RimWorld 1.7 is moving the colony sim off Unity and onto Waylith, a brand-new engine Ludeon Studios built in-house, and the studio says it runs two to four times faster in its testing. The game is supposed to look and play exactly the same. You can already try it on Steam’s unstable branch, and your saves and most of your mods come along for the ride.
What actually gets faster
Pretty much everything, according to Ludeon. Startup, load times with big mod lists, map and world generation, and the game’s ticks per second all improve on 1.7. In Ludeon’s own stress test, a late-game colony ran 2.2 times faster than on 1.6, and a modpack with 1,500 mods went from a 14-minute load to six minutes. The studio is careful to say your results will vary with your PC and your mod list, but if your 40-colonist, 200-duck base has been crawling, this is the update you’ve been waiting for.
Saves and mods
Ludeon says you don’t need to do anything to switch. Your 1.6 saves load on 1.7, and 1.7 saves still work if you go back to 1.6. The vast majority of mods run without changes. Some will show up in yellow as “potentially unsupported,” but that’s only because the version number changed, and Ludeon is asking modders to test and publish a 1.7-compatible version so the warning goes away.
Modders also get some new toys. Waylith supports the latest C# language features, makes it easier to write complex mods without dragging performance down, and opens the door to bigger visual changes and custom effects. More than two dozen modders helped test before the reveal.
There’s one warning: if your PC is more than 10 years old, 1.7 may not run on it. Ludeon wants to hear about it on the official RimWorld development Discord if that happens, since it might be able to make changes.
How to try it
The test build is on Steam right now. Right-click RimWorld in your library, open Properties, go to the Betas tab and pick the “unstable” branch. Restart Steam if it doesn’t update on its own, and choose “Play 1.7 Unstable” if Steam asks. The main branch most people play on stays on 1.6 for now, and Ludeon hasn’t given a date for 1.7 to go stable.
If you own RimWorld on GOG, Ludeon’s instructions only cover the Steam test, so you’ll likely be waiting for the stable release. The base game is $34.99 on GOG and on Steam.
One more thing
RimWorld isn’t the only game on Waylith. Ludeon says it’s working on something new with the engine, though it’ll be a while before the studio shares details. It also thanked RocketWerkz, whose Brutal framework helped make Waylith possible.
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Same RimWorld, same chaos, just a lot less waiting for it to load. Your ducks will thank you.