RimWorld

RimWorld

Vanilla Factions Expanded - Ancients
Jangles 9 Jun, 2022 @ 8:56am
Transhumanist meme required?
I noticed a slightly weird issue when editing the default ideoligion for ancient soldiers. While choosing memes, it doesn't give you any restrictions, you can freely select anything you like, but if you try to load a pre-saved ideo into that slot, it gives a message telling you that the transhumanism meme is required. This is not a huge issue as you can just use dev mode to load it in or edit it later, but it did get me thinking:

Does it even really make sense for the ancients to have the transhumanist meme anyway? Thematically you can argue it fits, but in terms of the actual gameplay effects it feels a little incongruous. Transhumanists want neural superchargers, biosculptors, and sleep accelerators. Ancient vaults never spawn with any of these in them. This feels especially noticeable when playing the ancient soldiers starting scenario, since the value of the bunker will (in my experience) push expectations up to moderate or even high pretty much immediately, and your pawns start complaining about neural chargers and harmful aging from the get go.

A transhumanist's desire for artificial parts also feels slightly at odds with the gene tailoring mechanics. You could have a pawn who doesn't need to eat, who can leap 50 feet, regrow limbs, fire lasers from their eyes and be literally immortal, and yet they would still complain about their "limited natural body" if they don't have any prosthetics.

Also, an extremely minor point: imo the techist style that transhumanist ideos get by default doesn't mesh at all with the vibe of ancient bunkers and tech, which to me just feels like another reason not to give them that meme.
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Sledjer 19 Jul, 2022 @ 10:23pm 
I agree with you that its weird to require something without it being built into the structures, but I think both artificial parts and crazy genetic modifications both match with the idea of transhumanism. Do think superpowers should probably satisfy the bodymodding need though. That said you should notice that vanilla ancients start with an ideo with transhumanism and I'll bet the vanilla expanded team is just following that. At any rate if you start in devmode and click edit mode when changing ideoligions, you can totally just ignore those requirements and force them to have your non-transhumanist ideoligion regardless.
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