RIMWORLD PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION GUIDE (Rimworld 1.4 + All DLCs).

WARNING THIS LIST WAS MADE ON 11-26-2022 FOR RIMWORLD 1.4 3558 VERSION, I can’t promise that it will be maintained nor updated forever as 1, I still have to deal with real life (sadly) 2. This was made during an inspiration stroke for my love of this game, but I will probably lose it fast (messed up mind and all).


A DUMB AND LONG INTRODUCTION: (Skippable)


Buckle up you are in for a rough time of reading, sorting, rereading, downloading, deleting, crying and keep on reading for the sake of pixels moving faster, if you accept to read and follow this guide made by a Neanderthal who found a keyword, a PC, and a couple of bucks to buy an incredible game, you may or may not moist your Rimworld experience.


Hi my name is Sylon, I’m not a modder nor an expert analyzer of Rimworld performance, I’m just an internet random, which has done during the last couple of weeks an unhealthy amount of research on how to improve one my favorite games performance, as there isn’t much easily access info on this subject I decided to do my first (and probably last) guide on how to do things that worked with my neanderthalian computing skills.


First and foremost DO NOT GO AND HARRASS ANY OF THE MODDERS LISTED BELOW, they are not your workers nor slaves to please your demands, modding is already hard and unrewarding enough to deal with a bunch of entitled orc’s that think they can demand anything just because they found it on the workshop.

This Guide is not the "end all be all" of Performance about Rimworld, is just a compendium of suggestions, tweaks and recommendations I’ve read about options and mods to use and not use, that people with actual brain have tested.

I REPEAT, EVEN IF YOU SEE BELOW A MOD LISTED AS AVOIDABLE IS NOT OF MALICE NOR TO DISCREDIT ANY MODDER TITANIC JOB, not because they can’t read the matrix doesn’t mean that they job is worthless, I hope that any of the listed mods as bad performing not only gets better, but that the creators grow and keep learning to become the great coders I know they can be.

Without any more dumbass discourse let’s begin.

Credits to: Madman666 – Dubwise - Mlie – LadyPotaty – Alu – SubmarineMan – Bradson – Owlchemist – Smartkar – Paladin - Segkart - kalashnik - and many other’s that had contributed either by modding, advising, checking, asking or helping on Steam, Reddit and RocketMan – Official Server and Dubs Mods Discord (If I left anyone out of the table I will try to include your name, in the hypothetical revisions)

For your Consideration (Please read)

Disclaimer Nº1: This guide was done thinking of Windows 10/11 OS, I unfortunately don’t have experience with Linux. Also, I’ll assume you already know how to install local mods, remember that they go in C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\RimWorld\Mods

Disclaimer Nº2: First thing you need to do BACKUP YOUR SAVES AND LOG FILES they are in C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\Ludeon Studios

Disclaimer Nº3: If you have an old, big, laggy save file that you want to increase performance on seek help on the following discords:

- Rocketman - Official Server Discord: https://discord.com/invite/MmfarqPKdc

- Dubs Mods Discord: (most useful for sorting performance doubts) https://discord.com/channels/853035355090714624/858564793215221770/858565028373725195

DO NOT START MESSING WITH YOUR MOD LIST WITHOUT HELP AND GUIDANCE OF DUBS DISCORD PEOPLE

On big legacy saves you most likely will get errors and performance issues even If you take out some of the slow mods I will list below, just because they were already cached on your save.

(I will leave a curated list of mods that I know for sure are performance friendly on my mod list here

IMPORTANT It's very likely that to continue following this guide after the Step 3, you will require to create a new safe for all these improvements work on the long run. I already had to let go 3 legacy saves as I doom them to -100 TPS hell while messing with slow mods.


Disclaimer Nº4: Rimworld is a CPU intense game, even if you have a Ryzen 10 with a ZTX 10090ti, the game is single threaded and will get slower the more you bloat it. (Don’t even think on touching Rimthread, this guide will assume you don’t work with it and have no intention on using it, is volatile at best due to being incompatible with most mod, and game destructive at worst)

Slow downs will happen the bigger your colony gets, specially on the late game, after you have 20 pawns and/or 200 animals your game most definitely will have slower TPS. I will suggest things to do to improve this but most are speculative at best and certainly it wont keep you at 900+tps, what will certainly help is keeping your population under control, reduce the amount of caravans that come with some of the mods I’ll suggest (like Ask before Enter or Dismiss Trader (Continued)) and disable animation mods (like Facial Animation's, Yayo’s Animation, and Yayo’s caravan).

Disclaimer Nº5: I’m not the one that came up with this mods/solutions/tips, this are things that were suggested by multiple people on different reddit and discord threads that I had seen worked for me (mostly they were shared on Dubs Discord so If you don’t see a mod listed below go there and use the search function if you suspect something may be dooming your performance).

Most of this suggestions were discovered or made by actual smart people (not me) so If after following this guide you still have performance problems go there and get help from them as I’m just a cave man nerd whom found tips that I wished I had known before going ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with big colonies.

