Rimworld Advanced Component Guide - Indie Game Culture (2024)

Gathering advanced components in Rimworld is challenging. Whether we’re fighting off swarms of insects for a mysterious royal benefactor or destroying a psychic drone guarded by a horde of murderous mechanoids, acquiring advanced components is a demanding process.

In this Rimworld Advanced Component guide, I’ll be reviewing the various mechanisms for acquiring the most precious building material throughout the barren wasteland. As a bonus, I’ll detail how to craft legendary weapons and power armor to make advanced components worth the trouble.

Read also: How to Get Started in Rimworld, a Complete Guide.

Bottom Line Up Front

Take every opportunity to trade for advanced components with traders early on. Alternatively, tech up, and you’ll be able to build this resource from components.

Advanced Component:

Rare, valuable, and worth their weight in gold lategame, advanced components are essential for constructing technologically advanced items to dominate the rimworld. While we can acquire a few advanced components reasonably early from merchants, their use only becomes apparent once we need 30 to 40 of them to field a single squad’s armor and weapons.

Building Advanced Components:

We have the opportunity to build advanced components much later in the game. While this is initially the most costly path to producing advanced components, it is also the most reliable method for acquiring the fairly scarce resource.

Step 1: Research Advanced Fabrication

To begin constructing advanced components, we’ll need to research advanced fabrication. This technology requires building a high-tech research bench and a multi-analyzer, which require a small portion of steel, plasteel, and gold to create. After constructing these two structures and hooking them up to a functioning power grid, we can prioritize a colonist to conduct research and select advanced fabrication in the research tab.

Step 2: Fabrication Station

After researching fabrication, we can construct a bench that enables us to build components from steel and advanced components from standard components. Aim to build this station in an area close to your steel/component stockpiles to speed up constructing these valuable building materials.

Step 3: Building Advanced Components

Now that we’ve built a fabrication station and gathered all the resources needed, we can start building advanced components. Each advanced component costs 1 component, 20 steel, 10 plasteel, and 3 gold and takes enormous time to create. Luckily there are several ways to speed up this lengthy process.

Speeding up the Process

• High Crafting Skill – Employ colonists with a high crafting skill to speed up the fabrication process. Looking at colonists’ bios will indicate their proficiency in crafting, and employing a planet-leading expert can significantly expedite the process. If you don’t have an expert, try creating one by abusing psytrainers for the crafting skill.
• Ideology– Human Primacy has access to a production specialist role that significantly speeds colonists’ construction and creative abilities. Consider subscribing to this ideology if you’re going for a colony focused around crafting.
• Aerotech Arms– This rare but powerful prosthetic significantly increases the rate at which colonists perform actions, including crafting. While we cannot build this prosthetic on our own, merchants occasionally sell this handy item for a few thousand silver. Consider giving up everything in your inventory, including your pack animals, to obtain this game-changing upgrade.
• Relocating your colonist– Building a fabrication station inside your crafting colonist’s room with the materials needed and several snacks in an adjacent space is a great way to expedite the crafting process. Try assigning a colonist with a tunneler quirk that makes them immune to cabin fever debuffs to bypass the mood debuffs regular colonists will suffer from this process.

Alternative Methods:

Instead of building advanced components, there are several other means to acquire advanced components. I recommend pursuing these avenues if you lack the resources to make advanced components.

Economic Avenues:

Merchants: Most merchants will have 2-4 advanced components in stock at any time. Purchasing these building blocks early on can land you with 40-50 advanced components once you need them hours later. Be warned, however, that employing this tactic will make your settlement more enticing for raiders to attack.

Space Merchants: If we’ve built a comms console and orbital beacon, we’ll have the option to trade with trade ships passing by. These trade ships are a great source of advanced components and other miscellaneous items. However make sure you place your silver stockpile close to the orbital trade beacon or the game won’t count your currency. Alternatively these ships love animals so we could breed and trade off dozens of livestock to fulfill our high-tech ambitions. I recommend breeding a large herd of horses to make these trade deals more feasible.

