In RimWorld, the tech tree is the conceit which allows the game to work with its ‘societal drift’ conceit. Tribes of nearly cavemen, “modern” colonies, and ultra-tech feudal lords all coexist thanks to a set of technological ‘research projects’ which separate each colony by level of development. In our System Hack, we’re going to need the same tech tree conceit, but the underlying mechanics are going to be quite a bit different.

Before we go any further, I want to make sure you know that Cortex Prime is now available on DriveThruRPG. While digital versions of the game have been available before, you can now finally own a PDF version unfettered by a walled garden app which made the game significantly less accessible. With Cortex Prime finally available in the broader ecosystem, my hope is that there’s much more interest in this and a whole host of other projects using the system.

For this particular project, though, we have to design a tech tree. We have a couple of considerations, one of which we discussed a bit in the last article in this series. Overall ‘tech levels’ are going to be neolithic, medieval, industrial, spacer, and ultratech. These divisions should tell us roughly where each technology goes as well as how much detail we need in our more granular technology divisions. The RimWorld tech tree explodes in the middle: there are 9 neolithic technologies, 12 medieval technologies, and then a whopping 74 industrial technologies. This then contracts again to 21 spacer technologies and only 8 ultratech projects. While this is complicated somewhat by all the RimWorld DLCs, there’s also the reality that some techs, like a lot of the cybernetic enhancements, gene splicing, robotics, and antigrav tech, don’t really belong in the industrial clade so long as you’re not trying to force early game availability (which we don’t particularly care about). Even when considering these changes, though, we’re still going to end with a tree that has a bit of a fat middle and much tighter ends. I think this makes sense, though we may want to consider a bit of a different shape with our techs that makes the tree grow more expansive as we go on instead of a rough football shaped ‘fat middle’.

The neolithic techs in RimWorld are fairly basic and all boil down to either basic tools or basic agriculture. For our purposes I’d like to broaden this a little bit: the entries in RimWorld are often tied to specific items, and we shouldn’t need to do that. We can start with a few techs so basic they can be assumed to be starting or ‘root’ techs: Agriculture, Tooling, and Pottery. From there, we can add a few to get to the neighborhood of 10-12, similar to RimWorld. Bows and Carpentry will require tooling; you need to be able to butcher animals to make bowstrings, and you need saws to plane wood into boards. Masonry will require Pottery, and Smithing will require Pottery and Tooling. Fermentation will require Agriculture, and so will Food Preservation. With that, we have nine fundamental technologies which can make up our neolithic bloc and the base of our tech tree.

The Medieval section is going to be pivotal, though it may not be all that much larger than the neolithic section. We want to show the evolution in Smithing from bronze to ironwork, dependent on larger forges and hotter temperatures. Here we have another base tech which can come from Masonry: Calcining, the technique of breaking down compounds using high temperature and minimal oxygen. Calcining is (although this is a bit of a simplification) a required process both to make cement and to produce charcoal which was first used as a higher temperature fuel than wood prior to the systematic mining of coal. Along with Smithing, Calcining can then be a prerequisite to Smelting, which will in our tech tree represent the move from bronze to iron. Calcining would also lead to cement, which will either be a standalone technology or a prerequisite to Engineering, itself a root tech which would allow (in the medieval epoch at least) construction of wind and water mills as well as pumps. From Carpentry and Smithing we can get Construction, which will allow construction of buildings from things other than rough wood, stone, and brick (from masonry). Construction would also be a prerequisite for Mining and Engineering. Also in the medieval epoch would be Apothecary; while healing traditions go back to the dawn of humanity, it’s relatively late that they become systematized.

As we move into the Industrial epoch it becomes more important if we want to keep technologies broad or make them narrower, especially as applications of these technologies start to diverge. My thought is to keep the tech tree fairly high-level, but add some additional requirements, research or otherwise, for the first time you build a new item, building, or workstation. This also brings in the inherent challenge of potentially trying to build something using technology you don’t yet have, which could represent a high-risk, high reward method to leapfrog your existing knowledge. That knowledge gets more expansive in the industrial epoch, with the most important (to in-game items) technological trajectories being metalworking and machining, electricity, and chemistry. Chemistry gets us gunpowder and modern agriculture, machining gets us guns and steam engines, and electricity gets us, of course, electricity.While chemistry and metalworking likely descend from medieval techs, electricity is going to have industrial-era prerequisites, at least in terms of being able to generate, use, and possibly store it. There will be other key technologies in the industrial epoch which come after electricity, most notably radio and, right at the end of the epoch, semiconductors and computers.

The spacer epoch is going to be broader and a bit different. In RimWorld, a number of technologies are crammed into the industrial epoch because that allows them to be accessible in early game without too much time spent researching. Since we don’t have that restriction, most of these techs are going to be pushed forward into the Spacer epoch. This includes things like cybernetics, robotics, and gene splicing. Anti-grav tech, being that it’s mostly fantasy, is going to go all the way into ultra-tech, as is a lot of the nanotech that shows up in RimWorld. For our spacer epoch, though, the focus is going to be on a combination of what could arguably be called ‘modern’ tech with some key advancements. The aforementioned RimWorld techs like robotics will be joined with early spaceflight and 3D printing, which will be a culmination of the chemistry tech after things like plastics (obviously) and hydroponics. The spacer epoch will also have access to AI, and honestly a colony AI would be an incredibly appropriate project for unlocking ultra-tech and all that it would entail. The problem with outlining ultra-tech here is that, honestly, the sky’s the limit. If we stick with RimWorld, we already have nanotech including resurrection, perfect cryosleep, anti-grav transportation, and that’s not even touching the ‘glitterworld’ and ‘archotech’ items which, in RimWorld, are so advanced that you never develop the ability to recreate them.

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As we at least frame out the tech tree as it parallels RimWorld, we now need to consider the questions recasting the research and technology mechanic raises. How is technology and research going to enhance this game, that is to say a game happening in-person and centering single characters (at least partly)? Will playing as a tribal settlement or other group of people subject to technological drift be fun? And, looking at it from another perspective, will it be central to the game? To be clear, I don’t know the answers to these questions, but looking at how RimWorld handles technology made it very clear that the tech tree is in service to the game. It may be that we want to give the same ‘tribal start’ option but, like in RimWorld, it won’t be the default. It may be that we want to approach technological drift differently. Would it make sense that an isolated group of people really ‘starts over’ tech-wise, or would their relationship with what’s left on the planet mean that they approach technology differently with a combination of first principles and salvage? I think putting an emphasis on salvaging and scavenging could be really fun given the implied setting, but it likely means we aren’t going to treat technology in the same way RimWorld does. The tech tree exercise will still be useful, as it will provide an outline for tracing dependencies; that said an approach based more on in-game discovery than ‘research bench’ is going to need to be based more heavily on items and workstations.

At this point, we’re moving from how to translate concepts from RimWorld into a tabletop version to taking those concepts and translations and beginning to make a game out of them. From here, it’s time to start actually building out some subsystems, taking the content and considerations from earlier articles and turning them into actual, workable rules. Character creation is 85% of the way there, but after that we need to consider what the gameplay loop really looks like. This isn’t quite a traditional RPG; we’re going to have delineated time use and procedures that make it possible to run more characters than you have players. Of course there will be scenes that play out like scenes do in many RPGs, but the idea is that those will happen throughout the characters’ days as opposed to playing the entire game from a character’s perspective. This bit of the design isn’t going to borrow from RimWorld, and it’s going to depart quite a bit from Cortex Prime. Still, this is the point when the whole System Hack gets interesting. Next time, we start putting together an Alpha.

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