RimWorld

- The little automated gun emplacements aren't that strong, but enemies prioritize them so not only does it help control the places your enemies attack, it keeps your colonists alive a little longer.

- With pod crash landings, 'rescue' means they leave after you treat them, to keep them in the colony you have to capture them and convince them to stay.

- Horseshoe posts are cheap and train shooting.

- Make sure to change the selected material when building. My first colony was made of a lot of steel, and early on, steel is valuable.

- 5x5 rooms with only a bed are just big enough to avoid negative moodlets for being cramped.

- Hauling is a huge time sink, so be thoughtful about stockpiles. Having a priority stockpile set at a high priority near a crafting table will save a lot of time in the long run. Similarly, make sure it's a short walk from your fields to your fridge.

- You need to build a freezer (a room with AC unit(s) set to below freezing) to store all your food, medicine and animal corpses. Adding a small airlock room (just a short corridor with a door on each end) as the only way into your freezer will help keep the cold air in there and make it more energy efficient. Additional wall thickness also adds more insulation and being in a cave or mined out area is also more insulated than an external structure that you built yourself.

- Research is really important. Make sure you've got a research workstation set up and that somebody has research enabled on their job list. By default it's the lowest priority thing, so you might want to tell your researcher to not clean or haul (or alter the priorities in manual mode) so that they put more of an emphasis on doing it. One of the techs you can research adds a new power-dependant research bench that's much better (and another one later adds a separate object called a multi-analyser that you need to place in proximity to the research bench to learn advanced techs).

- Lights use an absurd amount of power. Also by default any power consuming thing you build draws power regardless of if it's being used or not, so make sure you turn things off if you're not using them at the moment.

- Batteries and several other electronic things will explode or short out if they're rained on, so you'll want to make sure they've got a roof over them.

- Batteries in particular will also explode because fuck you regardless of where they're stored. I like to keep them in a little form fitting stone-walled cell to keep them from burning my house down.

- Speaking of fire. Fire is bad. Wood and (confusingly) steel constructions will burn. Stone walls don't. Research and build a stone-cutting station to make usable blocks out of all those damn rocks lying around the place and use them for exterior walls / things that need to be fireproof.

- Turrets will instantly destroy anything in a three block radius when they blow up, so if you put them right next to each other then your entire defensive line will be annihilated in about thirty seconds.

- Don't be afraid to save scum when you first start out to learn the mechanics.

- Dwarf Fortressing into a mountain as a starter base sounds like a good idea but in reality it takes forever to mine out rooms and when you finally do the whole place will be dark and filthy. Dirty rooms give a negative mood, if your whole base is dirty then people will go insane pretty fast.

- When someone does go crazy you want to make sure you tell your remaining colonists to drop their weapons before taking down the madman, bruises will easily heal but cuts and bullet holes will not.

- Make a colony with perimeter walls and only one entrance, at least for early game raids the enemies will only go for the entrance and you can funnel them in.

- Don't ignore mad animals, even squirrels can fuck someone up good.

- Personal shields cannot be used with ranged weapons.

- Make like Matt Damon and grow tons of potatoes as soon as you can, they are the most reliable source of food and won't spoil if they are in your freezer.

- You're going to die eventually, don't stress about it. Raiders don't generally destroy colonies, heat waves do. You can make a masterpiece of a base and it will still get destroyed because all your food spoiled in the heat and everyone is getting heatstroke in their masterfully decorated rooms because it's 500 degrees F outside.