Reddit user u/pwnzorder surveyed RimWorld players on the r/RimWorld subreddit about how they play Tynan Sylvester’s base-building game. He received 1,846 responses, of which 1,495 appear to be valid.

Here are some of the results:

Demographics

Of the respondents, 1,129 identified as male (75.5%); 341 identified as female (22.8%). Three identified as nonbinary or genderqueer. Twenty-two submitted jokes or apparent jokes, most of them “attack helicopter” variants.

Overall about half of survey takers were under 22; those were divided evenly between college-age and pre-college-age respondents. Of the remaining 50 percent, most were 22-35, but a significant minority of players were older than 35. More respondents claimed to be younger than 12 (technically too young to be on Reddit, per the site’s user agreement) than claimed to be older than 50.

This second graph presents the same data, but with condensed age brackets:

The youngest and oldest players are more likely to identify as female than the 18-35 bracket. (Remember that 18-35 bracket has nearly two-thirds of the respondents.)

Gameplay

Almost half of the respondents have put between 100 and 500 hours into the game. Another 13 percent have played less than 100 hours. Close to 40 percent have played more than 500 hours in the game; 15 percent have played more than 2,000 hours, which is about as much time as an adult who works 40 hours per week will work in a single year.

That’s a little overwhelming, so using the official version list I grouped the responses by the year in which a given version was released. (Pre-Alpha 1 players were placed in 2013, though a few versions of the Pre-Alpha 1 RimWorld were released in January 2014.)

This shows most players started in the last two years, though a significant minority has been playing the game for a long time.

Unsurprisingly, players who started playing RimWorld longer ago are more likely to have put more hours in. (I collapsed categories here since the chart got pretty messy otherwise.)

Favorites

A plurality of players usually use the default “Crashlanded” starting scenario with three colonists. About a third use either a custom scenario or a scenario from a mod. Tribal and rich explorer are distinct minorities.

Most respondents prefer the easier biomes: temperate with abundant trees. A significant minority prefer one of the more extreme biomes, such as the 3.7 percent who like challenging themselves with sea ice.

Most players prefer one of four default food crops: rice, corn, potatoes and strawberries. The “Other” choices including some people volunteering that they play with a mix of crops, and some people saying they use crops found in mods such as wheat or beans. One person put “organs.”

There is no consensus for favorite animal. Muffalo was the most popular, followed by husky, alpaca, wild boar and timber wolf.