Components are the backbone of almost anything even remotely useful in Rimworld. Try to play a game without ever using one, I doubt you will get far! (Side note: that’d be a pretty awesome community challenge) Without components, you would not be able to make or repair most electrical devices, firearms, armor, and late-game ship parts. Components are luckily fairly common to get or make. Here are all the ways to make or get components in Rimworld (vanilla).
How to Mine Components in Rimworld
You may see a sort of brownish rock on your map. If you hover over it and see “compacted machinery”, congrats! You’ve found components! Compacted machinery comes in veins of 3-6 blocks. Each block drops 2 components. With only 2000 health (25 hits) it is relatively easy to mine but will take longer than steel which has 1500 health in comparison.
How to Get Components from Ship Chunks
Ship chunks are 2×2 sized pieces of destroyed ships. They’re fairly useless, but luckily for us, pawns can deconstruct them for steel and components. Ship chunks spawn when your own ship crashlands on the planet or are random events and will fall from the sky. These are a great way to get components in Rimworld since they always give 8 to 9 pieces.
Oh, they provide cover. So not completely useless if they haven’t been disassembled yet.
How to Get Components from Mechanoids
There are three types of mechanoids – centipedes, scythers, and lancers. They can appear on the map for a variety of reasons. Some of these include ancient ruins, inside mountains, or through random events such as poison ships and psychic ships.
If you take one to a machining table, you can disassemble it for 50 steel, 10 plasteel, and 2 components! Although, you should know that if there are missing parts on the centipede from combat you may not get all of the above. Makes sense right? Less centipede, less material.
Lancers and Scythers can be disassembled at the same table for 20 steel, 5 plasteel, and 1 component. The same rule applies for them too – fewer parts, fewer materials.
While these are dangerous foes, they can serve as a useful source of components and plasteel which may be hard to come by.
How to Craft Components
There is a way to craft your components too! As soon as you have researched Fabrication in-game, your pawns can craft components and much more at the fabrication bench. Pawns with a crafting skill level of 8 or higher can make components (even advanced components) at the fabrication bench for 12 steel and 5,000 ticks of in-game time (~83.3 seconds).
This will probably be your go-to method in late-game Rimworld. All the ship chunks that spawned will have been deconstructed and all the compacted machinery mined. You’ll either have to wait for more ship chunks to fall, more mechanoids to kill, or for a trader to come by with components in their inventory.
And that is all of the ways you can get components in Rimworld! You can buy them, craft them, mine them, and deconstruct various in-game objects to get your hands on those extremely useful components.
If you’re looking for more Rimworld tips and tricks, check out our other posts on melee weapons, ranged weapons, and hydroponic layouts!
Have any creative ways of your own to get components? Know a mod on the workshop that makes it a little easier or even harder? Let us know below!