Quest Rewards:Most late-game quests feature advanced components as a reward. Despite their straightforward nature, however, these tasks may require you to endanger yourself (i.e. attract several hives to your location, block out the sun for an entire month, or cover the planet in radioactive fallout). I recommend weighing the risks before accepting these quests; eight advanced components aren’t worth destroying your colony over.

Dangerous Avenues

Raiding Tombs: Some locations feature ancient tombs with mechanoids or insectoids guarding several Cryptosleep caskets with advanced components inside. You’ll know you’ve found such a location when your colonist receives the “Ancient Evil” alert after passing by a fine-stoned wall.

Be careful; these encounters are not easy by any means and can quickly spell the death of unprepared colonists. I recommend awakening the sleeping hostiles from their pods so they can fight the enemies inside and then immediately vacating the room. After they finish, reenter the room and finish off whoever remains.

Destroying Psychic Drones:Sometime during the midgame, psychic droners will begin to crash into your surrounding settlement guarded by several mechanoids. While these machines can ruin your colonists’ mood from afar, they also drop Advanced Components when destroyed. Take care not to set the ground on fire and ruin your well-earned prize post-combat.

Raiding Ancient Tombs: Unlike regular tombs, from time to time, we receive quests urging us to check out abandoned high-tech facilities. While these tombs are generally rich in advanced components, they also have several traps like fuel ignition buttons that ignite after opening a door, swallowing your colonists in flame. Explore these tombs at your discretion.

Uses

After acquiring several advanced components, we have the option late gamer to use them to construct powerful items enabling us to dominate the Rimworld.

Equipment

Power Armor– After researching recon armor, marine armor, and cataract armor, we can begin constructing power armor with advanced components from fabrication stations. While we can also acquire armor from stripping enemies or trading with merchants, building power armor is one of the few ways to obtain legendary armor.

An Ode to Legendary Equipment:

Legendary armor is more protective, longer-lasting, and extremely valuable to merchants. However, crafting legendary armor requires an inspired settler with a high crafting skill or getting extremely lucky. I recommend using a colonist with a production specialist from human primacy to up the chances of building power armor.

Pulse charged munitions– Arguably the strongest ranged weapons in-game, advanced components at fabrication stations let us build these laser weapons that break through the most formidable enemy armor and tear the limbs off foes. I once had two colonists lose a leg and arm to a mechanoid wielding a charge lance, so make sure you’re not on the wrong end of these weapons.

Advanced Prosthetics: Instead of giving our dismembered colonists peg legs or hooks, we can now design biomechanical limbs that are stronger, more effective, and automatically regenerate after taking damage. Rather than replacements, these limbs essentially function as upgrades to our preexisting body parts, enabling us to eat less, sleep less, and learn faster.

Buildings and Production

Space Ship – One of the more complicated ways to escape Rimworld, building the spaceship requires many advanced components. Each part of your ship, like the ship’s engine and reactor, requires many advanced components to construct. If only we could build rocket ships out of sticks and mud.

Mining– The more advanced mining stations for detecting patches of resources within and without your colony require advanced components. Specifically, the ground-penetrating scanner, which detects large clusters of resources buried beneath your settlement, and the long-range mineral scanner, which detects clusters of resources outside your colony, both require advanced components. These buildings are essential for surviving in resource-scarce areas or finding more steel after depleting your given area.

Fabrication– After progressing far enough in the Rimworld tech tree, we gain access to specialized fabricators that can make anything our heart desires, from bionic limbs to specialized weapons and armor. These space-age 3D printers are fantastic for modifying colonists into Terminator-style killing machines or turning your raiders into high-tech warlords.

FAQs

Rimworld Advanced Component Guide: Final Remarks

Congratulations, you are now equipped to acquire, use and build advanced components into your burgeoning space empire. Whether you want to protect your colonists with the most durable gear or construct a ship to escape this hellish planet, advanced components open the door to several high-tech possibilities.

Continue reading related Rimworld guides:

• Rimworld Kibble Guide