The Ideal™ Rimworld Modpack (for 1.5)

after much deliberation, testing, experimenting, and overthinking. I believe I have done it. this is the ideal rimworld mod collection (according to me).

this collection is large, but I've carefully configured almost every configurable option available, made extensive use of cherry picker, and made this collection to suit my vision of what a heavily expanded vanilla rimworld experience could have been like. performance is also good. if you like that sound of that, my config settings are linked below, after all my rambling which you can skip. if you're a coward.

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I love rimworld, but there are two main problems I have with it. first is the general UI and UX of the game being clunkier than it could have been and, in my opinion, needlessly obtuse. second is what I perceive to be a general lack of depth and variety in the world itself. this collection was originally intended just to address those two issues by adding a lot of UI and quality of life mods, along with some quest, faction, and xenotype expansions. then things got a little bit out of hand.

regardless, despite the rather large mod count, I believe that this collection results in a heavily expanded, but still vanilla-like experience. there is a lot more stuff in the world, more things to do, more things to see, a lot of quality of life improvements, and over 1,000 things removed with cherry picker to eliminate bloat and a few laggy things. nearly every custom xenotype (including your own creations) should appear naturally in the world by default, in suitably large or small numbers, without needing them all to have their own factions. nearly every mod with config options has been touched by me to make it all mesh together well, and suit my tastes. I've also been careful to avoid TPS-heavy mods as much as possible, so performance is still decent even with huge, very long running colonies. I played with nearly 30 pawns and over 150 haul-trained animals, and could still almost reach the full TPS of 3x speed on an AMD 5950X in eco mode.

tragically, 1.6 and odyssey came out while I was still tweaking this collection in the middle of a very long running save, and not only that, several of these mods hadn't yet updated to 1.6 anyway, so here we are. I'm so pleased with this collection, however, that I will keep playing on 1.5 for as long as it takes to see all the most important mods get updated, and when the time comes, I'll make a separate 1.6 version of this collection. things will be different, but mostly the same.

some may say that a lot of these mods and many of my choices make rimworld an easier game. and to that I say... yeah. I believe that a lot of rimworld's difficulty came from design choices that just don't feel good to play with, making it sometimes feel more like I was spending more time fighting the game itself than dealing with the challenges it presented me. so I smoothed those edges off.

management is easier because pawns are no longer complete idiots, and you don't have to micromanage them just to keep them at a baseline level of happiness anymore. combat is easier because you can reposition freely thanks to run and gun, your pawns can carry and automatically switch between multiple weapons thanks to simple sidearms, and late game armors are more effective. dealing with resources is easier thanks to dramatically larger stack sizes and storage buildings allowing you to build huge, rich colonies without dedicating half the map to shelves. genetic engineering is easier because the items you need appear more often with traders, and if you play long enough to get very rich with neutroamine, you can simply craft the genes you want. rimefeller allows you to drill for oil and produce some expensive, rare resources, provided you have enough hands. outposts also make many things easier, but only if you choose to recruit a ton of pawns and set them up. if you get really rich, you can even turn your pawns into absolute monsters thanks to the many advanced bionic and implant options, which when combined with genetic engineering, can lead to pawns with well over 200% efficiency in all bodily functions. beyond all that, there are still many, many more things in here that could be said to make the game easier.

but you know what I think all of those things are? levers. some of these changes are fundamental new defaults, but most of them are simply new player choices, and higher difficulties are still as difficult as ever.

at the same time, the world outside can be more challenging than usual, thanks to the many new events, some of which are much more dangerous than usual, along with new hostile factions, much stronger mechanoids and insectoids, smarter enemies, enemy psycasters that can actually psycast, most enemy equipment now being biocoded forcing you to actually craft your own stuff most of the time, and new optional challenges.

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anyway, here's how you use this:

step 1: have all DLC up to anomaly, then subscribe to all

step 2: copy the git repository URLs for performance fish and fishery

step 3: download rimsort

step 4: using rimsort, click the download button in the toolbar and add both performance fish and fishery as git mods using the URLs you copied, then enable all the mods, click the sort button, click textures in the toolbar and optimize the textures, then finally, click the save button

step 4.5: before you close rimsort, check the active list of mods and look for the no pause challenge mod. if it's loaded before the smart speed mod, then manually move it so that no pause challenge loads after smart speed, and save again. it may sort that way automatically by the time you read this, but it didn't for me, and smart speed breaks without this change

step 5: download this file full of mod configs, extract it to somewhere, then copy the path to the folder you extracted it to

step 6: launch game, go to mod options, select export and import mod configs, enter the path from the previous step, and import the mod configs, then restart the game and play

bonus step: edit the settings for the progress renderer mod so it will save its images to a folder of your choice instead of your desktop. if you don't want to use it for every game, remember to disable the mod in the mod settings while in-game, since you have to disable the mod per-world. or just remove the mod completely if you hate it, I'm not the boss of you

extra bonus step: once you're in a game, select a pawn and then click the cog wheel to configure the rimHUD settings. make sure the refresh time is set to the maximum value of 3000ms, because it improves performance without any real downsides. this is the one setting I'm not sure transfers properly with the exported configs. the improvement isn't massive, but it's nice

linux bonus: linux users, add this mod to your list as well.

final note: does the total number of mods in this collection show anything less than 431? if so, some mods have been removed from the workshop. there used to be a battery mod in this collection, until that happened. I backed up this whole mod collection locally using rimsort just in case. the config files for workshop mods don't work instantly on local mods though, the config files all need to be renamed, which I haven't bothered to do yet. if it comes down to that, you'll be on your own there. but if some mods do get removed and you liked this collection enough, ask me and I might be able to share my local backups if I still have them.