Disclaimer Nº6: After all this warnings I want to clarify I will not be responsible if you break your save, your game, PC or house for not reading and following this long guide in order (for real everything suggested here should be cave man safe, due to being me who tried all of this steps),

This is my first ever game guide and I’ll be as thorough as possible, most certainly I will make many edits as probably I’ll leave info on the table on a first writing. If I don’t say something you consider important let me know and will be fixed.

PART 1 - PERFORMANCE TIPS WITHOUT MODS:

1- Have Rimworld run on an SSD (preferably on an NVME), If possible, use a good CPU with good single core benchmark results (This is speculative, but anything from Intel 8th gen or Ryzen 3 should be more than enough)

2- (NVIDIA GPU ONLY) If you are running an Nvidia GPU go to the control panel, choose manage 3D settings and go to program settings, select rimworldwin64.exe, (if you can’t find it select Add, then browse, and go to your RW folder, it should be in C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\RimWorld)

• a. After you have it, go to Power Management Mode and choose “Prefer Maximum Performance”
  
• b. Look for Threaded Optimization and select “On”
  
• c. Texture filtering- Anisotropic Sample Optimization “On”
  
• d. Texture Filtering – Negative LOD bias “Allow”
  
• e. Texture Filtering – Quality “High Performance”
  
• f. Texture filtering – Trilinear optimization “On”
  
• g. “Anything related to antialiasing “OFF or 0” (FXAA – Gamma Correction – Antialiasing Mode – Antialiasing Transparency, etc)
  
• h. Limit your FPS to 60
  
• i. Click Apply and Close.
  

3- OPTIONAL: Put rimworldwin64.exe to High Priority on Task Manager – Process tab.
a. (Note: This will always change to default after closing it, making you forced to do this step everytime you open the game, If you don’t want to deal with that I would recommend using the Application “Process Lasso” https://bitsum.com/ to set it permanently on High,

To do it open the game, open Process Lasso, select the Active Process tab, right click on RimWorldWin64.exe and chose CPU Priority – Always- and Chose High. (If anyone has an alternative that is more lightweight I’ll update this part)

4- OPTIONAL: Go to your C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\RimWorld, Right click on RimWorldWin64.exe and select “Properties”
a. On the opened window go to “Compatibility”
b. Select “Disable Full Screen Optimization”
c. Click high DPI settings
d. On the opened windows tick the box on the right side of “Override high DPI scaling behavior Scaling performed by: Application”.
e. Click Ok, then apply and close that window

PART 1.2: IN-GAME VANILLA PERFORMANCE TWEAKS:

1. (Suggestion) Play on maps below 225-225, it will reduce the degradation of AI and Pathfinding

2. (Suggestion) When setting a new game leave everything as is, Don’t put more than 2 factions of the same type and don’t go over 50% on planet scale.

3. Enable “Texture Compression” on your Graphics Settings.

4. Disable “Plant Wind Sway” on your graphics option (As far as I know only applicable on RW 1.4)

5. If you are set on having more than 20 pawns on your colony, this may help you with performance:

• a. (Speculative) Disable on the work tab (F1 key) Firefight, Patient, Bed Rest for all pawns, only activate it when there is a fire, a pawn is hurt or sick.
  
• b. (Speculative) Keep the clean task check only for useless pawns that have no good skills.
  
• c. (Speculative) Set different sleep schedules on half of your colony, keep half of your fighters waken and the other half sleeping, same with cooks, crafter, etc. This may help a lot with the game having to arrange multiple paths for pawns.
  
• d. (mid and late game) Disable works that your pawn is below 6 skill to do on. At big colonies you should already have specialized set of pawns for different tasks, doing this will help the game to release calculation load on many things (and yes this does include Haul task, leave that task on only for your Cooks and crafters/artist or your fastest pawns.)
  
• e. Stay between 100 to 200 animals in your colony. Set auto slaughter number for all species in a range between 8 to 14 animals, “DO NOT DO THIS FOR BOOMRATS OR BOOMALOPES, JUST MANUALLY RELEASE THEM WHEN YOU SEE YOU HAVE A LOT”, neuter at least half of your animal species but let at least 2 females and 1 male unneutered to renew population as time goes on and repeat the cycle

6. (Suggestion) If you have Ideology set zone’s for your slaves, I usually keep them on an Underground room and set a mini dump pile zone for them to craft things i.e smoke leaf’s, force them to stay on that zone on the Vanilla Pawn menu selection.

7. (Suggestion) Try to keep as little Storage zones/Dumpile zones as possible, one of the main performance hoggers is vanilla stacking process of items. Keep them accessible and close among each other if possible, and Avoid having tons of shelfs with multiple allowed items to store on (some mods may help relieve this pressure by increasing the stack amount like Ogre Stack or XXL Stack, will discuss this on a later section)

8. (Suggestion) Maintain the Home area on check to help with pathfinding, do not let it grow to the other side of the map if you are not doing anything there, If that happens go to “Zone” section on the Architect Tab and click “Clear Home Zone” and clear everything outside your actual work zone. (On the right down edge of your screen there is an option of “Automatic expand the home area” deselect this once you have chosen which areas are you interested in stay with.

PART 2 - PERFORMANCE MODS:

(Copied from Noob Friendly Performance Mod List[docs.google.com] – made by Smartkar with the help of other smart guys)

Even If you are not planning on playing with mods USE THIS FIRST 4, they will do wonders for your late game.

