Rimworld: 8 Tips For Forming Caravans (2024)

Rimworld gives you every tool you need to survive off the land. It also tests your skills and preparedness by hurling dangers at your colonists. This is no different for when you need to take them on the road to trade, raid, fulfill quests, or need to deal with rogue camps. Sometimes they must be accomplished or your colony risks death.

Unfortunately, there are dozens of things that can go wrong during these adventures, and they can go from bad to worse if you don't prepare carefully beforehand. Down to every piece of gear, how many colonists to bring, what animals to carry your gear, and what kind of gear will aid you best, it all must be considered.

8 Craft Bedrolls

One of the simplest and cheapest ways to keep your colonists from losing mood while traveling is with bedrolls that they can use instead of the cold, hard ground. When a colonist uses a bedroll while traveling in a caravan, it also increases their rest efficiency, so they spend more time on the road.

This can be especially important for sending couples together, as they prefer to sleep as a pair, and a double bedroll will count towards meeting this demand. For as many colonists as you plan to travel with, have an uninstalled bedroll in your stockpile, and they will automatically use them when forming caravans.

7 Bring Pack Animals

When forming caravans, you might have noticed that you can take animals with you, and some will have a horse symbol that means they can be ridden. Including these animals in your caravan means you both increase your travel speed and potentially increase your carry weight capacity.

If you want to focus on carry weight, elephants, muffalo, bison, and horses have the highest in terms of animals. If you have the Biotech expansion, you can also bring mechanoids, many of which have much higher carrying capacities, like the Tunneler, War Queen, and Centipedes.

6 Cook Packaged Survival Meals

The single most important resource for long journeys is the packaged survival meal. Without it, most food you can bring, besides pemmican, will rot in a number of days and severely limit the distance you can travel on the map. Since packaged survival meals never rot, you only need to focus on making enough.

Have a cooking station bill for "do until you have X" packaged survival meals so that you always have exactly the right number standing by. Your cook will also replenish the lost meals as soon as the caravan removes them from your stockpile.

5 Be Well Armed

As your storyteller sends your colony raids, maddened animals, and other various horrors, the same can happen for your caravans on the road. Oftentimes, their journey will be interrupted and force you into combat. Because you are far away from barricades and turrets, this is when your colonists are most exposed.

To mitigate the risk of losing your entire caravan, make sure you are taking your best armed colonists to at least protect more fragile ones you send to negotiate or trade with. You can also bring attack animals as cannon fodder, just make sure they are trained to attack, are attached to the right master, and are set to follow during draft.

4 Beware Of Visibility

One often overlooked stat that determines how likely your caravan is to be raided is your visibility score. This is solely determined by how many people and animals you have traveling in your caravan. It starts at 20 percent and increases by 16 percent for each additional colonist until you reach 100.

If you are taking a long journey, making sure your visibility remains low will be more important than you think, especially if you get raided multiple times. There is no way to remove visibility without removing colonists or animals, so make sure you only take essential people.

3 Start In The Morning

If you've never watched the little yellow dot crawl across the world map, you might not have noticed that your caravan stops moving at night. This can be frustrating if they are inches away from your colony or are hours away from missing the drop date on a trade quest.

Especially if you know the journey will take less than a day, form your caravan as soon as your colonists wake and have their first meal so they don't starve while forming the caravan and traveling off the map. If you know your colonists are mostly rested, you can wake them up early and not lose much mood.

2 Bring A Doctor

Injury is one of the most common ways to lose colonists is on the road while in a caravan. If you are set to commitment mode, you will regret not taking a colonist that has a high medical skill and a good amount of medicine on the caravan.

To make sure you aren't spending too much time on the map, place a bedroll on the ground under a quickly built roof. Wait until the injured colonist is both no longer bleeding and isn't incapacitated. This way, they can heal on the road and, with a high tend quality, they aren't at risk of dying or infection.

1 Place The Hitching Spot Near Your Warehouse

One way to have your caravan take nearly a full day to form is with a misplaced caravan hitching spot or poorly pathed AI. You can find the hitching spot in the Misc tab, and if you place it outside your supply room, your colonists will quickly load all the gear onto your pack animals without taking unnecessarily long walks.

If you want caravans to form as fast as possible, place your item storage, food storage, colonist bedrooms, and barn as close together as possible, ensuring you always make it off the map and on the road before the sun sets.