Shift Change

Shift Change

Requires the Odyssey expansion. The outfit stand this mod builds on is Odyssey content, so without it nothing happens. Harmony is also required. Colonists change into the right clothes for the room they are going to, whether they are there to work or to enjoy themselves, and back out again afterwards. Put a vanilla outfit stand in a room and put an outfit on it. Each stand dresses for one of two things. Work. A colonist taking on automatic work of that room's kind (doctoring in the hospital, researching in the lab, cooking in the kitchen) changes into the stand's outfit before starting, and back when their work takes them elsewhere. Recreation. The same machinery, for a colonist arriving to enjoy themselves. A frame of billiards, a hand of poker, an hour at the harp. A robe for the sauna, black tie for the games room. Their own clothes wait in the stand either way, and come back exactly as they were, force-worn markers included.

How to use it

Four optional controls per stand:

• Shared (set owners) restricts a stand to the colonists you list: one for a personal kit, several to serve a group and nobody outside it. Left unassigned it is shared, like a bed, so a kitchen needs one stand per cook working at once, not one per cook.
• The stand's switch, labelled with what it currently dresses for ("Shift stand: doctoring", "Not used for shift changes"), opens the checklist for rooms the game reads oddly, rooms that do two jobs, or a decorative stand you do not want used. It also names what the game reads the room as, which explains the surprises: a crib turns a hospital into a barracks.
• Change the whole outfit, off by default, is the difference between a lab coat worn over ordinary clothes and a sauna robe worn instead of them. Ticked, the colonist wears only what the stand holds and loses whatever their own clothes were providing, warmth included. That is worth a thought before a robe rack in a cold biome.
• Keep contents out of trade, on by default. Traders will otherwise buy anything on an outfit stand: the uniform, and the owner's own clothes parked there while they are on shift. Untick it for a stand you keep as a shop shelf.

The stand's Allow removing items toggle is held off while the stand is in service, because turning it on lets any colonist's outfit optimizer wear the uniform as everyday clothes. It never covered trade. To take a garment back, use the eject button in its Contents tab.

The rules it follows

Deliberately narrow, so it never fights you:

• Automatic only, for work and recreation alike. A direct order is never delayed by a wardrobe trip.
• Emergencies are never delayed, and nothing happens under threat.
• Personal kit stays personal. A stand with owners serves only them, and nobody takes clothes out of a stand somebody else is using.
• Passing through a room changes nothing; only doing the room's work does.
• A meal break gets them out of uniform first, wherever the food is stored, unless it is already in hand; that they just eat.
• If a stand frees up while someone is working in its room out of uniform, they step over and change, unless they are mid-treatment on a patient.
• A Change back button appears on any colonist in a uniform, for when you want them out of it now.

Rooms are read from their role, so hospitals, laboratories, kitchens, workshops, barns and rec rooms all work out of the box. One mod setting: Unassigned stands are shared, on by default.

Dressing for recreation

Tick Recreation: any joy activity in this room and the stand dresses whoever comes to that room to enjoy themselves. One switch covers all of it, because the room is the selector. Recreation and work types are mutually exclusive on a stand (one outfit serves one purpose), so a room that does both wants two stands. Only a room scoring as a rec room turns it on by itself. A throne room, a dining room with a chess table in it, and a pool usually do not; set those by hand, once. Gendered clothing wants an owner list. A stand serves anyone who can wear something on it. Fine for a lab coat, a trap for a gown: put a prestige robe, a ladies hat and a formal shirt on a shared stand, and a man will take the robe and leave the hat. Owner lists exist for this: All / Men / Women tabs, an Assign all button, and a stand becomes the women's stand in two clicks. Four things it will not do:

• Drinking and drug-taking do not count, because fetching a beer is the same job in a bar or a corridor. Sitting down to socialise at a table is caught, drink and all.
• Reading is left alone, because a colonist picks their reading spot after setting off.
• Outdoors is excluded, for now. Every outdoor cell belongs to one enormous room, so a stand in open ground would dress colonists for every walk on the map. A walled but roofless yard is its own room and still counts.
• Nobody is pulled out of bed: vanilla gives patients recreation they can take lying down, so they stay put.

What to put on the stand

Vanilla has no scrubs, no lab coat and no chef's whites, so there is very little to actually dress anyone in. Any apparel mod fixes that; Vanilla Apparel Expanded adds exactly those three and is what every screenshot here uses. Not affiliated with the Vanilla Expanded team.

Mod compatibility

Outfit Stands Plus works alongside this mod in either load order. Its mechanized and mending stands are full shift stands, and each stand shows exactly one Set owner control: this mod's while in service, theirs when set to Not used for shift changes. Gerrymon's Hotspring Expanded needs no setup: its pool rooms turn a stand on for recreation by themselves. Standalone Hot Spring works too (any modded recreation carrying a joy kind is caught), but its room takes the switch by hand.

Save safety

Add it to an existing save freely; nothing needs rebuilding. Removing it is safe too: stands revert to ordinary furniture, and a colonist mid-shift keeps the uniform (Clear forced apparel on the Assign tab un-forces it) with their own clothes waiting in the stand.

Source, and testing

An automated suite runs inside RimWorld itself before every release, covering the cases that are hard to undo: a gravship flight, a colonist dying or being banished mid-shift. That does not make it bug-free; it means the specific ways this could lose your colonists' clothes fail loudly in testing instead of quietly in your save. MIT licensed, with the design notes and the suite in the repository. No clothing, no buildings, no textures; it adds behaviour to a building the game already draws. Written with AI assistance; no generated art anywhere. github.com/beverage/shift-change Automatic Swap Outfit by aedbia (MIT) covers adjacent ground, triggered by allowed-area boundaries. Shift Change is an independent implementation, but that mod is why several dead ends were cheap to avoid. Portions of the materials used to create this content/mod are trademarks and/or copyrighted works of Ludeon Studios Inc. All rights reserved by Ludeon. This content/mod is not official and is not endorsed by Ludeon.