To say that Rimworld is a good game is a bit of an understatement, especially since it to the second spot on my best simulation games article, so I really do think itās great. That being said, vanilla (that means unmodded) Rimworld can be a bit of a pain sometimes, and adding some mods can make your playtime not only better but much more enjoyable.
Now, I do want to put a disclaimer that Rimworld really is a survival game and itās meant to be difficult, so which mods you chose to add depend wholly on how difficult or easy you want to make it on yourself. For the most part, Iāve done my best to include mods that arenāt game-breaking, and are more geared towards taking away micro-management, make sense or just lower the insanely high RNG.
#1 EdB Prepare Carefully
Probably the top and the most recommended mod is EdBās Prepare carefully, which allows you to choose your starting pawns. If youāve played Rimworld more than once, you know how frustrating it is to have to randomize your choices until you find something you like, so having a mod that allows you to pick and edit things the way you want is great.
Not only that, but a big part of replayability is creating your own āstoryā where youād like specific types of pawns, or maybe you even want to insert your friends in it and see which one of you is the best survivor. Just to give you an idea, you can choose names, traits, starting equipment, how pawns look even allowing you to pick starting resources and pets.
#2 Hospitality
Playing Rimworld long enough makes you realize how empty and rather lonely an outer rim planet can be. Outside of your own colonists, there isnāt much human life outside of the traders that pass by from time to time for trades . . . and of course, the hostile āvisitorsā who arenāt as nice. So, what if you could do something about that?
Well, Orionās hospitality mod allows building guest rooms and even beds so that these visitors can take a load off and just chillax for a bit. The great part is that through the mod, you could actually convince some of these visitors to stay and add to your colony. If youāre not so interested in adding to your crew, taking care of these caravans could potentially lead to a better reputation with factions, which actually is super useful.
#3 Glitter Tech
This one is not so much about making your life easier, as it is about adding a bunch of cool stuff. Building off some mentions in-game, the Glitter Tech mod adds a bunch of advanced gear for you to use from high-end bionic limbs, weapons and armor, and even things like mortars and blast doors. Most importantly, it adds a wall light, which is great if youāre tired of all those floor-sitting lights that are a pain to get around.
Of course, all this great stuff comes at a price, and there are certain corporations out there who might come after you later on. As such, this mod also enhances end-game content as the vanilla game begins to drone on at that point. That being said, donāt be complacent, those corporations come with lots of their own high-end gear, so you better be prepared.
#4 Realistic Rooms
As well know, colonists can be incredibly and ridiculously demanding, whether they need clothes while preferring to be nude or just generally ignore things that are good for them.
One thing that certainly is annoying is the room size requirements they sometimes have, and this mod helps fix that issue by making those requirements a little bit more pleasurable. No longer will you required to build sprawling mansions but instead can focus on making your own little cottage village.
#5 Dubs Bad Hygiene
For a survival game that tries to make itself as realistic as possible, thereās one thing which is suspiciously missing from the vanilla game . . . toilets. Ok, ok, I know that this may sound insane, but if you really want a true survival and in-the-wild experience, having to worry about that stuff makes sense. Therefore, this mod adds sinks, toilets, showers and even a sewage system, all of which will work towards dealing with hygiene.
Of course, like most mods, it comes at a price, which is that it takes one hour for colonists to use any of the aforementioned stuff, so it certainly adds an extra bit of hassle to the process. While Iām generally not a fan of micro-management, and there certainly are other good Rimworld mods, I think that something like this is pretty interesting.
# 6 Less Arbitrary Surgery
One thing about Rimworld that is infamous is how punishing it can be if you get some bad RNG, and that isnāt more evident than in surgery. Sometimes even the best medical colonist can completely fumble up and kill another colonist over something really minor. Thatās where this mod comes in and changes the outcomes of these failed surgeries.
Some things it changes is allowing second chances for non-fatal injuries, changes non-lethal surgery catastrophic/minor failure chances based on skill rather than a coin flip and decreases the damage upon surgery failure by up to half.
#7 Faction Discovery
One thing that people like to do is add their own factions into the game to make things interesting, but unfortunately, that means that players have to restart on a new save for those factions to be added.
This is where this mod comes in and offers a super useful service of being able to add factions on-the-fly as you play the game so that you donāt have to start a new game. It does this by creation tons of hidden factions in the games and then assigns your new factions to those slots so you can start playing them immediately.
#8 Colony Manager
After playing for a while colonist numbers can start to boom, especially if youāve added the mods on the list, and it becomes a real nightmare to micro-manage. Colony manager helps you with that by adding jobs like hunting and forestry so people can go out there and harvest that automatically.
It also allows you to set colonists as managers and the can queue up new jobs and make sure the assigned tasks can still be carried out.Ā Thankfully, it doesnāt alter or change anything you designate, so youāre still in full control.
#9 Mad Skills
In vanilla Rimworld, pawnsā XP will decay until they basically have no XP in a skill whatsoever. This mod allows you to alter that in a variety of different ways from adding tiers below which XP will not decay to increasing the cap on XP gain per day. It also allows you to remove the decay completely if thatās what you want.
I donāt know about you, but Iāve always generally disliked skill decay in games, especially because it feels like youāre losing progress, so Iām certainly happy in having this mod available.
#10 RuntimeGC
While the rest of the mods in this list are optional, Iād say that this is the most important and best Rimworld mod if you plan to play a very long game.Ā Since Rimworld saves all the data for dead colonists and other things, as the game progresses youāll begin to feel a ton of lag in the game and it can even crawl to a halt.
This mod allows you to delete all that unnecessary information with a click of a button, so as soon as you feel the slow down of your game, you can clear the info and get it back to the speed it should be running at. Iāll also mention that this doesnāt get rid of all the info for all dead colonists, only those whoāve had their corpses destroyed, so you can still resurrect colonists if you want to.
Tip: Keep in mind that extremely long games of just about any title, especially Rimworld, can cause some issues if you don’t have enough GBs of high-quality DDR4 RAM.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are some pretty good or even mandatory mods out there that can make your whole Rimworld experience so much better. While Iāve only listed 10 mods here, thereās still a ton more great ones out there, and Reddit user āApollo_Hotrodā has compiled a great list of them right here, including some of the ones Iāve put on here.Ā Either way, whichever mods you use, I hope you have tons of fun in your modded Rimworld experience.
If youāre attracted to modding here are some other notable mods to look at: