The News

Vanilla RimWorld gives you a living colony. The News gives you a living world around it.

Distant wars, plagues, coups, alliances, famines, espionage scandals and environmental disasters happen between other factions – and reach you through delayed, imperfect sources: radio intercepts, traveler reports, faction broadcasts, caravan gossip, and diplomat dispatches. Some reports are confirmed. Some start as rumors. Some get corrected later. What you know, when you know it, and whether you believe it all matter.

• The world is a real simulation, not a dice roll. Factions carry internal stability and legitimacy, fight wars as battles of strength, momentum and exhaustion, defend or lose capital cities, and can fracture into breakaway states. A grand-strategy power layer above them forms coalitions against an over-mighty hegemon and remembers which leaders became conquerors.
• World events ripple into your game: trade routes close, prices spike, sick visitors arrive at your gates, refugees ask for shelter, and colonists’ mood shifts with the news.
• A real intelligence desk. The News Console is a filtered, threaded feed – story arcs that escalate and resolve over time, with source, confidence, reliability and faction context on every report.
• The world map remembers. Severe famines and disasters can depopulate a faction settlement, leave visible ruins, and send survivors to refound a new town elsewhere. Active crises and faction capitals show on the world map you can read at a glance.

• Faction simulation & fragmentation. Factions track internal Legitimacy and Entropy and act on a leader archetype (aggressive, pragmatic, zealot). Enough instability can split a faction apart through secession, breakaway regions or a warlord takeover.
• Realistic war simulation. Wars are fought as battles where strength, momentum and exhaustion decide the outcome – ending in a decisive victory or a white peace, with decisive defeats able to cascade into coups or collapse. Toggle it on, or keep the legacy behavior.
• Faction capitals. Each faction has a persistent capital that anchors its politics, can be sacked in a decisive rout, and shapes diplomacy. Capitals appear on the world map with a crown icon (toggleable) and show their state – stable, restive, contested.
• Geopolitics & leader legacies. A power-ranking layer forms defensive coalitions against a dominant hegemon and tracks foreign leaders’ track records, awarding epithets like "the Conqueror" or "the Unshakable." Scandals ripple into trade, legitimacy and alliances.
• Refugee guests. Take a refugee in as a temporary guest instead of a permanent colonist – they stay a while, may choose to join, and earn goodwill with their home faction when they leave safely.
• Intel debriefs without a radio. Intercepting a defector or refugee reveals the truth behind their faction’s story thread and delivers a debrief letter, so even an early colony with no receiver can learn what’s really happening.
• Vanilla Furniture Expanded compatibility. VFE radios can act as news receivers, with their own alert toggle.
• Live intercepts. Fugitives, defectors, whistleblowers and other high-value travelers can cross the world map. Race a caravan onto their tile before they reach safety, then decide whether to shelter, ransom, rob, or let them go.
• Famous and infamous colonists. Legendary deeds can make a colonist known across the rim. Fame can draw admirers. Infamy can draw bounty hunters, retaliation, and a heavier mood consequence.
• Named leader personas. Faction leaders now carry persistent identities such as reformers, warhawks, brokers, prophets, inquisitors and doomsayers. Their persona colors diplomacy, coup aftermaths, exile pressure and news flavor.
• Optional DLC flavor. Ideology can shade colonist reactions, Royalty can add court-intelligence dispatches through titled colonists, Anomaly can twist coded broadcasts into eerie dead-air signals, and Biotech can add xenotype, sanguophage and mechanoid regional reports.
• World map incident overlay toggle. Active crisis flags can be shown or hidden directly from the world map controls, with the preference saved in mod settings.
• News Console tab – threaded story arcs, filters, unread indicators, a Foreign Desk dossier view, pinned threads, and per-save alert subscriptions.
• Radio reception – research Radio Monitoring, build a receiver, and assign a colonist to monitor it. Better operators get cleaner reports.
• 20+ event types – wars, coups, plagues, alliances, famines, espionage, economic crises, tech breakthroughs, cults, pirate fleets, ancient sites, environmental catastrophes and more, each with cause-specific narrative text and colonist reactions.
• Rumors, verification & corrections – with comms research you can verify suspicious reports; false ones file a correction into the timeline instead of silently vanishing.
• Gameplay ripples – war trade suppression & embargo pricing, plague visitor-vector spillover, famine price pressure and refugees, regional droughts, coup instability, and more – all toggleable.
• Diplomacy tab – send colonists as diplomats to raise goodwill, with covert operations and propaganda counter-intel.
• Coded broadcasts – rarely intercept encrypted transmissions; decode them for intel or world-map cache coordinates worth a caravan run.
• Colony advisories & preparedness – brief your colony ahead of a crisis to soften disease and trade shocks.

1. Research Radio Monitoring (needs Electricity), then build and power a radio receiver.
2. Assign a colonist to monitor it (Research work), and open the News tab.
3. Research World Communications Protocols + power a comms console for verification, briefings, aid and diplomacy.
4. Research Signal Decoder for coded broadcasts, and Diplomatic Corps for the Diplomacy tab.

• RimWorld 1.6
• Harmony (load it before The News)
• Harmony patches are narrow, settings-guarded, and fail closed – they leave vanilla behavior untouched when a condition isn’t relevant.
• Save-friendly: a save written by a newer version disables the mod’s runtime for that save instead of corrupting it.
• Safe for existing saves.

You tell me.

A detailed settings panel lets you tune or disable almost everything – event types, ripples, alerts, letters, thread staging, trade disruption, plague spillover, covert ops, colonist reactions, diplomat dispatches, and more. Want a quieter world? Turn ripples down. Want it to matter more? Turn them up.

• Distant wars never spawn raids on your colony directly – vanilla storytellers own raid pacing. The News adds the context that explains incidents.
• Plague is visitor-vector only; it won’t seed an outbreak in your own pawns directly.
• Worlds with only one non-player faction get fewer arcs (War/Alliance/Espionage need two factions).
• English only for now – all text is fully keyed, so translations can be added by dropping in a Languages folder.

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Created by The Doctor. Requires Harmony by Brrainz/pardeike.