RimWorld's horror-themed Anomaly expansion revealed, out next month

RimWorld, the acclaimed sci-fi colony sim from Ludeon Studios, will soon be besieged by "monstrous creatures, mind-bending mysteries, infiltrating parasites, and sanity-shredding phenomena" when its new horror-themed expansion, Anomaly, arrives on Steam next month.

Anomaly - RimWorld's fourth paid expansion after Biotech, Royalty, and Ideology - begins as colonists accidentally provoke a mad superintelligence, unleashing its horrors and twisting the world with "ominous, puzzling, mind-controlling, and earth-shaking" threats.

The idea, explains Ludeon over on Steam, is to give players the tools they need to build their own horror stories, with the developer citing the likes of Cabin in the Woods, The Thing, The Cthulhu mythos, and Hellraiser as inspirations for the expansion.

Some of the threats teased in the studio's post include a psychically-invisible hunter that can be detected by building proximity sensors, but only fought when it reveals itself; a massive flesh beast that crawls across the landscape, requiring players to carve off chunks to study in order to defeat it; a pulsating obelisk radiating with "filthy energy" that can mutate colonists, copy them, or transport them to an endless gray maze; even a doppelgänger corpse that will pursue a single colonist relentlessly.

New enemies include fleshbeasts, water beasts, shambling undead hordes, spherical death-machines, and cultists armed with psychic rituals, but a selection of new tools should give players a fighting chance against them. Expect to see the likes of flamethrowers, hellcat rifles, flesh-mutating pulsers, insanity-inducing weapons, and more. There's also a new containment facility, enabling players to capture and study monsters, then harvest their bioferrite and shards - which can be used to create "experimental serums, psychic rituals, ghoulification surgeries, and void-powered constructions."

Anomaly also promises a new endgame, with Ludeon teasing, "In the end, the abyssal void will swallow the world and you must choose your fate."

In addition to Anomaly, Ludeon has detailed RimWorld's free 1.5 update, which is available for testing now. This one's a biggie, introducing books, bookcases, couches, ornate doors, wall lamps, floodlights, and hidden conduits for starters. That's alongside the ability for colonists to dramatically crawl when downed (leaving a trail of blood in their wake), plus the chance for colonists to spawn with possessions related to their traits, the introduction of bionic jaws and organ decay, UI and visual improvements, and more, as detailed in a lengthy changelog.

RimWorld's 1.5 update will fully release alongside the paid Anomaly expansion in "one month". Ludeon says it'll share additional details in a series of blog posts over the next few weeks.