What’s your most memorable war crime you’ve committed?

I usually build a wall around my colony, but one time I forgot to close a steel door and the raiders got in and started killing my animals and setting fire to the buildings. I was so furious that I captured as many as I could, put them in a hole in the mountain, patched them with the bare minimum necessary to keep them from dying from their injuries, and gave them Twisted Fresh and sealed them. The idea was that they would kill each other through mental breakdown, and it worked perfectly.

I have a game going, my starter pawn (naked brutality) has built an entire colony from the ground up. His randomly generated name is 'Daisuke' which in Japanese means either 'great helper' or 'I love you' depending on pronunciation. Only a few days after he got started, another pawn, a lovely woman (beautiful, kind, high social) by the name of 'Cherry' joined him. They worked together well, and immediately fell madly in love with each other. They got married, and now they have 5 kids. It's wonderful.

She also has an x3 hunger rate, which I found out after looking at her stats because she was eating a catastrophic amount of food. Turns out she is a mime from the Alpha Animals mod, and if she ever experiences malnutrition of a severity more than trivial, then she will immediately 'die' and become a horrible monster that tries to eat him and all their kids. Now, the colony has abundant food, more than we know what to do with and it will never rot, (thanks, Apini) so it's normally not a problem, except when she gets morning sickness or is giving birth because morning sickness makes you vomit and lose food, and you can't eat during labour.
So I have this poor man who KNOWS his wife is secretly a monster who has been lying to him this whole time, but he just loves her too damn much and a couple times a year has to go full panic mode to ensure she doesn't starve. He's hunted down biotech labs for 'bad' xenogenes (like minus plant skill, when she doesn't do plants anyways) to give her metabolic efficiency in order to stave off starvation, but the longer she lives the greater the mime hunger becomes, as they start off normal and slowly ramp up. The children are totally normal, its just their mother who is an abomination. It's only a matter of time before Cherry tries to eat their entire family, and Daisuke will have to put her down. Which will make him miserable as he will murder his own wife, which will make his children hate him.

I had a colony where a raider got through the defences, and his stray shot hit and killed one of the children. This enraged me, and i decided death was too good for him.
I managed to capture him, and (using the expanded prosthetics mod) i removed all of his parts and replaced them with the worst prosthetics i could. Peg legs and arms, eyes replaced with sensors that could only see basic shapes in grey scale, ears with shitty microphones that gave everything a tinny, high pitched squeal. A mechanic jaw that could only intake nutrient paste, and produced a voice that sounded like it was being played on a blown speaker. A prosthetic heart that didn't pump blood well, leaving him with a constant feeling of paresthesia and tiredness. Prosthetic lungs that could barely process oxygen, always making a rattling sensation in his chest when he breathed. A prosthetic stomach that always hurt when digesting food, and never fully satiated the hunger he felt. Prosthetic kidneys that were more for show than function, both working together less efficiently that a single healthy kidney. A prosthetic liver that was so inefficient that he always felt the onset symptoms of cirrhosis. And a mind screw, for good measure. I don't think a single stat in his health panel was above 50% when i was done with him.

Then, i converted him to my ideology and recruited him to my colony for the sole purpose of renaming him "The Herald", before banishing him to the wasteland to carry his own terrifyingly twisted visage as a message to those who would hurt our children. Some might call it a war crime, but i call it justice. 😠

This sounds like an essay from someone attempting to deal with their own guilt.

weak aura says "its necesery, il let my pawns eat human flesh, or they all die"
strong aura says "its not war crime if its was fun"

"Most players dont begin the game wanting to commit atrocities" Yeahhh thats where you are wrong.

There are 3 kinds of people living in my colonie:

1. The choosen ones

2. Worthy prisoners

3. Food

Rimworld is the child of Dwarf Fortress.
"Fun" is the connecting thread.
Turns out "Fun" is much better when shared.

I think it is like this because unlike other games where the "evil route" is just for the history and astetics, in rimworld truly being evil a lot of the time is the path of less resistance, and when you add that to the high stakes of loosing your colony or a valuable pawn well, the decision is really easy.

The worst my colony has done is eat raiders, because well to be frank. If you are willing to die raiding me you are willing to die and being put on my dinner plate

I do pretty typical warcrimes, but Anomaly introduced the potential of being a harsh cult. We started skip abducting people so that we can steal their youth for our transhumanist colony rather than bothering with biosculptors.

Also, whenever I would get a particularly good melee pawn from a skip abduction, I'd stick an archotech shard in them and turn them into a ghoul as a sacrifice for melee combat.

I had a colony that worked with the mindset that new people started as slaves and earned their way into being a citizen of the colony.
After a big raid, one of the prisoners was relatively quick to being "recruited" and before I even had the chance to set up his work tab he butchered one of his friends and used the human leather to make his own slave collar.

Sure, I had humans allowed on the butcher table, but he did all of that of his own volition...

I vividly remember my friends look of confusion when I showed him my save with over 75% of the factions having good relations with me. any pawn I didn't like I would load up with supplies and banish them from the colony (removes mood debuff) instead of organ harvesting. I get even weirder looks for allowing more than 1 ideology in my colonies. it truly is a "who are you when no ones watching" situation.

Moral disengagement is an scary thing, especially when it doesn't just apply to games. Just look at people in power.

I had a colony in the ice biome.

We were once again attacked by raiders, and one of the raiders was a sangophage.
I didn't know what to do with her as a prisoner, then she got put into a coma by the Revenant.

After that i just dumped her at the back of the greenhouse.
Sangophages are immortal, so when her fingers were lost to frostbite, and her starvation advanced to 100%, she just remained in a permanent deathrest.

There's an extra layer to it when you know the game lore, you are not in a settlement with great wealth, you are a ragtag group of survivors on a random planet on the edge of the milky way, a barely inhabited "rimworld" on the edge of explored space.

There is no law, there are no police, there is no military, no Geneva convention, no convention at all, you are here, and here is dangerous, YOU must decide how you will survive.

I think the opposite happened for me, I went in wanting to be evil, then overtime I started feeling super bad about these silly pawns and now I try my best to look after them. (Anyone outside my faction doesnt count, my human leather pile grows larger everyday)

Morality this morality that if you raid my base and arent in the slightest useful you either end up dead, an organ volunteer or a weapon test dummy (there's also a 4th option where I test how much of this effect can a pawn endure before dying the usual freezing, extreme heat, toxins, forced everything withdrawals etc)

I give them to the flesh trees, i like to cultivate exotics plants