1- Rocketman (ESSENTIAL).

2- Performance Optimizer (ESSENTIAL).

• a. (Optional step) With this one I recommend go to Mods section on the main menu, Search for “Performance Optimizer” Click Advanced and go to Mod Options, then on the left box enable “Hide Buttom right overlay buttons” “Hide Resource Redout”, “Minimize alerts readout”, this options will hide some UI info that I consider unnecessary and that indeed consume performance you can select more or none as you wish, HOWEVER DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING ON THE RIGHT BOX, unless you know what you are doing.

3- Performance Fish:[github.com] (ESSENTIAL) Download and install as a local mod. (Edit: If you can't get to the download page please use this download mirror[mega.nz] I uploaded or search for the mod on Dubs discord in the #Fixlist channel)

4- Dubs Performance Analyzer: (ESSENTIAL) NOTE: (In game, click the little magnifying glass that appears on the top down menu and chose all optimization’s except the last two fixes (It breaks save files for me, not dubs fault, they are intended for specific cases).

• a. Also If you are going to use Smart Speed mod made by Sarg Bjornson's disable the "Reduce stutters while panning" on Dubs Analyzer. Sarg Note: Disable that (you can have all the others enabled). Close your game and re-open (VERY IMPORTANT!). If still doesn't work deactivate Dubs mod and activate again, open dubs settings in-game and enable everything except for "reduce stutters while panning".

5- Toggleable Overlays: “A MUST HAVE, the author (and me personally) recommend go into the mod settings and chose “Hide Icon Overlays” for: Power – Fuel – Forbidden Buildings and Blueprints. Also “Hide Pawn Names”: Player Pawns (I don’t use it but enable it if you have a ton of pawns) Hostile – Friendlies and Neutrals

• a. I would suggest enable quick show and Enable quick show toggle mode, so you can press “right ctrl key of your keyboard” when you need to see the hidden overlays of many items, remember to press it again so you get the benefits of the mod.

6- Toggleable Readouts: read the author description to make the most of it.

7- (OPTIONAL BUT RECOMMENDED FOR SORTING YOUR MOD LIST) Download and Install Rin Py Mod Manager[github.com] at GitHub and subscribe to the Rinpy mod manager Database If you are having any difficulties with this program follow this tutorials made by Dr_Zhivago

The following mods are non-essential performance mods that may or may not help your game:

(Disclaimer: Currently I don’t use AllYourBase nor LagFreeLamps: The first one I don’t have use for it right now, and the second one is missing from the workshop at the time of writing this guide (11-26-2022) I think Tweaks Galore mod has an option for this that I’ll explain below)


• AllYourBase:[github.com] Detects misusage and overwrites of vanilla bases: Can spot mods that override vanilla defs and will spew warnings, allowing to prevent mod conflicts

• Single Plant Texture Patch (Continued)

• (Optional)Lag Free Lamps Revamped (Use Neronix17 Tweaks Galore:
In game chose “Mods tab” on the main screen, then Search for Tweaks Galore, chose Advanced, and then mod options. In it’s general section, scroll down until you find Lag Free Lamps. Click on it and make sure is green.

o I will suggest you to take the time to explore this mod as it has tons of options that may help you reduce the size of your mod list by replacing mods that do the same function such as:

• Faster Smoothing
  
• Full Deconstruct Return
  
• Infestation Blocking Floors
  
• Insulting spree nerf
  
• Impassable Deep Water
  
• Prisoners Don’t Have Keys
  
• Skill Rates Adjustment (may or may not make Madskills innecesary, you do as you wish with it)
  
• (Optional) Go to mechanoids section on the top right corner box and select Disable Adapting
  
• Go to the Resource section and select Metal Doesn’t Burn and Stronger Steel.
  
• Go to Anima setting and enable Anima Tewaks and Replantable Anima
  
• Go to Ideology setting and select Ancient Deconstruction – Give Proper Materials – Proper Suppresion – No meme limit (optional)
  
• Go to Guaranlen section and Enable Guranleen Tweaks – Replantable Gauranleen.

Tweaks Galore as far as I know, is a performance friendly compendium of small mods function so you can (AND MUST) disable some of those mods and relieve load from your mod list (For me those mods were Faster Smoothing, Metal Doesn’t Burn, Prisoners don’t have keys and Mad Skills, but also there are mods for replantable Guaranleen and Anima trees mods that can be disable with the options above active.)

• Optimization: Leathers - C# Edition: “Splits leathers into categories, not much impact base game, but very noticable with a lot of different animal mods”

• Optimization: Meats - C# Edition: “Same as above, but with meat”

• Block Unwanted Minutiae: “Allows you to control what alerts you want to see, as well as fixing caravan lag”


• Psychic Harmonizer Lag Fix: “Outdated for 1.4, the author is checking if it’s still necessary at the time of writing this guide “11-26-2022”

PART 3 - REDUCE LOAD TIMES AND IMPROVE LOAD ORDER

IMPORTANT NOTE:

At the time of writing this guide Rocketman got an update and the Load Time Improvements are a main function of the mod,

If you want to try them out, go to the Rocketman Settings on an ongoing save file and go to the second option on the left panel, activate the “Enable Load Time reduction” on the Settings menu and also “Enable texture Caching” make sure they are green, restart your game a few times and should be good to go – Thanks to the Rocketman team for saving our late games :3

For Rin Py Mod Manager discussed on the previous section please make sure you are subscribed to the RimPy Mod Manager Database: AND LEAVE IT UN-ACTIVE, I repeat, DO NOT PUT IT ON YOUR ACTIVE MOD LIST just leave it as it is.

