There’s a familiar rhythm to life on the Rim. You crash land, you struggle, you build. You carve out a tiny piece of a hostile world and call it home. You build walls, then bigger walls. You set up killboxes and turrets, forever waiting for the next raid, the next infestation, the next catastrophic event to threaten the little life you’ve built. You are rooted to the spot, a stationary target in a world that is constantly moving against you. But what if you could move with it? What if, instead of building your fortress on the ground, you could build it in the sky?
The Odyssey expansion for RimWorld doesn’t just add a new vehicle; it offers a key to unlock an entirely new way of playing the game. It offers freedom. That freedom comes in the form of a Gravship, a mobile base that lets you take your entire colony, your workshops, your bedrooms, and your precious loot, and simply lift off into the sky. This guide is your complete blueprint for that freedom. We’re going to cover every single step of how to get and build a Gravship, from your very first day to conquering the cold void of space. Forget being a sitting duck. It’s time to become the master of your own journey.
What’s in our How to Get and Build a Gravship Guide?
What Exactly is a Gravship? (And What It’s Not)
Before we start wrenching on steel and components, it’s critical to understand what the Gravship truly is. Thinking of it as just another vehicle is like calling a power armor suit just another jacket. It’s a fundamental shift in the game’s DNA.
A Paradigm Shift in Gameplay
The Gravship changes the core gameplay loop of RimWorld. It transforms the game from a static base defense model, where you are a nail waiting for the world’s hammer, into a dynamic system of mobile operations, exploration, and resettlement. You are no longer tied to one tile on the map; the entire planet is now your backyard. You can chase resources, flee from overwhelming threats, relocate to more favorable climates, and project your power across the globe. It turns the world map from a backdrop into an interactive playground.
Not Your Vanilla Endgame Ship
It’s crucial to distinguish the Gravship from two other things. First, this is not the endgame spaceship from the vanilla game, which is designed for one purpose: escaping the planet and ending your story. The Gravship is the opposite; it’s designed to dramatically extend your story, not end it. Second, this shouldn’t be confused with popular mods like Save Our Ship 2, which focus on interstellar travel and deep space combat.
The Gravship is a tool for planetary and low orbit travel. It has no faster than light (FTL) capabilities and isn’t built to leave the solar system. In essence, the Gravship introduces what you could call a “mid-game endgame,” an evolving objective that gives your colony purpose long after you’ve become self-sufficient.
The First Big Choice: 3 Paths to Your Gravship
Your journey to becoming a nomad begins with a single, crucial choice: how you acquire your first Gravship. There are three primary paths, each acting as a different difficulty setting for engaging with the Odyssey content. Your choice here will profoundly shape the pace and pressure of your early to mid game.
Path A: The High Pressure “Gravship” Scenario
This is the trial by fire route, designed for veteran players who want to be thrown into the deep end. You start the game with a basic, functional Gravship, but there’s a massive catch. A war ready Mechanoid hive is immediately and relentlessly hunting you across the planet. This endless pursuit forces you into a purely nomadic playstyle from day one, leaving no room for long term settlement. It’s a brutal, thrilling test of your crisis management skills and your ability to survive on the move.
Path B: The Standard “Mechanoid Signal” Quest
This is the most common and balanced way to begin. If you choose any classic RimWorld scenario, this quest will appear a few days into your game. Accepting it causes a damaged Grav Engine to crash land somewhere on your map. This path allows you to first establish a stable early game colony before embarking on the ambitious project of building a Gravship.
Crucially, this quest has no time limit. You can let that signal wait for as long as you need. However, there’s a vital strategic trap here. Simply accepting the quest and having the Grav Engine appear on your map significantly increases your colony’s wealth. In RimWorld, wealth is the primary factor that determines the size and difficulty of enemy raids. Activating this quest too early is a trap that can prematurely scale up threats before you have any means to use your future ship. The smart player fortifies their position first and only calls down the engine when they are prepared.
Path C: The Custom Tailored Scenario Editor
For those who want total control, the Scenario Editor allows you to start the game with a Gravship in any scenario, even a tribal start. By going into the editor, you can change the “Arrival Method” to begin with a ship. Be warned, though: this method requires some technical knowledge. By default, you won’t have the necessary technologies researched, like Basic Gravitech or Biofuel Refining. This means that without manually adding those technologies in the editor, you’ll be unable to expand or refuel your ship, potentially leaving you stranded with a useless hunk of metal.
The Blueprint: Research and Essential Parts for Your First Flight
Once you have your Grav Engine, the real work begins. The path to a functional Gravship is paved with research. A well-planned research strategy is the key to a successful launch.
