Rimworld Ideology is here and with a plethora of questionable new mechanics have been added. Players can now create a belief for their colony which can open up a whole bunch of gameplay avenues. One such new gameplay mechanic is the edition of slaves. This guide will show you how to unlock this feature for your colony. It will also go through how to actually convert a colonist into a slave.
Allowing Slaves Through Your Ideology
Before you are able to enslave colonists and have them working for you, you will need to have a belief system that allows this. When you are starting your colony for the first time you are tasked with creating the belief system. You will do this by customizing rules and setting up Memes. These are the basic principles of your belief system. There are some Memes in which slavery is allowed and some which will disable the ability to have slaves altogether. Be mindful of this when you are choosing your beliefs.
Make sure you allow Slavery in the pre-concepts during the founding of your belief system. If slavery isn’t already mentioned in the list you can add it by selecting Add Precept. Now find slavery and set it to something positive. For example, is slavery is Honorable, your colonists will be very happy when they have slaves, and even suffer a mood penalty when they don’t. With the Acceptable level, there won’t be any mood changes either way.
How to Convert a Prisoner into a Slave
Now that your ideology is set up to allow it, you are able to convert your prisoners into slaves. Simply capture enemy pawns the same way you would have originally. You have to have a prison set up as normal. Now, select the prisoner you wish to enslave. In their information panel select the tab which reads Prisoner. Here you will find all of the actions available for your colonists to perform on this prisoner. Select the option Enslave.
With this method selected, your colonists assigned to Warden will attempt to break down this prisoner’s will. Once their will has been broken down to 0 they can become a slave to the colony. Make sure you have a colonist assigned to the warden job. There are factors that can help break the will of a prisoner faster such as;
- A long time spent imprisoned
- Being imprisoned in dark, basic conditions
- A high social skill of the warden
You can use all of these factors to break down a prisoner’s will fairly quickly. For instance it only took my warden 2 tries to enslave a prisoner.
Managing A Slave in Rimworld – Suppression
So now you have a slave. You’ll have a new ‘colonist’ who can do all of the tasks yours don’t want to. But keep one thing in mind, they may not be a slave forever. There is a possibility that slaves can rebel in Rimworld. Once you have a slave, select them and view the new ‘slave’ tab present in their information box. This will give you information about their likelihood to rebel and give you some options over them.
As you can see in the image above, their is a Suppression level present in this menu. When this reaches 0% this slave will be highly likely to rebel against their masters. This could even mean they just try to escape. Keeping the suppression level of the slave high is important if you plan on keeping them for a while. This is done through the Slave menu. As you can see there are 5 options here:
- No Interaction: Warden will not interact with the slave. This means their suppression will slowly fall and they will rebel at some point
- Suppress: A warden pawn will scare the slave from time to time and keep their suppression level up.
- Imprison: Send them back to prison where they can be converted belief-wise or added to the colony
- Emancipate: Warden will free the slave and send them back to their original faction. (Slaver belief systems will have a mood debuff because of freed slave)
- Execute: Self-explanatory
If you plan on keeping a slave, you are better of just leaving the action on Suppress. Keeping a slave suppressed is important to stopping them from rebelling. Make sure you have enough wardens to keep your slaves suppressed.