• Using the Sort button is a good way to ensure that most of your downloaded mods will work nice with each other, however for me the sort button puts Dubs Performance Analyzer, Performance Optimizer on other spots that may be not the best. I manually do the following:

• Move Performance Optimizer above Rocketman (it should be the latest part to load of your list)
  
• Move Dubs Performance Optimizer above Performance Optimizer and Rocketman (This three mods I had read should load last on the mod list, however I haven’t noticed issues when Rinpy autosort them)

If you have never used the “Optimize Texture” function on Rinpy Mod Manager you can skip to the Part 4

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(ALTERNATIVE METHOD (DO NOT USE IF YOU DID THE PREVIOUS STEP), Also DO NOT APPLY “Enable texture Caching” OF THE FIRST METHOD IF YOU WANT TO TRY THIS)

- To reduce load times please follow this guide made by Kalashnik , I had applied it and works for RW 1.4, However I have some Important notes on this:

• (IMPORTANT) DO NOT FOLLOW THE OPTIONAL STEP 3 ON KALASHNIK GUIDE

If you read Kashnik guide you will see that is AN OPTIONAL STEP on his guide and he is clear on stating that it may be best not to do it, specially with steam mods. , no matter how hard your cave man brain is screaming you to do it, THE “STRIP MOD” IS AN UNNECESARY FEATURE, it also could break your Steam mods forcing you to unsubscribe and resubscribe to all of them (I say this because it happened to me, it blocked all the workshop downloads for Rimworld and revalidating the game didn’t helped, IF YOU WANT TO MESS WITH THIS OPTION BACKUP THE STEAM MODS FOLDER (located in C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\workshop\content\294100)

• After having the Rinpy Mod Manager, Download the RimPy Mod Manager Database: AND LEAVE IT UN-ACTIVE, I repeat, DO NOT PUT IT ON YOUR ACTIVE MOD LIST just leave it as it is.

• Download and keep Graphics Settings+ below HugsLib on your mod list.

• Using the Sort button is a good way to ensure that most of your downloaded mods will work nice with each other, however for me the sort button puts Graphics Settings+, Dubs Performance Analyzer, Performance Optimizer on other spots that may be not the best. I manually do the following:

• o Move Graphics Settings+ below “HugsLibs” mod
  
• o Move Dubs Performance Optimizer above Performance Optimizer and Rocketman (This three mods I had read should load last on the mod list, Rocketman been the last to load always, however I haven’t noticed issues when Rinpy autosort them)

• (IMPORTANT) Always repeat the step 4 of Kalashnik guide everytime you add a mod or a mod gets updated, NOTE: to avoid having to wait for all mods to be converted keep selected the option “Convert New Textures Only” before applying the process.

PART 4- MODS SUGGESTIONS

If you have followed until here congratulations! Your Vanilla game should work as God intended, you may stop reading my ramblings and go play

HOWEVER, If you are planning on playing with mods, keep reading so you don’t make a mess with your game

Pay attention as this part, is the make or break if you are planning on playing with mods:

(REMEMBER TO BACK UP YOUR SAVE AND CHECK WITH DUBS DISCORD BEFORE TAKING OUT MODS FROM YOUR ONGOING SAVE (EVEN IF THEY ARE LISTED AS BAD”)

FIRST WE HAVE THE MODS TO AVOID AT ALL COST:

READ THROUGHLY the analysis of people that actually know what they are talking about, to check which mods will damage your performance:

• Smartkar “Noob Friendly Performance Mod List”: Noob Friendly Performance Mod List[docs.google.com]

• Go to the “Nasty Mods” Sheet (you can see it on the botton left corner), Everything on BLACK or RED MUST BE TAKEN OUT, anything on orange or yellow take your time to read carefully at Smartkar analysis and evaluate if is worth for you to take out.

• Another really important list to check made by Madman666 along with Netrve and Exspes (and probably other contributors I dunno) is this list of Slow Mods [docs.google.com]

• After reading the instructions, go to the “Slow Mods” Sheet (you can see it on the botton left corner) anything at Grade 2 or Above just take it out from your active mod list. The ones in Grade 1 take your time to check if it’s worth it to you to keep out or not.

