Quick answer
What to do first
For a standard Crashlanded start, secure reachable food and medicine, assign essential work, and build a small roofed shelter before expanding. Plant an early crop while you still have supplies; then establish cooking, storage and basic defenses. Your biome and growing season matter more than a rigid day-by-day blueprint.
Match your symptom
| Symptom | Likely cause | Check | Next action |
|---|---|---|---|
| No dependable cook or doctor | Essential work is uncovered | Before landing, inspect skills and work incapabilities. | Choose a group that can feed, build and treat itself; passion does not remove an incapability. |
| Food will run out before crops mature | Planting is not an immediate meal | Compare available meals with reachable forage and hunting risks. | Gather safe nearby food while a fast crop grows; do not send an unprepared pawn after dangerous wildlife. |
| Everyone starts building | Competing jobs delay survival tasks | Check work priorities and what each pawn is actually doing. | Give cooking and medical emergencies precedence over a large construction queue. |
| You have shelter but no resilience | Expansion consumed the reserves | Check food, medicine, temperature and a fallback fighting position. | Stabilize those needs before adding decorative rooms or distant mining jobs. |
Opening priorities
At the landing screen, a manageable climate and sufficient growing season reduce the number of emergencies competing for your attention. This guide assumes standard Crashlanded, not an ice-sheet challenge, a solo start or an Odyssey ship scenario. Choose capable colonists rather than chasing an ideal trait list.
Before landing: cover essential work
After landing, pause to inspect the map. Unforbid the supplies you need, identify a short route to shelter, and put vulnerable goods under a roof. A compact temporary room lets colonists sleep and work while you learn where resources and threats are. Avoid committing to a huge footprint before you can maintain it.
Food, shelter and medical triage
Plant food early, but do not count an unsown zone as food security. Assign a grower and a cook, check that ingredients and the cooking bill are usable, and keep a reserve for illness or a raid interrupting work. Use the food-shortage guide if the bottleneck is already urgent.
End-of-week readiness
By the end of the opening stretch, you should know who handles treatment, where colonists retreat during a threat, and how you will feed everyone if work stops briefly. If those answers are missing, pause expansion. Research and extra bedrooms can follow a stable survival loop.
Version & sources
Sources & what may change
- Applies to
- Core · PC 1.6.4850.
- Last verified
- 2026-09-04
- When to check again
- Recheck after a relevant game patch, DLC change or source correction. Mods can change these conditions.
Documentation reviewed; not an in-game test report. RimWorld Wiki is community-maintained, not Ludeon documentation.
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