RimWorld Caravan and World Travel Guide: Surviving Long Journeys

Caravans are how you play the whole world map instead of just your one tile. Haul silver to a neighbor town and come back with glitterworld medicine. Flatten a pirate outpost and strip it for parts. The catch is that a sloppy trip can eat your goods, your animals, and a colonist or two along the way. Most of that gets fixed with some simple math before anyone walks out the gate, and the math is mostly food and weight.

Preparing Supplies Before You Leave

Start forming the caravan early

The loading phase takes way longer than it looks. Every item you picked has to get hauled to the caravan hitching spot and loaded into the animals by hand. Start a big caravan around 0400 and it's normal to still be packing past noon. That's 8 hours gone before anyone takes a step outside.

Put the hitching spot inside your warehouse if you can. Shorter walking distance means faster loading. Extra haulers who aren't traveling will pitch in too, so don't panic if the roster looks thin.

If you're on 1.6 or later, there's a forced depart button on a forming caravan. It drops whatever isn't loaded yet and walks out right now. Great for emergencies, kind of a waste of supplies otherwise, since anything left on the ground stays there.

What actually goes in the pack

Bedrolls are the cheap win here. Caravan members use them automatically while resting on the road, and they improve comfort, rest efficiency, and healing rates. Quality still counts. One bedroll per traveler weighs almost nothing and saves you a mood spiral three tiles from home.

Bring medicine. Ten to fifteen units per colonist is a reasonable spread for a long trip, more if someone's already hurt or sick. Doctors on caravans tend wounds as needed using whatever's in the inventory, so the supplies are there when an ambush goes sideways.

A few extras worth the weight:

• Silver for trading. Faction outposts hold way more stock than the traders who wander to you.
• Drugs or gold if you have them. Light, valuable, easy to barter.
• Weapons and armor already equipped, since worn gear counts the same as packed gear for weight.
• Wood or steel if you plan to camp, for a quick shelter or a door.

What stays home matters too. Don't pack junk. Low quality weapons and armor should get smelted, not hauled across the continent. Chunks, corpses, and furniture (minus art and bedrolls) are dead weight. Every kilogram of trash is a kilogram of trade goods you left behind.

Pick the right people

At least one colonist has to go, that's a hard rule. Past that, think about what the trip needs. A decent shooter for ambushes. Someone with Plants skill for foraging. A doctor if anyone's prone to injury. The caravan gets named after whoever has the best social skill, which is a fun bit of flavor and a reminder that your negotiator sets your prices.

Injured pawns can't join a caravan as it forms. Once you're moving, though, downed people get carried along at full speed, so picking up casualties on the road is free.

Choosing Pack Animals and Caravan Size

The carry numbers

Pack capacity comes from body size multiplied by 35. Humans sit at 35 kg, clothes and equipped gear included. Here's the animal spread from the wiki:

| Animal | Carry weight | Riding speed | Hunger rate | |---|---|---|---| | Alpaca | 35 kg | none | 0.44 | | Donkey | 49 kg | 1.3x | 0.52 | | Dromedary | 73.5 kg | 1.3x | 0.856 | | Yak | 73.5 kg | none | 0.856 | | Horse | 84 kg | 1.6x | 0.84 | | Muffalo | 84 kg | none | 0.856 | | Bison | 84 kg | none | 0.856 | | Elephant | 140 kg | 1.3x | 2.568 | | Mastodon | 157.5 kg | 1.3x | 2.88 |

Horses come out on top for most trips. They tie for second-best capacity at 84 kg, they're the fastest ride in the game at 1.6x, and their hunger rate of 0.84 is lower than the other big carriers. The wiki's own analysis calls them arguably the best pack animal, and it's hard to argue.

The riding speed only kicks in fully when there's one mount per human. A single horse for three travelers gets you partway. A horse each gets you the whole 1.6x. Dromedaries are the interesting middle pick since they ride at 1.3x, carry 73.5 kg, and give milk when they're home. Yaks match the load but don't take riders.

Muffalo and bison are your plain workhorses. Same 84 kg, no riding, but muffalo shear into wool at home, so a herd pulls double duty.

Watch what the animals eat

All the pack animals are herbivores, which is great news. In growing season, on grassy terrain, they graze for free while the caravan moves. Their hunger bar just refills with no cost to you.

Outside the growing season it stops working. Same deal on ice sheets and extreme deserts. A winter caravan across tundra needs actual feed for those animals, and elephants are hungry ones, with a hunger rate over three times a horse's. Big carriers fall off hard as travel food costs pile up. Bring hay or pemmican for the herd, or stick to a season where grass is available.

