I mentioned at the end of the Steam Summer Sale that RimWorld was coming up with a new expansion/DLC called Odyssey.
RimWorld Odyssey
I put a lot of time into RimWorld back in its early days, in 2017 and 2018, and got to the “win” state where I beat the game… and it was a challenge. The game throws a lot at you when you’re trying to get that spaceship together and get off planet.
In doing that it became pretty clear that the optimum path to “winning” was to hunker down and not go off exploring or exposing your colonists to any unnecessary risks. Better to just build up a layered defense, avoid the warnings of an ancient evil in that one ruin nearby, and focus on ramping up your tech, trading with passers by, and otherwise mind your own business.
As such, I haven’t been super tempted to go back and invest a lot of time in the game. But I have kept my eye on it all the same and the devs have focused a lot on the lives of your colonists, with expansions building out richer and more varied paths for them… some of which might seem more like complications if your goal is to win. Royalty gave us titles and peerage, Ideology more complicated belief systems, Biotech brought families, genetics, and the possibility of a mechanoid army, while Anomaly introduced Lovecraftian horror elements to the game.
I played some of that with the Royalty and Ideology expansions, but it remained kind of a pain to leave your base and go out in the world… which brings us to the Odyssey expansion, which appears toasks the question, “what if you could take your base with you?” enter the gravship idea. From the update notes:
Build your own gravship
Build your own gravship and travel across the planet! Land anywhere you want to explore, hunt for treasure, scavenge forgotten gravtech, and bring back souvenirs like a charming hermit crab or a gold-plated charge rifle.
It starts small: just a grav engine, a few rooms, some thrusters, and a tank of chemfuel to get you airborne. But over time, it becomes a home – a mobile colony of bedrooms, labs, hospitals, workshops, and everything else your colonists need.
To expand your ship and go further, you’ll need to collect gravcores. You can recover these glittertech devices from insect-infested caverns, ancient reactors rigged with traps, crashlanded space wrecks, and orbital platforms.
Odyssey is about exploration, adventure, and new ways to play. Live as nomads that move with the seasons, and kidnap raiders by taking off while they’re aboard! Embark on a 100-day journey around the world, and collect one of every animal to build your own zoo. Design the weirdest, ugliest, most gloriously unhinged gravship and see how far it gets you. Or, hunker down inside an asteroid and live as long as you can in space. You can play Odyssey any way you like.
That sounded interesting enough that I decided to give it a try… and I wasn’t alone I guess. Over at SteamDB they recorded RimWorld and the Odyssey expansion in their top ten for sales for the week of July 8. Not too bad.
Steam Top Sellers – July 8 to 15 2025
We’ll see if this sticks for me. RimWorld is in my top five most played titles on Steam, and it very much has that SimCity vibe where you get sucked in and keep playing well past any other plans you might have… like going to bed at a reasonable hour.
Related:
Steam – RimWorld Store Page
Steam – Odyssey Update