Secondly some suggestions that the above list may not have been explicit with:

1- BY THE LOVE OF GOD DON’T GO HOARDING MODS (We have all being there, I had done it too, but losing 3 long ass saves were enough to make me recapacitate)

2- Try to keep a mod list of between 100 to 200 mods tops, (some people have said to have 400+ mods without issues, which I respect and envy, but on my case with 178 mods active (some bad for performance, we will talk about it later) my game sustains a 250+TPS on a 250x250 map with 44 pawns 7 megasloths 10 cows, 60 mechs and Thunderstorms

(NOTE: That is a test save I made to recreate a worst case scenario on a 100% size planet, Crowed at maximum, 3 factions of all types and with the highest temperature just to test my tweaks limits, I’m currently creating more benchmark saves for personal use to emulate a late game colony and see what else can I do to improve the performance))

3- Keep in mind EVERY SINGLE MOD OUT THERE WILL HAVE SOME KIND OF IMPACT ON THE GAME, BUT most of them will have a very low impact, HOWEVER there are some categories of mods that will certainly screw the game performance which are:

• a. UI MODS (Most of them will be heavy and laggy but only when they are opened, in example “Numbers”, “Worktab”, “Medical Tab”, etc, when closed they should not screw with your game so is recommended that you use this mods on pause or at 1x speed.
  
  
• b.Pathfinding Mods: In example, Perfect Pathfinding will most likely screw with this already badly made part on the vanilla game so avoid said mods if possible.
  
  
• c. Mods that alter the Pawns Behaviour, In example Psychology, this mods may put more load on the already complex pawn behaviour which will lead to serious decreases on TPS.
  
  
• d. Mods that add Animations or clutter to the game: In Example, Fog of War, facial animation, Yayos animation, Interactive Bubbles etc, all of this are really heavy specially if you have a lot of pawns, I will provide a couple of tweaks below that may help with this but is impossible at least for now to make this kind of mods hundred percent performance friendly, so if you want a really big colony of 20+ pawns + animals + mechs you will have to make sacrifices.
  
  
• e. Mods that add animals, races, foods, etc: Just steer clear of them if you can, they will bloat the already fragile engine of Rimworld and will make your late game a slide show.
  
  
• f. Mods listed below: The mods that I will mention below belong on some of the categories above that the lists I shared with you may not cover due to lack of testing, I will just give my non in depth analysis on some of the following

PART 5: MY PERSONAL LIST OF MODS THAT YOU SHOULD AVOID.

DISCLAIMER: I’ll try to avoid mods mentioned on the above lists

I’m no modder nor an expert analyzer so at least on this first version of the Guide I won’t provide Dubs Analyzer captures

This are just mods that I personally noticed caused some slow downs, or for me were ticking as demanding in Dubs Performance Analyzer- Harmony Patches.

Also I’m taking into account some mods that weren’t listed on the above lists, but were discussed on the Dubs Discord and didn’t have positive appreciations regarding performance/stability:

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1- PLA Steel Torrent: : Full disclosure, I personally like and use this mod, However for starters Yayo animation do affect this mod models as they seem to behave like animals or mechs, also I noticed it will certainly cause issues with Vanilla Expanded Chemfuel if you put Chem-pipes below your parked vehicles. (I believe that same thing happened with Rimefeller but I may be wrong). Also, it may damage performance (specially on the late game raids) when many of this vehicles are Recruited and on the attack, I would suggest you not to use it or reduce the amount of vehicles to less than 10.

2- Doors Expanded: Even without a single door of this in your map it will cause random hickups on your performance, stay away until further notice.

3- Vanilla Furniture Expanded – Architect: High ms on Harmony Patches according to my Dubs Analyzer, I speculate that the more items you use from this mod the bigger it’s impact, I noticed on an ongoing save that by disabling it the TPS increased somewhat, however I don’t have that data anymore and that save file got corrupted due to me moving mods on and off, If someone asks and I find the time and energy, I may try to do tests in the future.

4- SRTS-Helicopters: May or may not be causing problems for me, If you load one of the helis, but don’t deploy it, the animation may cause slowdowns, on RW 1.3 it happened to me that when trying to move a lot of pawns and items on one helicopter for moving out of a colony, it never finished the launch sequence and I had to load a previous safe, If you want to use it try not to have more than 3 helicopters as it may be intensive on video memory.

Either way I would recommend you to just use SRTS-Expanded as it’s already going to do most of this mod stuff anyway.

5- Subsurface Conduit: I may be wrong but I noticed more TPS with normal conduits in the same position I put this ones, use it at your own risk or use Invisible conduits.

6- Rimfridge (old and Updated) serious performance impact, use Simple Utilities Fridge instead

7-Replace Stuff It will seriously cause performance hiccups even when not active, take it out of your load order when there is no pending replace jobs.

8-Architect Icons: I liked it but it was reported on Dubs discord to be not recommended.

9-Blueprints: I personally rarely used it, If you have a ton saved I would understand leaving it but it was reported on Dubs discord that may cause serious issues.

10-Everybody Gets one: Seems to be terrible for performance and get’s worse the more pawns you have

11- Friendly Fire Tweaks and Avoid Friendly Fire: the latter is terrible for performance on combat, and the first one seems to alter the same values so it’s best to just avoid them and put your shooting colonies close and give your melee shield belts instead.

12- Interception Tweaks Steam Workshop: may or may not be putting more unnecessary calculations during combat, I would have to test this one on my own with bigger battles further, but it’s probably best to not to use it.

13- Map Preview:

Performance Friendly with its latest updates according to
@m00nl1ght on june 28th 2024

14- Faction Control 1.4: Unless you truly know what you want of this mod, It may be best to avoid it, some people reported to have serious problems when loading world map due to weird faction behavior after using it.

