We've got a new expansion coming to everyone's favourite deranged murder factory colony simulator, Rimworld! Announced today on Steam, Rimworld's next expansion is titled Anomaly and it brings more horror to the game.

Rimworld Anomaly

Here are the most important things you need to know about Rimworld Anomaly:

• Your colonists provoked a mad super-intelligence, accidentally. Don't lie, I know it was you, Jim!
• New threats and scenarios are here to build into your horror story.
• New monsters include flesh beasts, shambling undead, and death-machines.
• There are several new tools, including flamethrowers, hellcat rifles, and resurrection IEDs.
• You can capture monsters to study them, building stronger facilities keeps in crazier monsters.

Rimworld Update 1.5

You can check out Rimworld's 1.5 update today on the unstable branch on Steam and took 18 months of work from the dev team. It Includes:

• Books, bookcases, couches, ornate doors - your colonists can read!
• Wall lamp, flood lights, and hidden conduits.
• Performance improvements which include a rewritten pawn render system.
• Humans can now crawl when they've been downed, leaving blood trails behind.
• Colonists can now spawn with items that are related to their traits.
• Rooms can now be cleaned instead of having to clean individual tiles.

Additionally, when all of your colonists are dead or gone, there’s a new option as part of the game over letter to “create new wanderers”, if you want a second chance with your colony. This allows you to create 1-6 new colonists to inhabit the remains of your colony instead of ending the game. This is entirely optional and you don’t have to use it if you prefer a more hardcore experience.

You're going to want to check out the entire change log, which is an 18 page document.

Anomaly launches alongside Patch 1.5 which arrives in "a month". You can wishlist the expansion over on Steam.

Quote From Rimworld

We’re super excited to announce our new horror-themed expansion, RimWorld - Anomaly!

This expansion adds all manner of monstrous, mysterious, and maddening threats, containment facilities to capture and study dark entities, and a new reality-twisting endgame. Anomaly releases in one month!

We’re also announcing the upcoming update 1.5 to the base game (which will be released at the same time as Anomaly). You can currently test this update on the unstable Steam branch - see the bottom of this announcement for details. (Note that this is only base game content - Anomaly is not yet available.)

We’ll be releasing more info about Anomaly in a series of blog posts over the next few weeks.

The expansion begins when your colonists accidentally provoke a mad superintelligence. From then on, madness manifests: Monstrous creatures, mind-bending mysteries, infiltrating parasites, and sanity-shredding phenomena that twist the whole world around you.

Inspired by classics like Cabin in the Woods, The Thing, The Cthulhu mythos, Hellraiser, and many more, Anomaly goes beyond fighting monsters. This expansion presents ominous, puzzling, mind-controlling, and earth-shaking threats to build your personal horror story.

Twisted Scenarios in Rimworld Anomaly

Quote From Rimworld

• At night, hear the screeching of a psychically-invisible hunter that feeds on human souls. Build proximity alarms to detect when it’s near, but you can only fight it when it chooses to reveal itself. Chip away at its health every time it returns, and collect and study chunks of its flesh. Turn the tables, become the hunter and kill it where it lives.
• A massive flesh creature is growing across the landscape, consuming and covering the whole map with a quivering mass of meat. It defends itself with beasts and acid. Fight it to get samples of its nervous system, then study them until you can venture to its heart and kill it for good.
• A parasite has mind-controlled some of your colonists - but who? They pretend to be human as they work to infest others. Track evidence, imprison, interrogate, and medically test people to find out who is infested before it’s too late.
• A pulsating obelisk crash-lands near your base. You can try to suppress its filthy energy, but the obelisk may lash out and violently mutate your people, copy them endlessly, or abduct them to an endless gray maze.
• Your colonists become obsessed with a beautiful golden cube, one by one. They build statues of the cube. They worship the cube. They love the cube.
• A corpse arrives that looks exactly like one of your colonists - and seems to follow them. No matter what you do, the corpse returns…
• And many more weird and horrifying events!