Rust's Essentials

This list was heavily inspired by veequeue. I've added a small handful of mods that I think are also very necessary and removed some that were DLC dependent. This list contains one or more mods that do not play well with multiplayer. Built for and compatible with Rimworld 1.6. Highly recommend going through all mod options and adjusting to your personal preferences for the best experience.

Essentials (mods that even a first time player should use):

• SimpleCameraSetting - Increases zoom limits in both directions.
• Smart Speed - Adds a 4th speed and full speed customization, including default game speed.
• Smarter Construction - Automatically makes pawns not trap themselves in what they're building.
• Drag Select - Drag across more buttons than what vanilla normally allows.
• Dynamic Trade Interface - Improves massively over the vanilla trading interface.
• Fahrenheit and Celsius - The game makes more sense in Celsius and was based on it but it's nice to see Fahrenheit for immersion's sake. If you already use Celsius IRL then you'll probably want to disable this.

Visual changes and graphics mods:

• Vanilla Pawns Retextured
• Vanilla Hair Retextured
• Vanilla Beards Retextured
• Muzzle Flash
• RPG Style Inventory - I think that the vanilla inventory list is very unfun to look at and interact with, this mod helps.

Important mods to note:

• Smart Speed - Adjust speed to what your computer can handle, Rimworld can get incredibly taxing at high speeds, and in some cases a lower speed can be faster than a higher one if your computer cannot keep up. Defaults are fine if you don't want to mess with it, but I highly recommend testing and adjusting to your personal taste in the mod options.
• Defensive Positions - Lets you create preset spots for your pawns to go to when they're drafted and also lets you create selection groups for your pawns assigned to numpad. In colonies with 8+ pawns it's cuts down on tons of tedium.
• Pharmacist - Adds a full new tab for choosing what meds are used in what situations.
• Follow Me - Read the mod page and check mod options for keybinds. Doesn't add anything functionally but is nice for immersion.
• Tainted Renaming - I recommend changing the default option to something that will make sense to you, like "Tainted" for example.

Why X over Y?

• SimpleCameraSetting over Camera+ for performance reasons.
• RandomPlus over Character Editor/Prepare Carefully because the latter will break your game and I prefer the simplicity of this to the former, personal preference.

If you have any questions or suggestions, just lemme know in the comments.