15- Medical Tab, Work Tab, and Colony Manager: As most UI mods this ones can cause lag even after closing it, it may be best to use Numbers with a couple of tweaks instead, use them at your own risk.

16- Any Pathfinding mod: Just avoid them, Owlchemist’s seems to be working on a big update for Clean Pathfinding that may be performance friendly but until is ready avoid anything that messes with this part of the game.

17- Time Control: Never tried it, but it seems to be horrific for performance.

18- Speak Up: I love the concept of this mod but for the time being it’s probably best to not use it if you have a lot of pawns.

19- While You're Up / PUAH+: PUAH is fine by itself, however this particular mod has been reported to be terrible for pathfinding .

UPDATE Dec-2023: Tested it a while and seems to be actually good for performance

Lastly a quick mention on a recent list of heavy mods shared by Madman666 on Dubs discord between 27-08-2022 and 11-15-2022

• Biomes! Islands (horrible)

  Reported to be performance friendly on 12-22-2023 - (Thanks @joseasoler)

• JecsTools (horrible)
  
• Immortals (heavy)
  
• Seamless Embrasures (scales with the amount on screen)
  
• Smart Medicine (horrible)
  
• Where is my weapon? (heavy, scales with pawns)
  
• Dual Wield (heavy)
  
• Facial Animation (heavy)
  
• Yayo animations (heavy)
  
• Stockpile Ranking - bunch of slow transpilers and patches, always active, listed

--Continue on the next section--

PART 5.1 MODS THAT YOU SHOULD TWEAK AND/OR BE CAUTIOUS

• Prison Labor - got better, but still slow, according to Alu no longer should outright murder your game, but still prone to other bugs and incompatibilities. Listed. Consider making use of Ideology slavery system instead.
  
• Kanban Stockpile - safe performance wise, however in my testing pawns ignored the stockpile similar stack limits completely on LWM shelves and thats the only reason i imagine people would want to use it.
  
• Variety Matters Stockpile - nice features, but in my testing crashed the game twice. Noticeably heavier than Kanban Stockpile. Not sure about it yet, as i cant really test it properly when rimworld ♥♥♥♥♥ itself with it for no apparent reason.

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PART 5.1 MODS THAT YOU SHOULD TWEAK AND/OR BE CAUTIOUS:

The following mods should not be heavy on performance however some of this require considerations that you should be warned off.

1- Edb Prepare Carefully: As of 11-26-2022 it’s outdated for RW 1.4, Also some people have reported to have given bugs, either way, Character Editor seems to be a better alternative

2- Numbers: This one is an essential for many, myself included, but can harm performance when is open, so I would recommend you to use it only when you are on pause or 1x speed.

3- Mortar Accuracy: Not bad for performance as far as I read, but vanilla behavior may have made this obsolete as the accuracy scales with shooting skill, use it if you want to tweak the mortar aspect of your game further.

4- Q’s Biotech Patches: Not a bad mod, but it seems to be integrated in vanilla biotech after the latest update.

5- Vanilla Social Interaction Expanded: On my harmony patches usually is on a high spot, I wouldn’t say is tanking on performance but unless you truly want what this mod offers I would skip it.

6- Carry Capacity Fixed (Continued): Not necessarily bad, but Bulk Carrier seems to be a more customizable alternative.

7- Meal on Wheels: as of RW 1.3 it seems to be unnecessary as it may be doing vanilla behavior.

8- Interaction Bubbles: Some say is laggy some say is not a big deal, I personally like it but it may be best to disable it if you have a lot of pawns.

9- Fluffy Breakdowns: It has been reported to cause lag when the maintenance work is in progress, to alleviate this (this is speculative and may make the game easier) increase the Based Component Lifetime to 600%+ and set the Powered off buildings maintenance degradation factor (0%), lastly put Maintenance threshold to (50%) or above.


10- Music Expanded Core - Music Expanded Framework - P-Music: As far as I know they should be okay, I personally use Music Expanded Core and Framework, however some Dubs people had described the Vanilla music system as "not greatly" done. So use them at your own risk, I’ve been playing with them during the last couple of days and haven’t caused any issue or slow down that I notice. (a Madman666 suggestion is to use your MP3 player and mute the game so probably that's a better alternative lol)

11- Categorized Bill Dropdown: It's okey performance wise, I personally like it but I would recommend you use Dubs Mint Bill instead and save space on your mod list.

12- Mods that alter the Pawn Bar
CM Color Coded Mood Bar [1.1+]: Allegedly this one works best on small colonies.
[LTO] Colony Groups: Allegedly this one works best for colonies with a lot of pawns(Tweak it’s settings as it has good customization and a performance option.

• a. Both to me tickle in Harmony Patches on Dubs Analyzer as heavy using, but I didn’t notice any real performance hiccup

UPDATE: Both are performance friendly, I use Owl Colonist Bar (it's not fully ready tho)

13- Mechanoid Hibernation: it should be okey and what I’m going to say is purely speculation, but I would rather avoid conflicts with “Mechanoid Idle Optimization” or “More Mechanoids Work Modes” which improve the performance of Biotech Mechanoids, I’d recommend the last one as it provides performance and customizability ((If someone confirms this mod is compatible with the other two then I will delete this entry))

14- Common Sense: Is good but DON’T ACTIVATE MANY OPTIONS, Take your time to read and disable as many options as you can from this mod, specially the pathfinding ones.

