How to Get Components in RimWorld: Biotech | High Ground Gaming (2024)

Components are one of the most important items in RimWorld. Representing all the small bits and bobs that go into the complicated spacer tech you use on the edges of space, components are used in nearly every piece of electrical technology you construct. They’re relatively rare, and acquiring them can be very difficult in the early game.

To make the component situation more strenuous, sometimes your electrical equipment will break down and need a component and an adequate constructor to come and repair it. This can spell doom for your entire settlement if the component that needs to be replaced is inside something critical, like the air conditioner in your walk-in or the solar panel that charges your entire base.

But don’t fret. This RimWorld guide will help you find more components at every stage of the game. Let me show you the way.

Early Game Scavenging

At the start of a Crashlanded scenario, you will fall out of your pods with a total of thirty components. This will be enough for most of your initial creations, allowing you to make some power generators and temperature control devices quickly.

Make sure you haul your components inside or put them on a shelf right away since being outdoors can make them decay over time. You can save some components early on by avoiding electrically-powered workstations in favor of using wood fuel for your stove and manual power for your tailoring bench. Don’t build more heaters, coolers, or generators than you absolutely need right away, and consider using wood torches if the area isn’t too hot.

In the mountainsides, you can see orange-tinted squares of what the game labels as “compacted machinery”. Sending a miner to go harvest these squares will yield you components, and these deposits are likely to be your primary source of them until later on.

Make sure you only let your best miner collect these early components, as the game does scale the yield of a deposit with the skill of the miner. It also scales with their sight and manipulation stats, just like the quality of many other stats. Any miner below skill eight is losing some amount of yield on every mineral deposit, so if you don’t have any good miners, you should train your passionate ones on stone instead of metal.

Alternatively, instead of farming deposits, you can also find crashed ship chunks nearby. These can be deconstructed to give you a supply of steel and components. Sending your colonists with strong construction skills can get this done quicker.

When you do the common Crashlanded scenario, you’ll see the parts of your ship fall down around you. When you run out of components, you can send someone out to collect these. As a random positive event, sometimes 1–4 ship chunks will fall out of the sky all at once toward different parts of the map. If you get really lucky, you could get twenty-four components out of a ship-crashing event.

Trading For More

Trade is always a reliable path toward acquiring more components in RimWorld. Once you’ve mined out all the compacted machinery and deconstructed every available ship chunk, you’re likely going to acquire your next batch of components through trade.

The biggest key to good trading is to have a good negotiator engage with the sale. Whoever has the highest social skill should be the face of your colony. Sending someone with low social skills, or disabilities affecting their hearing or talking abilities, could have huge negative impacts on your trading prices.

If you have the Ideoligion expansion, sending someone with the Leader role applied will give you a non-stacking 2% bonus. Additionally, if you get lucky enough to have someone with the inspired trade inspiration while trade is available, they can get another 18% bonus towards the exchange.

Early on your best sources of traded components will be bulk goods traders from outlander or imperial factions or exotic goods traders. You can either wait for them to come to you, or — if they’re within a reasonable distance – you can send a caravan loaded with goods to barter for components. Only those possessing a knight or dame title can trade with imperial settlements.

If you are going to set up a trade caravan, send someone with social skills alongside some pack animals that will help them haul all the components home. Sending a caravan out to a settlement will give you a flat 2% bonus for trades.

After you unlock microelectronics, your trading opportunities are expanded, as you can build the communications console. This is an incredibly important advancement but needs to be paired with orbital trade beacons set up in your storage rooms.

Now, occasionally you’ll get notifications that ships passing by the planet have goods available for sale, which they will send down to you via drop pods. It’s smart to spend as much silver as you can on components early on, as you’ll always need more of them eventually. Plus, they’re much more useful than letting your silver reserves get too large, drawing larger raids your way.

Fabrication

In order to start making your own components at home from scavenged steel, you’ll need to unlock microelectronics and two other technologies.

The first of these two technologies is a multi-analyzer, a device that speeds up your research but costs eight whole components all on its own. With the help of a multi-analyzer, you’ll gain access to the highest tiers of space technology — including fabrication and the ability to build a fabrication bench.

