Life After HugsLib

HugsLib is a staple of every modlist - or at least it was in the past. In recent years more and more of its features have been incorporated into the basegame or other mods and so it has become a bit of an obsolete piece of RimWorld modding-history.

While there are no critical reasons to stop using HugsLib, it is also true that the mod is outdated and modders would do best to move on from being dependent on it as a framework. And while most popular mods made the jump around 1.4 already, some still remain using HugsLib - mostly for its mod-settings framework, which these days is supported by RimWorld itself.

But if you're in the process of cutting out HugsLib from your modlist and still have to stick to it because those one or two mods still using it, here's a list of some of those remaining mods that have been modified by people in the community to work without HugsLib.

The benefits of removing HugsLib from your modlist are actually rather slim. Even if most of its features are obsolete these days, most of them cause no issue by just being there. But it is a poorly maintained mod and there's always a chance of it breaking with any game-update. While its author still fixes such issues, it's hard to say how quickly those will happen. So if HugsLib at some point is breaking your setup, being able to remove the mod - even if just temporarily - is quite important. But if you're still using mods that are dependent on it, this might simply not be possible without causing more gamebreaking bugs.

Avoiding the use of HugsLib is therefore more a prophylactic measure, but the less moving gears you have on your modlist, the less likely for something to break. The main reason mods are still using HugsLib is for mod-settings, something that can easily be done with just basegame methods these days. The authors of those mods just have to invest the time to port them over. The feature of sharing a Hugslog has been outsourced the the standalone Log Publisher from HugsLib as well, so the original mod isn't necessary for that either. What remains are some fringe features only still used by two or three mods at all - those are the outliers here, because unless they cut out their dependency full independence from HugsLib isn't really possible. Given that's only a few mods in a list of roughly 13,000 for the latest version of RimWorld, this might not even affect you to begin with.

While the vast majority of mods already cut out their dependency on HugsLib, some popular mods still remain till this day. So some people in the community started to cut the dependency out for themselves. Most notably here ViralReaction's efforts known as Sans HugsLib. Typically those edits are either made for personal use or at best shared in some more niche places of the community - like Dub's Discord Server - and are typically hosted on GitHub. Because of that, here's a (work-in-progress!) list of known mods stripped of their HugsLib-dependency.

• Better Workbench Management (by ViralReaction)

• Real Ruins (by ViralReaction)

• Medical Dissection (by ViralReaction)

• Harvest Organs Post Mortem (by ViralReaction)

• Change Map Edge (by Safairette)