Converting
Textures

Memory-impact of mods is often underestimated - with some modlists able of 'casually' adding 10-15GB to the otherwise rather low memory-footprint of the base game. Read up on how RimWorld handles texture-loading for mods if you're interested in the reasons for it - for the average user mostly matters how to convert their mod's textures to DDS and how to benefit from it though.

Mod-quantity itself is a rather bad indicator here - with the individual memory-impact varying massively between mods. If you want to check how much memory your mods are eating up, use the methods listed in our "out-of-memory crashes" guide.

With the 1.6-update loading DDS-files is now supported by the base game as well - removing the prior need for additional mods and making texture-conversion even easier and basically a no-brainer for most users.

ATTENTION!
If you previously converted textures using RimPy, they can cause game breaking errors now in RimWorld 1.6! Even some mod-authors might have used RimPy to pre-convert their mod's textures, not being aware of the issues that can cause, therefore;
Make sure to remake all of them using one of the listed methods below!

Pre-converting textures typically comes with the following benefits:

• Faster starting game
  By skipping the conversion at start-up and allowing the game to load the files directly into memory, the main benefit usually is the reduced time the game takes to load. The effectivity highly depends on your modlist and hardware though.

• Smaller memory footprint
  DDS-files tend to be smaller in size (in memory) than those converted by the game's converter. This helps saving some system-memory and especially helps in cases where the user runs out of RAM at start-up, causing the game to crash.

• Increased quality
  In general it results in sharper textures and less artefacts than RimWorld's own conversion. This might not be a deal-breaker, but is just a bonus to the other benefits.

Some things pre-converted textures doesn't help with are:

• In-game performance
  Once textures are loaded, their impact on in-game performance should be close to zero. One exception here would be cases where without conversion, the memory-utilization spikes to critically high levels, causing the whole system to slow down.

• Increased file-size (on disk)
  One benefit of using the PNG-files is their small in file-size. Converting textures to DDS will negate that by taking considerably more space on disk. This shouldn't matter much with modern hard drive sizes, but if you're short on space - keep that in mind!

As of the time writing, there is mostly one conversion algorithm in use. The following methods all use ToDDS as base so the results are all more or less the same. Which method to choose mostly depends on preference, but for the average user just utilizing RimSort's integrated converter does the job.

• RimSort (ToDDS)
  Fast, high texture quality, memory-efficient, can be used to only convert specific mods.

• ToDDS Standalone
  Fast, high texture quality, memory-efficient, can't specify to convert individual mods only.

• ToDDS Commandline
  Fast, high texture quality, memory-efficient, harder to use than UI-supported methods above but full control over variables.

Converting textures with ToDDS Standalone converter is straight-forward but also limited. After downloading and extracting the files, just run the rimworld_todds.exe in the folder to start the app. It's use is mostly self-explanatory - and every option offers tooltips by hovering your mouse over the respective (?) to find out what each feature does. While it offers less settings and options than the commandline or RimSort's integrated version, it's mostly pre-configured with the best settings for RimWorld.

WIP