One gotcha with other pets: carnivores and omnivores can't hunt or scavenge while on the world map. A husky that feeds itself at your base will starve on the road unless you pack its food too.

Bigger isn't better

Caravan speed runs on a formula: base 13.6, times your mount multiplier, times your load ratio, divided by terrain difficulty. An empty caravan moves at up to double speed. A caravan at max capacity moves at half speed. So adding carrying capacity usually makes you faster, since it drops your load ratio, until you hit plenty of spare room and the gains shrink.

Visibility works against you in the other direction. It's based on total body size of everyone walking, and it multiplies your chance of getting ambushed. One human is 20% visibility. Two is 36%, not 40%, so it's not a straight line. A dozen travelers plus a muffalo herd lights up like a bonfire, and you'll get waylaid more often.

For a trade run, three to five colonists with a horse each is a sweet spot. Fast, quiet, enough guns to handle the average ambush. Big caravans have their place for settlement raids, just know you're paying for it in random encounters.

If you're running Biotech, mechanoids add capacity for free. They draw no power on the world map, only in event maps like ambushes, and they carry whether or not the mechanitor travels with them. A tunneler hauls 122.5 kg and eats nothing. Treat them as bonus saddlebags.

Managing Food Spoilage and Hauling Capacity

The food tiers

This is where trips live or die. Food spoils fast without refrigeration, and the game shows your "days of food" right in the caravan status box next to your estimated travel time. If the second number is bigger than the first, you have a problem.

| Food | Lasts unrefrigerated | Notes | |---|---|---| | Simple meal | 4 days | Fine for short hops | | Berries | 14 days | 2% food poisoning chance per meal | | Pemmican | 70 days | 0.018 kg each, best nutrition efficiency | | Packaged survival meal | never rots | 0.3 kg each, most convenient |

Pawns eat whatever's closest to spoiling first, automatically. That's handy, since you can pack a few simple meals for the first stretch and know they'll get eaten before they turn.

For anything past two weeks, pemmican and packaged survival meals are the real answers. Pemmican is the better deal per kilogram. Each piece is 0.05 nutrition and weighs 0.018 kg, so 18 pieces fill a pawn like one meal, at about 160% nutrition efficiency from the raw food that went in. Survival meals run 150% efficiency and weigh 0.3 kg apiece, but they never expire and they cook faster in bulk.

A worked example

A human eats roughly two meals a day, and because pemmican comes in small units, pawns don't overeat it the way they do full meals. Call it 32 pieces per colonist per day.

Three colonists on a 10 day round trip:

• 3 people x 10 days x 32 pieces = 960 pemmican
• 960 x 0.018 kg = about 17.3 kg of food

Seventeen kilos feeds three people for ten days. One muffalo carries 84 kg. Food is basically never your bottleneck once you're making pemmican. Pack double if the route looks risky, since you can always barter the extra.

New Tribes start with pemmican researched, which is a big early edge. New Arrivals have to pick between pemmican and packaged survival meals, and both cost the same research. PSM is usually the safer long-term pick once you're settled, pemmican carries the early and mid game.

Foraging and grazing

Every colonist on a caravan forages automatically while there's a growing season on the tile. The yield scales with Plants skill, plus manipulation and sight, and the biome multiplies it. Tribal pawns get a 170% bonus, which is why tribe caravans can nearly live off the land.

The wiki's break-even numbers: a New Arrivals colonist with Plants 9 feeds themselves while paused, but needs around Plants 18 while moving. New Tribes manage it at Plants 6 paused and 11 moving. Averages won't save you, a good forager might.

Foraged food counts as raw, so it carries that same 2% per meal food poisoning chance. Fine as a supplement. Risky as the whole plan.

Paused caravans forage at double yield, get some recreation going, and draw fewer attacks. If you're ahead on food, parking a caravan for a day on a fertile tile is a cheap resupply.

Keeping the weight down

If you end up overloaded and crawling, the fix is the Gear tab. Drop items there and they're gone for good, but a caravan stuck at max load is moving at half speed anyway. Ditch the low value junk, keep the silver, and your travel time can drop by a third on a long leg.

Remember the return trip. Outbound runs light because you're carrying silver. Coming home loaded with loot, you want spare animal capacity. Count your hauling for both directions, not just the fun one.

