Lonely and afraid, a forsaken colonist was all that remained. Fay eventually fell out of her cleaning frenzy, the base now scrubbed, spotless and quiet. In time the abomination wandered off and was slain by a lone thrumbo (a gigantically graceful creature that can be dangerous when enraged) and finally, my little colonist was safe again. The walls and fences were swiftly repaired and graves were dug to allow the deceased colonists to be put to rest. Countless days passed, Fay built as much as she could and ate away at the reserves as the chill of winter began to set in. The first falling of snow at long last brought new hope with it, two traveling Orassans (a unique cat humanoid race with a love for frosty weather) decided to join our colony of one.

Torque, the male Orassan had an affinity for building, shooting, and most importantly research, a particularly useful skill to help advance the colony. The female cat creature named Tabitha adored cooking and tending to crops and animals which would come in handy with the coming seasons. These two settled comfortably quickly and life could begin to move forward as usual. I decided to add a second outer fence to the base, you know… just in case of repeat incidents and the base itself was coming on along nicely. The only slight issue could be seen with the lack of medical knowledge among the three, not a single one could perform the task. Now, this could mean trouble, no actually it definitely meant difficulty on the horizons. Leading a colony without a trained doctor usually never ends well, too many things can go wrong within Rimworld and if there’s no one to patch a colonist up then the chance of survival is staggeringly low. With the second fence being constructed I decided to work on building up some sort of livestock again. Tabitha eagerly began taming llamas, a giant herd of them migrated and ended up living right outside the fences which made things slightly easier. About six llamas happily joined us and took sanctum from the outside world within the colonies base. All seemed well once again, colonists were happy, the base was efficient and running optimally for a relatively early game. Fay had even caught the attention of Torque, much to his wife Tabitha’s dismay (I only realized this later when checking on the colonist’s list of needs). The llamas were breeding efficiently and as soon as the snow melted we could begin planting crops for extra food sources.

Now, do you remember when I mentioned my terrible habit of not checking the alerts displayed so clearly on the corner of my screen? Spoiler alert… it’s about to happen again. Well, I failed to notice the blinking ‘animal hunting’ notification as well as the giant spider slowly stalking across the map towards Torque as he hunted peacefully a fair distance from the base. The scene that followed was frustrating, to say the least. Rimworld colonist’s initial response is to run when attacked, however, spiders are terribly nimble and can usually catch their prey swiftly. Torque was carried off into a spider lair, wrapped and webbed neatly and left to die a slow death before being eaten by spiders. I managed to send Tabitha to rescue him, fight off a couple of spiders and haul him back to a medical bed. So here we are, Torque lying helplessly in a medical bed bleeding out and not a single colonist who could do a thing about it.

The end of his story is not a happy one, in fact, quite the opposite. Torque bled to death fifteen hours after his spider ordeal as his ex-wife and new girlfriend stood powerless by his side. Fifteen hours and four minutes later a request came in asking for refuge within the colony from nearby. A request from the one person who could have possibly saved him… a doctor.