You can find multiple unorthodox things in Rimworld, and things have gotten many strangers with the addition of the Anomaly DLC. The DLC brings a lot of strange, supernatural effects to the game, including Harbinger trees.
These are a unique type of tree you can find as you make your way through the Anomaly DLC. Although it may not immediately bother you, these can become a useful tool that you can utilize to assist your Rimworld colony. The way you use it, though, is not entirely clear. We can help make things more apparent to you and highlight the usefulness of Harbinger trees.
How to use Harbinger Trees in Rimworld
The traditional way you utilize a Harbinger Tree is to feed it corpses and have the tree hang onto them. However, the second method is to have a colonist from your Rimworld game cut it down, which gives you a small amount of twisted meat and wood. The twisted meat is not the best thing to feed your colonists, and we’d recommend against treating Harbinger Trees as a food source, although the wood is completely fine. You mostly want to take advantage of the fact that it can hold down corpses, especially when playing in the Anomaly DLC.
You can do this by highlighting any Harbinger Tree on your map and then selecting to make a corpse dumping ground. Now, whenever your colonists need to remove a corpse or dead body they encounter in Rimworld, they take them to the Harbinger Trees rather than making a grave.
You can continue feeding the Harbinger Tree corpses and rely on this method rather than digging graves. However, the true reward for keeping a Harbinger Tree near your colony is during the Deathpall event, an Anomaly event in Rimworld that can easily overwhelm you if you’re not ready for it.
The Deathpall event essentially has it so any non-mechanoid corpse near your colony will return to the world as a Shambler. The Shambler is a living corpse, similar to a Ghoul, that feels no pain and attempts to attack anything nearby, hunting any of your living colonists. Although Shamblers go away after a few days, they can be difficult to handle in Rimworld, especially if you’re not expecting to fight off a horde of them after they rise from their graves.
The Harbinger Tree is the best way to prevent the Deathpall event from bringing your colony into chaos. You want to bring any corpse you have in your colony to it and ensure they don’t become an issue. Even if a Harbinger Tree has not fully digested a corpse, a Shambler does spawn, but the Harbinger Tree attempts to hold the now living corpse for a bit of time, giving your Rimworld colony time to prepare to deal with the relentlessly hungry Shambler.
