RimWorld gets a surprise new expansion and it's Royalty

RimWorld got its first paid-for expansion today, with Royalty arriving for the space strategy game from Ludeon Studios.

If you've not come across the title before, we slapped a 10/10 on it when it left Early Access in late 2018 thanks to its ability to facilitate incredible player-authored stories in its deep sci-fi sandbox, and since then the game has been supported by the devs, including the recent 1.1 update intended to improve mod-support.

Now, in a post shared over on Steam, the developers have outlined how the team has expanded in recent months and how that, in turn, has let them explore new ideas and prepare fresh game-changing content updates, the first of which is the new Royalty expansion.

A laundry list of changes can be found here, but if you're only after the broadest strokes; the Empire has arrived on your little planet and is looking to make friends. With innovative tech and ancient traditions going hand in hand to create some game-changing scenarios, we'll get new mechanoid structures, original quests, and high-tech weapons like "plasma swords, electrical zeushammers, and hypersharp monoswords."

It sounds like your colonists will be granted royal titles, which will make them "haughty and demanding", but on the bright side, you should get some cool new psychic powers to play around with via an Imperial psychic amplifier that lets you make your enemies hurl on demand. Nice.