[Update]: RimWorld's very first expansion Royalty has now suddenly been released alongside Update 1.1!

If you're like me and you've already had RimWorld consume a frankly embarrassing amount of your free time over the past few years, I'm afraid I bring some bittersweet news. With almost no warning, Ludeon Studios have now released a whole bunch of new content and improvements as a part of the Update 1.1 beta!

In terms of weaponry and armor, the update has added EMP and smoke launcher weapons, barricades to protect yourself from foolish raiders, as well as a lighter variant of marine armor - recon armor. There's also a bunch of new animals like donkeys, horses, sheep, goats, and most importantly of all, geese. As for the characters themselves, they have received a couple of new traits, reworked versions of previous ones, as well as some new tribal backstories to spice things up even further.

All of that is just the tip of the iceberg, and since there is basically no way to summarize the various changes and additions, I would highly recommend you read through the patch notes yourself if you're curious. You can find them by hopping over to Steam.

If you prefer to dive in head first and see what's up with your own eyes, you can also help the developers out by joining the beta. Simply head on over to your Steam library, go into properties, select the betas tab, and from there choose 'unstable' from the dropdown menu. The download should begin in a moment or two, but if nothing happens, just restart Steam and it will likely fix itself.

While this should be fairly obvious, don't go into the Update 1.1 beta with any major mods. Some of the simpler ones may continue working without any additional tweaking on your end, but most of the complex mods will break in a spectacular fashion. And since the beta update is already considered unstable, I'd advise against bringing in even more potential problems into the mix.

Have fun, and if you encounter any nasty bugs, make sure to report them on the official forums.