Laying the Foundation: Essential Early Game Research
Before you even touch the Gravitech tree, a few foundational technologies are non-negotiable. Electricity is the absolute prerequisite for everything. Without it, your research benches are dark and your ship parts are unbuildable. Next is Biofuel Refining. Your ship’s thrusters run on Chemfuel. While you can trade for it, researching biofuel refining allows you to create a sustainable source from common materials like wood or plants, which is almost essential for a nomadic life. Finally, research Complex Furniture. Space inside your initial ship is extremely limited. This research unlocks shelves, which dramatically reduce the storage footprint of your items, freeing up precious tiles for beds, workbenches, and other vital facilities.
Unlocking the Skies: The Gravitech Research Tree
After securing these basics and having your researchers analyze the crashed Grav Engine, the main Gravship tech tree unlocks. The first and most important step is Basic Gravitech. This is your gateway. Completing it unlocks the recipes for the core components needed for flight: the Pilot Console, Small Thruster, Small Chemfuel Tank, Gravship Hull, and the all important Grav Anchor. As you progress, you’ll aim for more advanced research like Advanced Gravitech, which lets you craft your own Gravlite Panels, and Orbital Tech, which is your ticket to the vacuum of space.
Your First Flight Checklist: The Absolutely Critical Components
To get your ship off the ground, you need a handful of essential parts. The Grav Engine is the beating heart of your ship; it’s uncraftable and is the piece you acquire from the quest or starting scenario. The entire ship must be built connected to it. Gravship Substructure tiles are the floor of your ship, built from Gravlite Panels and steel. Anything built on this substructure is considered part of the ship and will be carried with it when you fly.
The Pilot Console is your user interface for controlling the ship. Without it, your ship is just a fancy, immobile base. Finally, you need at least one Small Thruster and one Small Chemfuel Tank to provide movement. This initial build is a puzzle of optimization. The engine can only support 500 substructure tiles at first, forcing you into a strategic game of spatial Tetris.
Building and Expanding Your Mobile Base
Your first ship will be small and cramped, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. The journey from a tiny shuttle to a flying fortress is one of the most rewarding parts of the Odyssey experience.
Gravlite Panels: The Lifeblood of Expansion
Think of Gravlite Panels as the very bricks and mortar of your future home in the sky. These advanced panels are the primary ingredient for creating Gravship Substructure, the floor tiles upon which your entire mobile colony will be built. Without a steady supply of these panels, your ship will forever remain a small, limited platform. Every new bedroom, every workshop, and every storage area you dream of adding to your ship depends entirely on your ability to acquire more of these critical components.
From Salvage to Self-Sufficiency: The Three Phases of Panel Acquisition
The game cleverly guides you through acquiring Gravlite Panels in a natural, three stage progression. First comes the initial salvage. Your first taste of these panels will come from the wreckage of the crashed Grav Engine. This small, finite supply is just enough to let you build a rudimentary ship. Next, you enter the questing phase. During the mid-game, your main source of panels will be as rewards from various world events and missions. This system brilliantly encourages you to be an active participant in the world.
Finally, you reach the ultimate, sustainable source: crafting them yourself. To do this, you must research Advanced Gravitech, but the real challenge lies in acquiring the raw material: Vacstone. This unique rock is found exclusively on asteroids floating in the planet’s low orbit. This mechanic serves as a brilliant narrative driver, forcing you to upgrade your ship for the dangers of space travel.
If you want to learn everything about RimWorld Odyssey, Read our The Full RimWorld Odyssey Guide
Breaking the Limits: Grav Field Extenders and Gravcores
A single Grav Engine can only support a maximum of 500 substructure tiles. To break past this ceiling, you need to find and install Grav Field Extenders. Each extender you install adds another 250 tiles to your ship’s maximum size and creates its own construction radius, allowing you to build outwards. You can install a maximum of six extenders, pushing your final ship size to a colossal 2000 tiles.
However, building these extenders requires a rare and highly valuable late game resource: Gravcores. These are not something you can easily mine or craft. Gravcores are the rewards for completing some of the most challenging quests and exploring dangerous ancient ruins, pushing you to seek out the greatest challenges the world has to offer.
Mastering the Nomadic Lifestyle
Managing a fully mobile colony presents unique challenges that require new strategies for basic survival.
The Nomad’s Dilemma: Power, Food, and Resources
While you’re landed, you can use standard generators, but you must always be ready to move. For a more permanent solution, you can eventually craft Gravcore Power Cells. Traditional farming is inefficient for a colony that moves every few days. The Odyssey expansion adds fishing, which is an ideal food source for mobile colonies. For your animals, you can use a clever trick. Place a caravan hitching spot just outside your ship and plant dandelions around it. By setting your ship’s pen marker to disallow animals, your colonists will automatically lead them to the hitching spot to graze.