15- Quality Colors: harmless with Toggleable Overlays but if you aren’t using it be careful as may cause lag spikes.


16- Integrated Genes: may or may not be necessary after the latest biotech update. I personally stopped using it as I didn’t have much use for it. Depends on you.

17- Loading in progress: Not bad, but unless you are constantly using cargo pods or caravans you can spare it from your modlist this one.

18- Modular Weapon: one day (maybe after the latest update) it started to throw errors randomly, it may have been my fault but I don’t use custom weapon mods so who knows, may had been problems after the latest update, whatever it is, this mod is good but be careful with the game updates.
19-Quality Builder: After the latest update it gave me random log issues, maybe is fixed but after having a couple of builders on skill 10 I find it unnecessary, If you want to use it you shouldn’t have problems.

--Continue on the next Section--

PART 5.1 - CONTINUED

20- Fortifications – Industrial and Citadel: some people on the dubs discord reported bugs and somewhat problems with it. For me I only noticed that one of its production benches didn’t work for me (the one that makes chemful from organics), may have been my fault, I would recommend you not using it as it brings a lot of things that may bloat your save but it should be safe overall.

21- Ready those guns: Should be safe but I would prefer not using mods that give more instruction to pawns.

22- Deconstruct First - Butcher First - Smooth first: same as Ready those guns, should be safe but probably will give more work to the code to process. I personally didn’t feel any lag with them but after the early game are quite unnecessary so may be safe to remove then and spare your mod list that load.

23- Relevant UI in Description: Probably okey performance wise, I didn’t feel any problem while using it however as any UI mod is best to don’t mess with them.

24- Spread the Word: Not noticed any problem other that the Convert option on prisoners is fully replaced by Convert and release however, I would just leave it off just in case it conflicts with other faction mods.

25- More Faction Interacions: Use with Ask Before Enter and make sure that it’s loaded below dynamic diplomacy (If you are planning on using it). Also follow some of the author suggestions: “My recommendations for people who play with MFI + DD or faction mods would be to increase the "Time modifier for faction interaction" slider in the MFI mod settings menu from 1 to 3 and to disable the "Allow Alliance" and "Allow permanent enemy factions to change relationships" options for DD. ”

26- RimHUD: Go to it’s settings (it’s the little gear on the bottom right corner on the pawn description box) and increase it’s time from 500ms to 3000ms

27- OgreStack: Go to settings and add another 0 to all stacks, or whatever number you fill comfortable with, probably not the cleanest way to do it but will reduce the amount of stacks scattered around your base which may help your late game performance.

28- Reinforced Walls+: Avoid the ones that create a Force Field Shield, there is a fork that does that already here Reinforced Walls, I did some tests, and with a big ass 4x4 wall that covered all the edge of my map they tanked my TPS like crazy, probably my fault, I replace those with the normal Reinforced ones and didn't caused any slow down.

29- Utility Columns: Avoid the Cluster Bomb one and you shouldn’t have any issue regarding performance.

30- Simple FX: Splashes: May or may not help a little with the Rain performance, it’s impossible to fix that as the rain changes many values at the same time in game, but I didn’t notice bad behavior on my game after installing it, so I’ll leave it up to you.

(OPTIONAL) MODS TO IMPROVE VISUALS BUT WILL CAUSE LAG:

The following mods ARE COMPLETELY OPTIONAL AND WILL CERTAINLY HAVE A NOTICEABLE PERFORMANCE IMPACT

It’s not a secret nor something to be discovered,

THE FOLLWOING ARE GRAPHICS MODS

any mod that modifies the graphics will have significant performance impact however the first 3 listed made by Owlchemist are well optimized and shouldn’t destroy your performance.

I will be going from lightest to heaviest and leave some speculative tips for some mods that may or may not help with their impact but I will repeat a last time

THIS STEP IS COMPLETELY OPTIONAL AND ISN’T INTENDED TO HELP YOUR PERFORMANCE

on the contrary this will cause impact and will scale the more pawns you have with the latest ones.

---------------------------------Light Graphics mods:--------------------------------

• Simple FX Vapor: Actually has little to none impact but use it at your own consideration.

• Scattered Flames: Along with the Smoke FX can cause lag with big wildfires, however it may improve your TPS during fires if you disable some options on it’s settings.

• Simple FX: Smoke This one will add smoke effect to certain items of the game, it has improved a lot on it’s performance impact, but if you have many objects that activates this FX, like with fluffy breakdowns being below 50% maintenance it will certainly reduce TPS.

-----------------------------Heavier Graphics mods:--------------------------------

NOTE: Animations will certainly reduce your TPS and FPS the more pawns you have, I will leave some recommendations that MAY help on performance but further testing it’s required. Either way If you plan on having a big ass colony disabling this Mods outright are your best bet for stable performance.


• Yayo’s Caravan (Continued): There isn’t much to optimize here, use it or ditch it, it will only be
shown on World Map but I can’t guarantee isn’t lagging something while doing nothing.

