I played rimworld on and off casually for a few years. <100 hours in the game. I could never make it to the spaceship though I did have a pretty good colony or two.
Sorry here is the rant of my recent colony I tried playing for hours and hours:
I bought ideology and came back to rimworld because it sounded fun and wanted a simple tribal start. Everyone said arid shrublands is easy so sure. i picked pheobe on normal difficulty because I was looking for a relaxed time. Everyone says arid shrublands is the easiest.
Holy shit. 4 animals on the entire map + 1 herd of elephants. Almost no trees whatsoever, and researching is so damn slow that I have only had stonecutting and complex furniture done in 2 years. Electricity by itself would take 3-4 years of non-stop research...
Meanwhile, there is no way to heat or cool anything because campfires make a room boil (and there is no wood) and passive coolers don't work (and there is no wood). I have a giant cactus farm, but don't worry, somehow it takes 2 seasons to fully grow when it says 15 days on the card and it is 100% fert. So that doesn't help much. So there is no way to cool except to go into the mountains. Fine, except oh wait, when it is 60C outside, it is still 50C in the heart of the mountain when everything has doors...
I have half the map covered in agriculture and the heat is so intense (35-60C and never ever ever drops below that) means that I have to use every bit of spare wood for cooking and every single day is a fight to have enough food. I have to rotate out cooks because they will pass out in the kitchen.
Then I am hit with heatwave after >70C heatwave. Crippling and incapacitating all of my colonists for a week at a time until everyone is starving. Don't even think of cooking during a heatwave. Then it will get to over 80 in the room to cook one meal and the colonist will instantly go down. Not to mention the frequent heat storms during the heatwave to set everything on fire, but of course there I'd no technology like "a bucket of water" so my colonists have to let it all burn or die of heatstroke trying to pat it out lovingly with their bare hands.
2 raiders in 3 years, 0 chance to supplement my 5 colonists in any way at all. Each of those 2 raids had the people instantly killed, so no chance to recruit.
I can't hunt because my tech is so bad and my colonists are so slow that shooting an elephant once means they charge across the map and wipe out all 5 colonists in 30s
I can't raid because every single day is a fight for food for the day and the colonist tech is so bad they would get destroyed instantly.
I can't research armor because that would take years and years and I need to sink every minute in every day trying to get electricity so the next heatwave doesn't wipe me out.
Pretty much I am stuck in the most difficult fight for my colony every minute of every day and it simply isn't fun at all. Not eventful at all either. There is no story, just a slow grind of no technology and brutal, never ending heatwave conditions. This is what I assumed desert would be like, not arid shrublands...
That isn't even mentioning the weekly "mad hare"... some world that this is, 1 mad rabbit will beat 2 people, 1 with a spear and one with a revolver. What on earth. Then I am down to 3 people for at least 3 days while they recover. No way they will go down my completely open spike corridors either, they will just wait outside until I need someone to harvest agave outside of the walls where 1 single scratch takes your colonist down to 20% movement speed and it can just run them down...
/rant
Sorry, I hear people say that arid shrublands are the easiest biome, but holy hell would I disagree. If your farm isn't churning out rice within the first few days, you are simply completely dead.
I've never played arid shrublands, so the cooking problem described here got me curious. Would moving the kitchen outdoors under a roof keep a cook in cool clothing from passing out?
Echoing what others have said, I think temperate forest would be much better for a relaxed game. Lots of resources, easy weather.
Outdoors is outdoors; temperature will be the same regardless of whether there's a roof. Also, cooking outside invites crippling all of your colonists with food poisoning because the outside is inherently dirty. To avoid the problem of the campfire overheating the room, I suppose you could remove the roof of the kitchen. No roof means you can't control the temperature, but as long as you have four walls and a floored tiles, you can at least make the room clean. I've never tested that, however, because I hate playing in biomes without wood or food. And as long as you have wood, you can build passive coolers.