The Grav Anchor: The Most Important Decision You’ll Make
Of all the components you will build, the Grav Anchor is arguably the most strategically important. The core, unforgiving rule of the Gravship is this: lifting off from a map tile without a Grav Anchor installed results in the permanent deletion of that tile and everything on it. Building and installing a Grav Anchor changes this rule. With an anchor on a tile, you can leave with your Gravship and return to that exact same spot later.
This allows you to create a permanent main base and use your Gravship as a shuttle. The Grav Anchor effectively acts as a difficulty reducer and a playstyle choice. Its absence keeps you in a high stress survival loop; building it is your primary way to opt out of that self imposed difficulty.
The Strip Mining Mentality: Leaving Nothing Behind
One of the most important rules to remember is that when your Gravship lifts off from a map tile (without an anchor), that tile is gone forever. This means you must adopt a “strip mining” mentality before every departure. Mine out every valuable resource, steel, plasteel, components, gold, because you will never get a chance to come back for it.
Taking to the Skies: Flight Risks and Space Travel
Flying your Gravship, even just across the planet, is not without risk. It requires skill, preparation, and a bit of luck.
The Dangers of Flight: Pilot Skill and Potential Disasters
Every time you issue a flight command, there’s a chance of a negative event, and the success of the flight depends on the Piloting skill of your colonist at the console. Potential failures range from a minor crash that damages the hull, to a thruster breakdown requiring component repairs, to a case of “Grav Nausea” that will have your colonists randomly vomiting for a few hours. A high level pilot drastically reduces the risk, but the chance of failure never truly becomes zero.
The Ascent: Your Checklist for Space Worthiness
To leave the atmosphere and travel to orbit, you must prepare your ship for the harsh vacuum of space. The first step is researching Orbital Tech. Your ship must be completely sealed with airtight walls. You’ll need two key life support systems: Oxygen Pumps to generate breathable air and Heaters to maintain a livable temperature. To enter and exit the ship without depressurizing the whole thing, you must build airlocks. Finally, any colonist venturing outside into space must be equipped with a Vacsuit and a Vacsuit Helmet.
Exploring the Void: Orbital Scanning and New Frontiers
Once you’re prepared, a whole new world of opportunity and danger awaits in low orbit. You can build an Orbital Scanner to find points of interest, including ore-rich asteroids containing the Vacstone you need for expansion, collapsed orbital platforms, and derelict wrecks filled with loot and danger.
Endgame Upgrades and Strategies
The most powerful upgrades for your Gravship cannot be crafted. These elite, unique items are found as rewards for exploring the world, turning your ship into something truly formidable.
Uncraftable Power: Finding Elite Ship Upgrades
The Fuel Optimizer dramatically increases your Chemfuel efficiency, letting you travel much farther on a single tank. The Gravship Shield Generator creates a massive, temporary defensive shield around your landed ship, invaluable for surviving surprise drop pod raids. These elite upgrades are found as rewards from allied factions and by exploring ancient structures and space ruins, forcing you to actively engage with the world to find them.
The Gravship as a Warship: Mobile Fire Support
While there is no ship to ship combat in Odyssey, using your Gravship as a mobile fire support base is a key and powerful strategy. You can mount turrets directly onto your ship’s hull, turning it into a mobile fortress. This allows you to establish an instant defensive line wherever you land. The structure of the ship itself can be used to create chokepoints and cover for your colonists during a fight. But your greatest military advantage is mobility. You can use it to rapidly deploy troops to key points on the map, flank enemies, or conduct lightning raids on enemy bases, escaping before reinforcements can even arrive.
Writing Your Own Odyssey
The Gravship in RimWorld: Odyssey is more than just a feature; it is a deeply integrated system that transforms the game’s core. Building it requires engaging with the research system. Fueling it ties into farming and refining. Expanding it forces you to engage with the quest system and planetary exploration. Upgrading it to its peak requires you to travel to the new orbital biome and confront its unique dangers. This deep, multi-layered integration is what makes it feel like a true, polished expansion.
Ultimately, mastering the Gravship is synonymous with mastering the interconnected web of systems that Odyssey introduces. It successfully creates entirely new ways to play and win in RimWorld, giving players the chance to write unprecedented stories of survival and adventure on the Rim. Whether you choose to be a pure nomad constantly on the run, a hybrid industrialist with a main base and an advanced shuttle, or an orbital baron pulling wealth from the hearts of asteroids, the Gravship is your tool for writing your own odyssey.
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