All RimWorld Skills - RimWorld Guide - IGN (2024)

There are 12 RimWorld skills every colonist has a certain level of expertise in. Each colonist is ranked from 0-20 in each skill, and ensuring your colonists are collectively experienced in as many skills as possible will make survival considerably easier on a planet that is constantly sending threats and terrors at you.

This guide explains all 12 skills and why each one is useful. We've also included information on how leveling up skills works and why passionate skills are important—even if they're not ranked highly, to begin with.

• All RimWorld Skills List
• How To Level Up Skills
• Passions Explained

All RimWorld Skills List

Here are the 12 RimWorld skills and an explainer of what each of them affects. Click or tap the links below to jump to the explanations.

Animals

The Animals skill has two core aspects: it affects how well a colonist handles animals (wild and tame) and it increases the chance of going undetected while hunting wild animals. The higher the Animals skill is, the higher the chance of taming a wild animal and training a tamed one becomes. Each colonist with this skill can also try to master animals, which means it will follow them and obey commands. The wilder the animal, the higher the Animals skill must be to attempt to master it. Gathering resources from animals is also quicker, as is the yield received. Examples include milking and shearing.

Artistic

Colonists with a high Artistic skill are better at creating beautiful works of art at an art bench. The more beautiful a sculpture, the higher market value it has, so you can quickly make a lot of money when trading. Having beautiful sculptures around your colony also improves the environmental beauty and will affect the moods of your colonists. In the case of pawns with the Greedy trait, it makes achieving an impressive bedroom easier.

Construction

Construction, as you'd expect, pertains to building anything and everything in your colony. The higher the Construction skill of any given colonist, the faster they will build new structures. They're also able to build more difficult structures, the chance of a structure being botched mid-build is reduced, and the chance of items being of a higher quality is increased. Essentially, if a colonist is constructing (or deconstructing) something, the Construction skill is relevant.

Cooking

Cooking is the catch-all skill for everything to do with food. The higher the cooking skill, the faster they cook meals, brew drinks, and make drugs, and the less likely the meals they produce will cause food poisoning. Cooking also affects the speed at which a colonist will butcher creatures for cooking, and the yield of meat produced when butchering creatures in this manner.

Crafting

If you task a pawn with making clothes, armor, or weapons, their Crafting level is relevant. Essentially, anything made by a smith, tailor, or crafter. Lots of items have a minimum crafting level requirement so leveling up Crafting allows you to simply make more things, and it increases the quality of the stuff you make. It also affects the speed and yield when shredding mechanoids, the speed of creating new and repairing damaged mechanoids, and how fast they can create subcores.

Intellectual

Intellectual pertains to one thing: research. Throughout your entire RimWorld playthrough, you'll want to have a colonist researching various things, and you want that person to have the highest Intellectual skill possible. The higher the skill, the faster research is done. However, Intellectual also affects the speed a colonist can synthesize drugs, and hack into computer terminals, though neither is as important as research.

Medical

Colonists with a higher Medical skill are better doctors, which means they perform surgery and medical treatment faster and to a higher standard. Surgeries also have a higher chance of success. Performing medical treatment with a low Medical skill means the chance of infection is increased, as is the chance of permanent health conditions. Failing in surgery, on the other hand, can be as drastic as killing the patient or causing a host of other issues. The chance of success in both medical treatment and surgeries can also be increased by having higher quality medicine, hospital beds, and a sterile environment, amongst other factors.

Melee

The Melee skill determines how effective a colonist is with a melee weapon. This includes landing hits, along with dodging incoming melee attacks. A colonist without the Brawler trait has a 50% chance of landing a melee hit with no points in the Melee skill, increasing to 90% at level 20. On the flip side, a colonist without the Nimble trait has a 0% chance of dodging an incoming hit at Melee level 0, increasing to 30% at level 20.

Mining

Mining is another fairly self-explanatory skill, as it affects how quickly a colonist can mine rocks and the yield from each mineral mined. This applies to both standard mining and deep drilling when underground.

Plants

Growing crops is essential to survival, so having a colonist with a decent Plants skill is vital. The skill affects how fast a colonist can sow and harvest growing zones, hydroponics, and flower pots, along with how quickly they can cut down trees and other flora. It also allows them to forage more when traveling by caravan.

Shooting

Where Melee affects hand-to-hand combat, Shooting is all about ranged combat. Working out the specifics is a little more complex thanks to the Careful Shooter and Trigger Happy traits, but the gist of it is that the higher the Shooting skill, the more accurate the colonist will be with ranged weapons. Accuracy is calculated per tile though, so the closer a colonist is to the target, the more accurate they'll be. The Shooting skill also affects the chance of hunted animals attacking the pawn hunting them, and the accuracy of mortar shells fired.

Social

Finally, the Social skill is all about mood and interactions with others. The higher the level, the better the colonist is at arresting people, converting others to their ideoligion (if you have the Ideology DLC), how good at negotiating they are, and both buying and selling prices are improved when trading.

How To Level Up Skills

Colonists gain experience points for individual skills when they perform that particular skill. In the Work tab, you can mouse over a tick box to see which skills are applicable to that task, and your path to success will come by ensuring the best colonists for the job are assigned to each one. Some tasks reward experience each time the colonist completes it, while some grant experience per second performing that task. Either way, practice makes perfect, eh?

While you can get quite specific with the formula to work out exactly how much experience a colonist will gain in something depending on their skill level, the most important thing to know is that there is a soft cap of 4,000 experience points per day per skill. Any experience gained after that is earned at a 20% rate.

Passions Explained

Passions are indicated by a flame icon next to a skill. When you're deciding on your pawns to bring with you at the start of a playthrough, passions don't necessarily correlate to the skills they're already well-versed in, but passionate skills will level up quicker for that pawn. When performing that skill, it will also provide a mood boost for the pawn. Passions also cannot be added or removed, except for children in the Biotech DLC during growth moments.

A pawn without passion for a skill will earn experience at 35% of the rate. One flame icon indicates a 100% multiplier and +8 mood when performing tasks related to that skill. Two flame icons mean a 150% multiplier and +14 mood.