One of the new features added to Rimworld with the DLC Biotech, is the ability to have pawns become pregnant and have children. Whether or not you think children were a good idea they are here to stay. Did you know that children are by default, not apart of any raider parties that hit your colony?
Luckily for all you Lord of the Flies role-players out there, the ability to have child raiders is still possible. This is done through one of the settings in the game. This guide will show you how to enable child raiders and tell you about some of the impacts that may have.
How to Enable Children Raiders in Rimworld Biotech
Enabling child raiders is a fairly straightforward process in Rimworld Biotech. You can toggle this option on from the beginning of your colony or even midway through the game. To enable child raiders, press the ESC key to bring up the pause menu. Select the Options menu and under the Gameplay tab select the option to Modify the Storyteller settings.
If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the Custom Playstyle Settings you will find the option Child Raiders within Biotech. Simply toggle this on (so you can see a green tick) and now children will have a chance to be apart of raiding parties.
With this turned on, there will be a chance that children will be a part of the raids. This does not mean that all raids will be made up of children so don’t worry about that. There is also an option to disable children completely in this settings menu. Obviously if this option is selected, you will not have any child raiders.
Why You Should Think Twice About Enabling Child Raids
SO here’s the part where I tell you some reasons that this may not be a good idea. Having enabled child raids myself, I actually really like it. I think it adds to the total experience and being able to acquire more pawns in general is the goal for a lot of my playthroughs. That being said, there is one glaring reason why you might not want to do this.
When a colonist takes down a child, they will get a very large debuff on their mood. It doesn’t seem to matter whether or not the child was stabbing the household cat 10 seconds earlier, doing this to a child is simply traumatizing for the colony. The thought of the colonist will be Killed Child and this will apply a -6 mood penalty for 5 days. This will stack with each youngling taken down.
This may not be as big of a hit to the mood as some thoughts, it definitely adds up. Especially end-game when you have a large force of raiders.