cooldown), Available (with how many points you have), or Locked (with what title or prerequisite you need)
• Your current title, unused permit points, and royal favor are shown per faction
• Expand a permit to see its required title

IDEOLOGY DLC

Role management on the Social tab:

• The Ideology & Role section now lets you browse all available roles for your ideo
• Each role shows its current holder (or "No role assigned")
• Expand a role to see its description, requirements, and effects
• Assign or unassign roles directly from the inspection tree -- if a pawn isn't eligible, it tells you why

Certainty is now displayed with properly translated labels.

Important NOTE: Ideology is still not fully accessible! Mainly, you can't make your own ideoligion until I've finished revamping the set up screen. If you want to test these changes, do not save your game after enabling ideology. You will end up with a random ideoligion which can have really... interesting, sometimes disastrous consequences for the relationships of your pawns.

BIOTECH DLC

Pregnancy approach:

• The Social tab's inspection tree now supports the pregnancy approach system. When viewing a romantic partner's details, you'll find a "Pregnancy approach" menu right after the Relationship line. Expand it to choose between the available options (Normal, Avoid Pregnancy, Try for Baby). If pregnancy isn't possible between the two pawns, it tells you why.

Romance target selection:

• The Social tab now includes a "Try Romance" option. Navigate the list of viable romance targets, hear their success chance percentages, and press Enter to initiate. If the relationship would cause complications, you'll get a warning dialog before anything happens.

Genes tab:

• The Genes tab in pawn inspection is now accessible. Browse a pawn's gene list with full keyboard navigation, and press Alt+I to open info cards for individual genes.

Skin color descriptions:

• Skin color genes now use descriptive shade names based on actual color (very light, light, fair, medium, tan, brown, dark brown) instead of the generic "Skin color" label. This applies in both the info card gene list and the unborn baby gene inspection.

ODYSSEY DLC

Fishing zones:

• Fishing zone menu is now fully accessible
• Navigate repeat mode, target count, minimum population, and fish species
• Includes tooltips for population and minimum values

Terrain info:

• Terrain info (key 2) now includes fish species and population when standing on fishable water

Animal attack targeting:

• Announces range from master when entering targeting mode
• Press R to check distance and range status
• Clear error if out of range, and targeting stays open so you can reposition
• Animal attack range is shown in the gizmo description