Resonance

Resonance

Resonance rebuilds RimWorld's sound so that everything has a position and has to travel to reach you. Open a door and the outdoors comes in through that doorway, from that direction, getting louder as you walk toward it. Close it and the outside is still there, quieter and duller, seeping through the walls. Seal the room properly and it goes almost silent. Take the roof off and it opens straight back up. I play blind. Screen reader, keyboard, no mouse. Vanilla gives you very little to go on sonically, so I built the mod I needed: one where a campfire tells you it is a campfire and roughly where it sits, and where you can hear that someone is walking on metal instead of grass. If you can see, this is an atmosphere mod. If you cannot, it is closer to a map. Every setting works from the keyboard, and each change is spoken aloud.

What it does

Footsteps change with the ground under the pawn. Fourteen surfaces, including snow, which is read from real snow depth rather than a terrain type, so it fades away as the snow melts and you hear whatever is underneath again. Animals get light or heavy sets depending on body size, so a chicken and a muffalo are not the same sound. Mechanoids get a quiet metallic set, deliberately kept low so a raid sits underneath everything rather than burying it. Rooms have reverb worked out from their real size, shape and wall material. A closet sounds tight, a corridor flutters, a big hall rings on. Wooden walls soak sound up. Stone and metal throw it back. Footsteps and melee both pick this up, and it is usually the quickest way to notice you have walked somewhere new. Weather runs rain, wind, snow, fog and toxic fallout. Thunder is timed to the actual lightning strike on your map and delayed by how far away it hit, so a distant one arrives late the way it does in life. Water plays from the nearest river, ocean, lake or marsh, which makes the shoreline something you can hear rather than something you have to look for. Buildings loop only while they are genuinely running. Campfires, generators, turrets, coolers, fabricators. Cut the power or run the fuel out and they go quiet, which turns the audio into a fairly reliable read on what is actually working. Vanilla sounds get the same treatment. Gunfire and work noise muffle through walls too, not only the audio this mod adds.

Settings

There is a master volume that scales everything at once, plus separate sliders for footsteps (human, animal, mechanoid), melee, ambience, weather, objects, pawn conditions and water. Set the balance you like once, then use the master to move the whole mod against the rest of the game. Performance Mode is for slower machines. It stops tracking footsteps from pawns far off camera and skips the most expensive part of the engine, without giving up occlusion, reverb or positioning. Ctrl+Shift+minus and Ctrl+Shift+equals move between settings. Hold Alt as well to change the one you have selected. Ctrl+Shift+I speaks the loudest sound near you and where it is coming from.

Questions

Can I add it to a save I already started? Yes, and you can remove it again later. It stores nothing in your save file. Will it fight with my other mods? It should not. Sounds from other mods get the same treatment as vanilla ones, because this hooks the game's own sound system rather than replacing it. Anything else that rewrites ambience is the obvious thing to watch. Why did RimWorld's own ambience stop? This replaces it. Running both at once gives you two ambience systems talking over each other, which sounds worse than either on its own. It comes back if you disable the mod. It is too loud. Master volume. If it is combat specifically, melee stacks up faster than you would expect, so pull that one down. I can barely hear anything indoors. That is mostly the point, since you are inside. Open a door and see whether it comes through clearly. If it does, the model is working and you probably just want ambient volume higher. My frame rate drops when there are a lot of animals. Turn on Performance Mode. Something sounds wrong and I cannot explain why. Stand where it sounds wrong and press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D. The mod collects what I need, sends it, and opens your browser on a page that asks one question: what went wrong. Type it in plain words. You never have to find a log file or work out what to attach. Stand where the problem is before you press it. What it captures is the sound around you at that exact moment, and where you were standing is most of what I need. The page lists everything in the upload before you send it, and nothing is filed until you tick the box agreeing to it. Worth knowing up front: log file paths normally contain your Windows username. Your IP address is not stored, the contact field is optional, and if you change your mind after it uploads there is a button on that same page that deletes the whole thing off the server. If you would rather send nothing automatically, Ctrl+Shift+D writes the same report to a file next to your saves and transmits nothing.

Requirements

RimWorld 1.6, and Harmony, which nearly every code mod needs and you very likely already have: https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2009463077 Harmony has to load first. RimWorld sorts that out for you if you let it. The full README ships inside the mod folder if you want detail on every setting.

Support

The mod is free and stays free. Nothing is gated behind anything and nothing will be. If it has been useful to you and you feel like throwing something at it, my Ko-fi is here: https://ko-fi.com/olegthesnowman