To start making components on a fabrication bench, you need a crafter with eight skills and twelve pieces of steel. Do note that it takes quite a bit of time to craft components. Make sure to keep your best crafter assigned to upkeep a constant supply.

With all that said, you might want to forego spending research time on fabrication until you’ve already acquired the parts needed to make the bench. The bench is made from advanced components, an upgraded version of the same components you’ve been working with thus far.

Advanced components at this stage in RimWorld can be very rare. Traders might have them for sale for hundreds of pieces of silver each (if you have the cash to spare, you should always pick these up). You’ll need more and more of them to upgrade your gear into spacer tech and to develop powerful bionic replacement parts for your injured colonists.

If you can’t afford the time and silver it costs to wait around and trade for advanced components, there are a few other sources you can consider. One of them involves waiting for a mechanoid-influenced ship to crash in your settlement zone.

Some of these ships are psychic droner ships that lower the mood of everyone in the area at gradually-expanding levels, while others are defoliators that will kill all plant life in a gradually-expanding area. Either of these ships drops a single advanced component when you have your colonists destroy them. At this stage, you’re likely able to handle the “ancient danger” that might be sealed behind nearby bricks or buried deep in the mountainsides.

Late Game Acquisition

Eventually, the map your main settlement is on is bound to run out of steel (at least, steel you can access initially). This means you’re also bound to eventually run out of components you can create since they take twelve steel apiece. The same holds true for advanced components since they are made from plasteel and gold mixed with regular components.

There are a few approaches you can take from here on out. One is to build a long-range mineral scanner and set it to look for whatever you’re running low on. You can even set it to look for a big block of components all on its own. A small mining area will appear, and you can send a team of your best miners over there in a caravan or via drop-pod to harvest it.

Around the same time you unlock the long-range mineral scanner, you’ll acquire deep drills and a different piece of tech called the ground-penetrating scanner. Using these in combination lets you mine deep underground for all sorts of materials, encouraging you to set up small mining outposts all around your main compound.

If you own the royalty DLC, your royally-endowed colonists will receive access to aid permits after they are granted the rank of Acolyte. One of the early aid permits you can select is a steel drop, giving you a small load of 250 emergency-use steel every 45 days. If you are conservative enough in your construction of power-using buildings, this could be a sustainable amount of steel all on its own.

Another possible source of components (and the steel that makes them) in RimWorld is mechanoids. Previously, you used to need to deconstruct enemy mechanoids at a machining table in order to harvest their components. But this now only yields steel and plasteel.

At this point, hostile mechanoids also have a chance to carry dozens of components. Instead of needing to break them open to get them, you can simply pick them up as loot when the mech is downed.

Mechanoids often also drop into the map with nodes that can be deconstructed for more components and plasteel, provided they aren’t destroyed as collateral damage from an exploding mech turret. These discourage you from using your mortars when you don’t need to.

The new mechanitor class of colonists gains not only a small army of robots, but also the ability to summon three different boss mechanoids, all of which will bring a posse of robotic bodyguards with them. While the bosses themselves don’t tend to yield components, the bodyguards will. They can also be broken down for steel.

You can summon the first boss, the Diabolus, as many times as you want, with the fight getting increasingly more difficult each time. The same condition applies to the other two bosses, but constructing the building required to summon them is significantly more resource-costly.

Lastly, you can use your electric smelter to melt down old armor, weapons, and chunks of metal debris into steel, as well. This even works for tainted armor, so stripping dead raiders, while ghoulish, is a worthwhile task when you’re running so low on steel that you can’t make enough components to keep the base functional.

Pro tip: gather all the chunks into a centralized area close to the smelter so you don’t need to leave it on all the time. Otherwise, it draws a whopping seven hundred units of electricity!

Join the High Ground

We hope you found our guide on how to get more components in RimWorld useful! Keeping the lights on is an important part of running a settlement on the hostile planets of RimWorld, and components represent all the small parts you need to keep an interstellar base fully operational. We pray that every machine you build stays in tip-top shape, and you can focus on more important matters like getting off this rock. With your batteries full and your colonists wearing advanced armor, components will enable you to take the high ground.

If there’s anything you think we left out, let us know in the comments below! And be sure to subscribe to our newsletter for all the latest.

Happy Gaming!