A new update to seminal colony builder and story generator RimWorld has been announced, and it’s a massive one. Update 1.7 for RimWorld will see the game shifts from the Unity game engine into developers Ludeon Studios’ new in-house game engine.
The Waylith Engine as it is dubbed should run RimWorld at least twice as fast, the developers claim that performance improved by around two to four times faster. Stress tests which make use of a modpack that includes 1500 mods see the save game load after 6 minutes time, compared to 14 minutes in the previous Unity-based version 1.6. Not that any reasonable player would have literally thousands of mods, but this is a stress test, after all, so even if you’re playing vanilla it should have some performance benefit.
Usually, game engine changes of an already live game like this should have a lot of depreciated or unsupported features, but Ludeon Studios say that save games between version 1.6 and version 1.7 can work both ways (version 1.6 saves work on 1.7 and saves from 1.7 can be brought back to version 1.6).
Even wilder, most mods should work on version 1.7 of RimWorld without much change, though modders are encouraged to update it so it is marked “1.7-compatible” to remove the “potentially unsupported” label.
Version 1.7 for RimWorld isn’t live yet, but it is available on Steam’s unstable branch for those interested to try it out before it properly goes live.
The creation of an in-house game engine isn’t made out of the blue, as Ludeon Studios teased that “RimWorld isn’t the only game on Waylith. We’re working on something new!”
RimWorld has you set up your story of starting out a sci-fi colony where you only provide instructions to what the colonists do as they build, craft, survive and defend their home. With the official DLC and mods, the game where you can turn everyone cannibal or run an organ trade can get as wild or as cosy as players see fit. The game does start to get chugging in longer save files when the colony gets really big, so any base game performance improvements is welcomed.
As for what the makers of RimWorld is making next, we’ll just have to stay tuned for what’s to come.