Load Times

[Boss]

Has Tynan said if he's going to address this at some point? I understand mods add to load times, but Skyrim (even the 32 bit version) and games like Starsector, which tend to have much larger and more mods, load SIGNIFICANTLY faster. While having higher textures. Same thing with Barotrauma. It feels like Rimworld has some sort of problem.

[Robo]

Instead of other games that normally load using the hard drive, RimWorld in this case uses the CPU to compile. It's something that had been in use ever since the game was first developed, and I think a complete rewrite would be needed to make the game use the hard drive rather exclusively than the CPU to load. This is why SATA SSDs or NVMEs do not decrease load times.

Correct me if I'm wrong in any of this, though I'm pretty sure that RimWorld does use the CPU to load.

[MadArtillery]

Does the game have long load times? Never noticed anything taking long at all with this game though my mod list is a lot smaller then most.

[Steelfleece]

Yes. The majority of the load time is the game compiling your mods list into the core to make a playable program from it. If you want a shorter load, the options are pretty much trim the bloat from your mods (difficult, I know), upgrading to a CPU with better performance, especially performance per core, or a miracle.

[Duke Flapjack]

A SSD helps a lot too. My 470-mod list loads at only about 10-15ish minutes after I installed the game on an SSD.

[Astasia]

RimWorld doesn't have long load times unless you are using too many mods and running out of memory, or you are using a bad combination of mods that create basically recursive patching loops. These are both mod/player created issues and not something the devs can really improve. If you tried to do something similar with other games they would just crash, so I suppose that would be one way to "fix" it.

My usual mod lists are in the 150-250 range and it only takes 2-3 minutes to load. Not using my SSD (they really don't do anything in RimWorld's case since there's such a trivial amount of stuff on drive), and with a crappy old Ryzen 7 1700. If your load times are above 5 minutes it's likely your mod list is screwy and you could improve it be removing a few bad mods.

There was an update for the game around 1.1 that focused on improving mod load times almost entirely. We probably aren't going to see another such update, I think they were satisfied with load times after that point.