Work Memory

Work Memory

Your crafter has a brain. Sometimes it even remembers what it was doing. Work Memory gives recipes a sense of practice: repeat the same kind of work, and a pawn gets into rhythm; leave it too long, and that rhythm cools off. Keep at it long enough, though, and part of that skill sticks for good. The idea is simple, and annoyingly real. Reopening a project after a few days usually does not start with work. It starts with remembering where you stopped, why the last decision made sense, and why some past version of you named a variable like that. Once the brain catches up, efficiency starts climbing again. Yet there are also things you simply never forget. Write enough code, and certain patterns become muscle memory you could recite half asleep. That is how our brains actually work: short-term and long-term memory run side by side, and enough practice carves some skills in for good. Work Memory models both layers. RimWorld pawns deserve a taste of office life too.

For Rimsonable Players

If you are coming here from Rimsonable's migration notice, welcome back! This is the former Rimsonable Work Memory feature, now moved into its own mod. The old version was a good idea with suspicious numbers. A 50% cold start penalty and short fade delay meant your best crafter could spend more time being punished for starting work than rewarded for staying focused. Realistic for software development, maybe less ideal for a colony simulator. Admittedly, the original values were tested only in the dev environment, not judged in real colony gameplay. Once I enabled it in my own colony and watched pawns constantly suffering from the 50% speed penalty, even I wanted to turn the feature off myself. The new version now makes the default values more Rimsonable:

• Cold starts begin at 70% speed instead of 50%.
• The default maximum is 115%, because the bonus is always 50% of the penalty.
• Short-term memory waits one in-game day before it starts decaying.
• A long-term memory layer now lets persistent practice stick permanently, so seasoned crafters keep an edge across breaks.
• The settings menu lets you adjust both curves in full.

How It Works

When a pawn works at a workbench on a tracked recipe, Work Memory records familiarity for that pawn and that type of work. More repetition means a better speed multiplier; too much time away means the pawn has to warm up again. That familiarity lives on two layers. The short-term layer builds quickly and fades just as quickly once the pawn stops, modeling the warm-up rhythm of a focused work session. The long-term layer accumulates slowly across every repetition and sets a permanent floor the short-term decay can never drop below, modeling skills that genuinely consolidate over time. In practice this means a pawn who has crafted hundreds of plate armors keeps a lasting edge even after a long break, while a pawn touching a recipe for the first time in a while still has to shake off the rust before reaching their personal ceiling. By default, it only applies to recipes that produce items with quality, such as weapons and apparel. If you want cooking, refining, smelting, and other non-quality recipes to use the same mechanic, there is a dedicated setting for that. The memory is mostly tied to the exact recipe, but some familiarity carries through related product categories and the same workbench. A pawn switching between similar armor bills is not a complete beginner. A pawn switching from helmets to fine meals is, academically speaking, pushing it. The current multiplier appears in the pawn info panel while they work, so you can see exactly how Work Memory is affecting their speed.

Settings

The settings menu is split into three tabs: General

• Apply to non-quality recipes.
• Adjust the cold start penalty and maximum bonus.

Short-Term Curve

• Change how quickly pawns warm up.
• Change when memory starts fading.
• Change how quickly it fades.

The short-term preview lets you pick a recipe work amount and shows when the pawn reaches normal speed, when they hit the maximum, when fading begins, and when the rhythm is gone. Long-Term Curve

• Set how much repeated work it takes before memory becomes permanent.
• Shape the diminishing returns of consolidation.
• Cap the permanent ceiling, or disable the long-term layer entirely.

The long-term preview is measured in repetitions, showing how many times a pawn must run a recipe to reach normal speed permanently and to approach full mastery. One small RimWorld accounting crime: the short-term preview uses the raw work amount. The value shown in-game is divided by 60 for human readability, because at normal speed, 1 real-world second = 60 ticks. So if a recipe shows 30 work in-game, use 1800 in the preview. If you miss the old numbers, you can set them back yourself; if you wanna continue your S&M journey in RimWorld, I won't stop you from setting the cold start to 0% and disabling the long-term layer.

Compatibility

Required: Harmony Supported RimWorld version: 1.6 Optional integration:

• RimHUD

If RimHUD is installed, Work Memory adds the current multiplier to RimHUD's Activity row.

Supported Languages

• English (manually curated)
• Simplified Chinese (manually curated)
• Traditional Chinese (manually curated)
• German (LLM translated)
• Korean (LLM translated)
• Russian (LLM translated)

Other Mods by Me

Rimsonable: A collection of toggleable tweaks to make RimWorld more reasonable. It's also where this feature used to live, before I decided it deserved its own spotlight. Useful Marks in Colony Groups: A compatibility patch for Useful Marks and Colony Groups, making the marks show up properly in the Colony Groups colonist bar. GitHub repository: https://github.com/truemogician/Make-RimWorld-Great-Again/tree/main/WorkMemory