RimExpeditions

Description

Build a transit gate and send your colonists on contract work to other worlds. A logistics outfit called the Vega Transit Consortium buys labour by the day and sends it somewhere it would rather not go. Call them on your comms console and they ship you a rented beacon, keeping a cut of the pay. Research your own gate and the cut goes away. Your people are gone for a day or three. You have to hold the colony together without them.

What you actually do

Pick a contract, put people in the gate, and read the odds before you commit. The briefing shows every factor behind the number - each pawn's relevant skill, their armour, whether anyone is hurt, whether the team is short-handed, whether you brought a doctor. A bad result is something you chose, not something that happened to you. The number shown is the number rolled. There is no hidden "true" value.

The details that matter

-Bring a doctor and far fewer people come home in a box. A good one roughly halves deaths. Nothing abolishes them. -Not every contract can kill. Negotiations, surveys and repairs risk failure and injury, never a life, so a colony that cannot afford to lose anyone still has work at every tier. -Pack animals contribute hauling and mass, not marksmanship, and never count towards team size. -Losing the gate does not lose the crew. They wait on the far side until you build another. -Prisoners and slaves can be sent. Slaves walk in under orders; prisoners have to be carried. Neither has any say in it, and it can be switched off.

Contracts

Contracts are generated for your colony when the board refreshes, not drawn from a fixed list that eventually repeats. Twelve kinds of work: salvage runs, relay repairs, dead drops, surveys, hive clearances, convoy intercepts, extractions, factory strips, beast wrangling, receptions, vault openings, depot raids. The pay is set by your colony. A settlement worth two hundred thousand silver is not offered the same purse as one living in huts. Difficulty stays tied to the tier, so an easy contract stays easy however rich you get - only the money moves. Ten offered at a time: 4 easy, 4 medium, 2 hard. Hand-written contracts appear among them, with names instead of site codes. The board does not open all at once. Contracts unlock on completed expeditions, on standing with the consortium, and on research. Locked ones are shown in the briefing with the reason, so you always know what to aim at.

Haggling over the pay

Counter-offer on the briefing screen and the consortium reshapes the payment - components instead of leather, gold instead of steel - taking a small cut off the total for the trouble. Counter again and it takes another cut on top. You haggle to be paid in what you need, not to be paid more. Rarely a counter comes back better than what was on the table. Standing with the consortium shrinks the cut and improves those odds. Nothing forbids another try; the compounding cut is its own limit. What the screen shows is what the crates hold. Agreed terms are locked to the expedition at launch, so a board refresh cannot rewrite what your team is owed. Hand-written contracts do not haggle, and say so rather than hiding the button.

Things go wrong out there

An expedition is not a timer you wait out. Word comes back while the team is still gone - a floor gave way, the samples are spoiling, somebody sold the route twice. Each one moves the odds you will be resolved against and says so in a letter.

The hub

Expedition tab on the bottom bar, or the button on any gate. Every teleporter you own is one shared staging area. Open it anywhere and you see everyone waiting in every gate, on every map, with a Return button beside each of them. Boarding is no longer one-way - you do not have to deconstruct a gate to get somebody back out. With more than one gate you choose where they step out, including a gate on another map. Returning is free. No injury roll, no recovery time; nothing has happened to somebody still standing in a gate. And the gate a pawn is standing in always works as an exit even unpowered, so a flat battery can never trap colonists inside. The same window shows who is away, grouped by contract, with live success and casualty chances. Clicking somebody gives their real pawn card - character, health, needs, social, gear - the same tabs the map uses, for people who are not on the map. Read-only, so you cannot queue surgery on somebody who is on another planet.

Pulling somebody out early

Some contracts let you bring one or two people home early while the rest carry on. Easy work usually allows it, mid-tier often, the cipher-gated tier never. It costs twice: the leaver faces the danger on the way out, scaled by how far in they were, and the team left behind is less likely to finish. The window shows what the odds become if that one leaves.

The hard tier

The best-paying work needs a transit cipher, a one-use crossing address you cannot buy. Fragments come back as salvage from medium contracts; five plus a spacer component splice into a cipher at a fabrication bench.

Power

Your own gate draws a flat 5000W whenever it is switched on. Use the flick switch between contracts. Boarding never needs power. Launching and arriving do.

Mod settings

-Difficulty presets - Story, Standard, Brutal, or Custom, each saying in plain English what it does. -Story mode never kills, whatever else is set. The deaths checkbox is disabled and says so rather than silently doing nothing. -Risk and reward multipliers on Custom, toggles for deaths, permanent injuries, gear loss, animals and sending prisoners and slaves, and recovery days after returning. -Haggling - cost per counter-offer, and the chance of a better one, with the resulting numbers shown at hostile, neutral and allied standing.

Compatibility

Requires Harmony. Nothing else - no DLC, no other mod. One Harmony patch, appending to the comms console list rather than replacing it, so it coexists with other mods touching the same place.

Save compatibility

Safe to add to a save in progress; the consortium is created on load if your world predates the mod. Saves from earlier versions keep working, and an expedition already in flight finishes on the contract it launched with. Do not remove the mod while anyone is away. Those pawns live in its data and will go with it. Bring everyone home first. Not supported in RimWorld Multiplayer; the away roster is not synced.

Updates

24.08.2026 - 1.2 The hub, and haggling -Every teleporter is one shared hub. See everyone waiting anywhere, on any map. -Return button beside each waiting pawn. Choose which gate they step out of, across maps if you like. -Counter-offer on contract pay: reshape the payment for a small compounding cut, with a rare chance of a better deal. -Standing with the consortium now buys leverage in a negotiation, not just access. -Haggling cost and luck are both mod settings. -The Roster button now appears on any gate when somebody is waiting anywhere. 18.08.2026 - 1.1 Contracts are generated now -Generated for your colony instead of a fixed catalogue, so the board never runs out. -Pay scales with colony wealth; difficulty does not. -Mid-expedition events, the Expedition tab, and early extraction. 28.07.2026 - 1.0 Initial release -Transit gates, contract board, the Vega Transit Consortium, and the full odds breakdown. -Transit ciphers; animals, prisoners and slaves as crew; early recall.