Strategies

Learn how to survive the horror-themed threats of RimWorld's Anomaly DLC. Discover strategies for entities, containment, rituals, and the void monolith to conquer the darkness.

Anomaly is a horror-themed DLC for RimWorld that introduces mysterious threats, containment facilities, a new research tree, psychic rituals, new gear craftable from a new resource, and a new endgame. It was released on April 11, 2024.

Darkness stirs on the rim. Survive flesh infestations, cultist attacks, shambling undead, blood rains, invisible hunters, and other sanity-shredding perils. Capture and study entities to harness the power of the void. Conduct psychic rituals and awaken an evil machine god.

Your colonists accidentally awaken a dark monolith and provoke an insane machine-mind of unfathomable power. Its terrifying manifestations begin to haunt the world. Survive these strange happenings as you study the new phenomena and learn how to end the madness.

Monolith: The Monolith is a structure that is found on the map at the start of the game, or after the quest Strange Signal if the monolith is not currently present on any player map tile. It starts off deactivated, and becomes activated once a pawn is assigned to investigate it and all warnings are ignored. After the monolith becomes activated, more entities are able to appear. The player is given access to view the entity codex. Activation sets the monolith to level 1. Increasing monolith level is accomplished by discovering entities of the current Entity Codex Tier and then interacting with the monolith. There are 8 entities to discover at level 1, 17 at level 2, and 2 at level 3. Reaching level 2 monolith requires discovering 7 of 8 level 1 entities. Level 3 monolith requires discovering 12 of 17 level 1 or 2 entities.

Entities: Entities are the major threats of the Anomaly DLC. Most Entities will not appear until a colonist has finished investigating the monolith. Entities will appear in the Entity Codex after being discovered. A higher level monolith will cause more dangerous entities to appear. Entities can be studied by incapacitating them and placing them within a containment cell. Colonists will be automatically set to study them with the Dark Research job, which will advance progress in the Anomaly Tech Tree.

Ambient Horror: The monolith does not appear. Any Anomaly threat can occur, but Anomaly threats will be rare by default. Good if you want to interact with Anomaly expansion content without it being the focus. NOTE: The monolith endgame cannot occur in this mode.

Anomaly Settings: The frequency of anomaly major threats can be adjusted in the custom difficulty options. The default settings are 8% Anomaly Threats while the monolith is inactive and 30% Anomaly Threats after the monolith has been investigated. These sliders do not affect Minor anomaly incidents like Small Shambler Swarm, Creepjoiner Arrival, and Distress Calls. Ambient Horror is only selectable before the game starts and cannot be changed thereafter.