Would RimWorld benefit from being installed on an SSD?

[blüe]

I play with a ton of mods so load time is slow as expected, would installing the game on an SSD help at all or would it be unnoticeable?

[Astasia]

It would likely be unnoticeable, but depends somewhat on what types of mods you use. Most mods on the workshop are only a handful of megabytes in size, there is not a lot of "loading" that happens where a SSD would help, instead the vast majority of time spent waiting for the game to reach the main menu is spent on patching processes which are CPU bound.

I can tell you I've tried putting RimWorld on my SSD and did not notice any improvement, it's possible a couple seconds were saved but without a stopwatch I couldn't tell you. If you already have a SSD it probably wont hurt to try, but I wouldn't get your hopes up. If you are thinking about buying a SSD specifically to help with RimWorld, that's probably not a good idea, though you might get other use out of a SSD as it does help a lot with larger games that are many GB in size and have a lot of stuff to load.

[Overeagerdragon]

Originally posted by Astasia:

It would likely be unnoticeable, but depends somewhat on what types of mods you use. Most mods on the workshop are only a handful of megabytes in size, there is not a lot of "loading" that happens where a SSD would help, instead the vast majority of time spent waiting for the game to reach the main menu is spent on patching processes which are CPU bound.

I can tell you I've tried putting RimWorld on my SSD and did not notice any improvement, it's possible a couple seconds were saved but without a stopwatch I couldn't tell you. If you already have a SSD it probably wont hurt to try, but I wouldn't get your hopes up. If you are thinking about buying a SSD specifically to help with RimWorld, that's probably not a good idea, though you might get other use out of a SSD as it does help a lot with larger games that are many GB in size and have a lot of stuff to load.

I can subscribe to this... my biggest modpack was over 400 mods and putting rimworld on my SSD (where my steam install is too btw) made hardly any difference... funny thing is that whilst loading that pack my taskmanager will give the "program is not responding" warning every time...

[blüe]

I appreciate the replies. That's good to know that it's CPU bound. Maybe I'll look into upgrading my computer, would help with plenty of other games I've been playing as well.

[Fyredrakon]

There isn't much data for the ssd to provide faster. If you have an ssd already, it might be worthwhile to put Rimworld and mods on it if you play frequently, since it takes up very little space(probably no more than 2 gb).
Unless you intend to go out and upgrade your PC, just move Rimworld to an SSD and see if there is any improvement.

[Quenlin]

Rimworld is one of those games that benefit most from having less cores on the processor.

[Playzr 🐵]

Rimworld loads my saves really fast these days. I'm sure being on SSD helps but it might not be the bottleneck.