load times with vanilla expanded

[belowalo]

I have all the mods from vanilla expanded so 30 ish mods i think in total give or take.

I have an SSD 16 gbs of ram at 3600 mghz a 4060 so i dont understand why it takes upwards of 5-10 minutes to load the game is there any way to improve this in 2025?

[Amroth]

There are two cardinal rules about Rimworld modding:

- Accept that load times will increase with bigger mods. Absolutely no way around this.

- The only thing that somewhat improves load times is optimizing textures using Rimpy mod manager. It makes quite an impact, and is about the ONLY way to shorten loading times aside from getting rid of biggest impacting mods.

Also use the mod Startup Impact to see which mods contribute the most to your loading times. Stuff like Combat Extended and Medieval Overhaul add quite a few seconds.

Don't expect loading times to ever be lower than 1-2 minutes at least using mods.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

Some mods have a lot of impact on startup times, many such mods exist in the VE collection.

[Astasia]

If you are only using VE mods and nothing else on your list, disable VE Genetics (the animal one) and I would guess that would drop several minutes off your startup time. On its own that mod is fine, but when you combine it with a bunch of other animal mods it has an exponential effect on startup time. A number of the other VE mods add a bunch of animals, like well the various VE Animals mods, but also Insectoids 2. The VE Factions mods in general also do have some impact on load times, just because they are relatively meaty mods. I'd suggest not enabling ones you aren't intending to engage with in a specific run.

Also your CPU matters a lot for load times, your SSD and GPU have no real impact in this game, RAM speed probably also doesn't matter much, 16gb of RAM might not be enough depending on your mods, but mainly the game uses your CPU to do all the patching work which is the vast majority of time spent loading the game.

[Stim The One]

Even the VE guys say you shouldn't use all of them at once (and I still do) and one just accepts that so many mods means that there will be slowdown. I need to wait half an hour just for the game to START. The bigger achievement is that it runs.