RimWorld psychics can now be Avatar hippies or grave-loving goths too

The Dune-esque psychic warriors of RimWorld's Royalty expansion are great, but what if you want your spacewizards to not be dukes and lords but rather monks, hippies, or goths? The latest update has you covered. It revamps psychics by making them mediate to charge their wizardbrains, and different types of character will use different focuses. Sure, lords will still love their thrones and that, but maybe you'll have a tribal lot who love a big psychic Avatar tree, a spooky wizard who mediates around graves, or other weird wizzes.

Wizards now have Psyfocus, a new resource which is used when casting magic spells and fades over time too. To top it up, they'll need to meditate. Wizards can meditate anywhere but it's boosted by their meditation focus, an object or environment which suits their personality. These can vary based on things like their childhood backstory, traits, and titles.

The Dignified focus is meditation thrones, only for titled Empire wizards. Morbid types love graves and sarcophagi, especially if there's a corpse in them - and even more so if they knew the corpse. The Artistic focus is just art, plain ol' art, which most people can use but is less powerful. The Minimal focus is for ascetics who love staring at blank walls. And with the Natural focus, tribal folks need to be out in nature and get extra bonuses from the 'anima tree'. Glowing with bioluminescent organisms and growing anima grass around them, these can psychically link with people in rituals. Fancy.

"The above all means that the Empire no longer needs to have laws against psychic powers – so they don't," creator Tynan Sylvester explains. "If you want to be tribal psychics drawing power from the anima tree, while being friendly with the Empire, you can. The Empire also no longer tries to prevent anyone from using bladelink weapons (renamed to persona weapons), again, simply because it wasn't worth restricting players this way. Such weapons are still very hard to get, so if you get one, use it."

Throwing new wizparts into the big storytelling machine that is RimWorld sounds great. Here's Sylvester showing more of it:

The update changes so much more than this, mind. See the patch 1.1.2647 notes for everything.

"The big theme of this update was opening up new play paths so you can take on the game's world in whatever way to like, and the game will respond in a way that's sensible," Sylvester said. "This means you can be tribal, outlander, pro-Empire, anti-Empire, neutral Empire, use psycasters or not, use drugs or not, use ranching or not, and so on."

Our Nate's RimWorld: Royalty review declared it "the best Dune game in three decades".

If you're looking to shake the sci-fi sandbox up in more ways, check out the best RimWorld mods.