Handling Ambushes and Random Caravan Events

What can happen out there

Four main event types hit caravans:

• Ambush. An enemy faction jumps you on a generated mini-map. You can't leave until every attacker is dead, downed, or fled.
• Manhunter ambush. Same setup, but with a pack of hostile animals. These never flee, so plan for a real fight.
• Demand. Pirates want goods or a colonist handed over as a slave. Refusing starts a fight.
• Encounter. A friendly caravan crosses your path and you can trade on the spot.

Demands are usually a trap. The pirate groups that make them tend to show up in weak numbers, and fighting pays off nine times out of ten. Paying just marks you as an easy mark for the next one.

Encounters are free money if you're carrying silver. Buy food mid-trip if you're running short, or offload loot you don't want to haul home.

Fighting an ambush

The moment the alert pops, pause. You get a fresh map with terrain, and the attackers come at you from a distance, so you have a beat to look around.

You're fighting without a base. No walls, no turrets, no killbox. What you do have is natural cover, trees, rocks, and the terrain features on that tile. Get your shooters behind cover, put any melee fighters up front in a line, and let them come to you. If the fight is truly ugly, remember that animals can be thrown at problems. Pack animals in a pinch, combat pets if you trained them.

If a friendly settlement is a tile away, you can send a second caravan as backup. It can't jump straight into the battle tile, it has to enter an adjacent tile first. Still worth it for a big engagement.

The 24 hour window

Once you win, a 24 hour countdown starts. Use it. Doctor your wounded, rest, and strip everything off the bodies. Downed enemies can be captured if you build a tiny enclosed space with a sleeping spot for each one, and captives travel with the caravan when it reforms. That's free prisoners, and free silver or recruitment later.

Everything you want to keep has to be picked up before the timer ends. When the countdown finishes, the caravan auto-reforms and anything left on the ground is lost. You can also hit Reform Caravan yourself to leave early, but only once no hostiles are standing, and you have to re-select every pawn, animal, and item by hand. Miss one and it's gone.

Linger too long and the storyteller notices. Camp on an event map for several days and it spawns a raid specifically to shove you out the door. Loot fast.

Losing a caravan

A caravan dies when all its colonists die or hit an extreme mental break like giving up. Everything it carried vanishes with it. Milder breaks, like sad wandering, just pause things until the pawn snaps out of it.

The Social tab lets you abandon people to save the rest. It's a real option when someone's downed and being dragged down with them. Just know their friends take a mood hit back home, and it's worse if the person was unlikely to survive the walk anyway.

Settling New Bases and Visiting Other Factions

Trading at faction bases

Walking your silver to a friendly outpost beats waiting for traders in a few ways. You trade on your schedule instead of theirs. Outposts stock far more than a visiting merchant can carry. And you get a 2% price bonus for trading in person, on top of whatever your negotiator's social skill does.

Trading also nudges relations up. If a faction won't trade with you yet, or you just want them friendlier, the gift button in the trade window converts goods straight into goodwill. It works out to roughly +1 per 40 to 160 silver of market value, with the rate better the lower your standing is. Grinding a hostile neighbor toward neutral with a few gift runs is a completely normal play.

Once you're allied, you can call caravans to your base through a comms console for 15 goodwill a call. Handy, but it's no substitute for going to them, since their home inventory is just bigger.

Attacking an outpost is the other direction. You can hit any settlement regardless of relations, and pirate bases especially can hold glitterworld medicine, luciferium, components, and gear worth a fortune. Relations with that faction take the hit, so pick targets you don't mind making an enemy of. Post 1.0 settlement defenders are no joke either. They don't scale down with an easier difficulty setting, so bring real guns and real armor, not a trade escort.

Actually settling a new tile

Any caravan can hit the Settle button on an empty tile and start a fresh colony. The default limit is one colony at a time, and you can raise it to five in the options menu. You can't settle directly next to your own base or next to someone else's settlement, so plan the spot with a tile or two of buffer.

Don't haul raw materials to a new site. That's the slow way. Carry compact wealth, silver, gold, drugs, and buy what you need from the new neighbors. If the site is close to home, transport pods fling bulk materials across in minutes once you've researched them. Far sites mean a supply caravan chain or living off local trade.

One warning that's bitten a lot of players: hitting Abandon on an empty colony needs no confirmation. It turns the whole map into inaccessible ruins, instantly, forever. Double-check which button you're pressing before you click anything near your old base.

For a new settlement's first days, the same caravan rules apply. Keep the pemmican flowing, keep the animals fed, and get a wall up before the storyteller remembers you exist. A caravan that becomes a colony keeps everything it carried, so pack like the trip home might not happen, because sometimes it shouldn't.