• o Disable Swing Animation
  
• o Disable Show animal
  
• o Limit the Max Pawn Count to 3 or 4

• Yayo’s animation (Continued) : Go to it’s mod settings and do the following changes:

• o Enable Only Player Pawn Animations
  
• o Disable Humanoid Alien Races patch in case you are not using HAR.
  
• o Set the visible range to near or lowest
  
• o Disble the “Apply Drawing changes from Oversized Weapons”, only if you are not using the Oversized weapons mods.
  
• o Update frequency (in ticks) set it to 10
  
• o Walking animations turn it off if you have a lot of pawns.
  
• o Combat animation disable it if you are having a to deal with huge raids constantly.
  
• o Weapon twirling disable it
  
• o Sleeping animations disable them
  
• o Mechanoid walking animations disable them (maybe the work animations too)
  
• o Animals walking and work animations set it to disable if you have a ton of animals.

• [NL] Facial Animation – WIP Steam Workshop: this one is seriously heavy, If you have a lot of pawns consider ditching it outright, Go to it’s mod settings and do the following:

• o Disable the Force No Cache option (May cause issues, to me hasn’t caused any but beware)
  
• o Disable Facial Animation for Non Colonits.
  
• o Disable Facial Animation in Portraits OR set the Update interval to 20+ ticks.

• Vanilla Textures Expanded - [NL] Facial Animation: This one is my personal preference and is dependant on the previous mod, It seems to consume a hell lot of virtual memory, probably is just inevitable with Facial Animation Overlays. Hopefully the optimizations done above will help however if you want an alternative use:

• o Faces of the Rim - Facial Animation: MAY be a more light alternative, but I don’t know for sure, didn’t do comparisons properly before switching to VTE Facial Animations (due to personal preference) because like I stated at the beginning, I’m a neanderthal with a keyword

FINAL NOTES, (Yes, finally you are free!!)

After all the suffering you have gone through to arrive here I first want to thank you and I hope you enjoy your new TPSs.

I CERTAINLY DIDN'T COVER EVERYTHING THERE IS OUT THERE REGARDING RIMWORLD PERFORMANCE, And more than likely I had made a mistake in some part,

Please refer to the Dubs Mod Discord listed on the "For your Consideration" part of this guide If you have questions regarding a Specific Mod performance impact, that people is very smart and they usually don't bite

I probably won’t do many updates on this list as I lose passion for things really fast, If anyone want’s to pick this guide up for the future generations go ahead just credit the proper modders/analyzers/regular random that may contribute to improve it.

Also If nothing on this list worked for you, I’m really sorry that I disappointed you, please refer to Dubs Mods Discord, they will probably know what to do to help you out.

Finally thanks for reading and hope you have a wonderful time on the Rim 😊

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PS: I intend to post pictures on the near future regarding comparisons of the effectiveness of this suggestions on save files that emulate worst case scenarios late game behavior. But for now please accept a picture of Randy's love to all of us

[dysaster]

"There are some categories of mods that will certainly screw the game performance which are:

Mods that add animals, races, foods, etc: Just steer clear of them if you can, they will bloat the already fragile engine of Rimworld and will make your late game a slide show."

well fck literally my favorite type of mods, 70% of my 190-sized modlist is made out of this

[blyad]

RimWorld is not CPU intesive game. In fact it doesn't use you CPU at all. Only your 1st thread will be affected due to how the game was written. This is the sole reason why the game runs like shit even on vanilla playthrough.

[rutiriik]

was having unplayable framerate midgame due to errors in the DrawManager downloaded all of the performance mods and it completely solved it thanks

[the grim queefer]

Getting 20~ fps (250-360 tps) on my 3070 i7 8700 with less than 10 pawns, less than 50 mods and none of them seem to be problematic, is this normal?

[Fimmy]

"Rimworld is a CPU heavy game" yes - it is - you then proceed to recommend disabling a bunch of solely GPU bound features lol. huh?

[CodedArms]

Is still good, but definitely get more ram, struggling my but off, barely able to play 2x speed with this added on 16gb, went to 48GB and day and night differnece, 3x speed and i think at full tik speed(i9-10700k)

[Sylon]

@ACity1x23 my pleasure, this mod comes at the right time as I'm digging Rimworld again quite a lot, can't promise that I will fully update the guide as so many things have changed and I have little spare time, but I'm glad most of the tips still work. Will have to do it as soon as I can!

[ACity1x23]

@Sylon, thank you dude! Good info and thank you for putting together this guide!

[Sylon]

@ACity1x23 played for a couple of hours with the "FPS Stabilizer" mod, can confirm 2 things.

1- TPS were slower on a colony with 10 pawns and more than 50 animals went from around 400 to 500 to 300

2- BUT the perceived smoothness of the game is actually great, I personally will keep using it as I feel the game more responsive and less jancky with it but as TPS are lower the real performance for the game doesn't improve tho, just makes it all feel better, overall conbined with the performance mods and latest versions of Performance Fish should be a good combo, but won't add it to the list just yet as I don't feel confident saying it's actually a performance boost mod

[Sylon]

@cauamachado51 ngl, that's speculative as some other games may improve performance in my experience, although on a LTT video saw that instead of "Aplication" the "System Enhanced" would be better to be disabled, in either case, could be just placebo, so sorry for not been able to give more details.