News Flash

Not meant as a comprehensive list of all known issues, but to provide some basic PSAs about the most widespread or severe, temporary issues with the game and mods. If you're the author of a mod listed here or have otherwise new and useful information about a case, feel free to inform us over the usual channels about it!

In addition to the general issues introduced by the 1.6 Unity update and certain hardware, here are three (admittedly; vague) things we found in random troubleshoots over the last few weeks and months. None of those cases could be investigated well enough to talk about earlier, but given issues of that kind keep piling up, here's a short list of potential culprits when encountering issue with your game - mostly meant as 'last resort' methods if anything else fails, but maybe it's helping one of you:

• Nvidia apparently released a problematic GPU-driver update some time around May 2026, causing 'black screen' and crashes for some users. Unfortunately the affected driver-version is currently not known (my fault, I missed taking notes) and neither is the exact combination of hardware. Two of the affected users at least ran a 40xx and 50xx series card, so there's a chance it mostly affects newer models specifically. Only found solution was to roll-back those drivers to a previous version. Current state of the latest driver-version is also unknown and the issue might just have been temporary - still worth trying if you encounter similar symptoms.

• We also found that some people, who reported 'choppy camera movement' and bad TPS/FPS with no obvious reason found when using Performance Analyzer to be affected by Windows' Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS). This mostly seems to affect older GPUs and is generally known to be a mixed bag, causing worse performance for many older games while being able to give a few % more performance on newer games & hardware. If you encounter similar issues, might be worth trying to disable that one first!

• Even more dubious are some serious issues (black screen, crashes) for some users due to a recently introduced Windows 11 feature; Multi-Plane Overlay (MPO). Unfortunately there's not enough information right now to tie it better to any specific symptoms, but it might be another option to disable the feature when being affected by similarly severe issues. 

While already being a suspect of badly made AI-slop and some features being bad on performance, it came to our attention just recently that the mod Zoology: Realistic Animal Overhaul runs an absurd amount of conditional patches that are adding insane numbers to the game's initialization time. It scales with the number of (not only animal-)mods used and can add a couple of minutes just by itself. There are a bunch of other concerns, like it causing game- or even save-breaking situations whenever one of the animal-mods it supports updates with significant changes - just on top to some barely working features like on-map animal reproduction and others.

Our clear recommendation is to just not use the mod at all - but if you must, now you at least know what to expect - so you don't wonder why your game suddenly takes 10min longer to start...

The mod Map Mode Framework causes severe game crashes for some people and can even corrupt savefiles. While the mod itself seems to be mostly abandoned at this point, there are still a few popular mods that depend on it. We would highly recommend to stop using it outright, but if you really can't be stopped you can try switching to a more recent, bug-fixed fork of it. As of the time writing this, this fork has been tested for a while and seems to fix all the serious issues of the original version. It's uncertain if that will prevail and how the support of this fork will be in the future - but for the time being, those are the options to deal with the case.

Just a quick heads-up about texture conversion. With recent changes to the basegame and Graphics Settings+, textures previously converted with RimPy will actually cause issues. So just keep in mind to use ToDDS to convert them and if you still have old files, clean them up and remake them with a proper converter!

For quite a while since the 1.5 update there is an increasing number of reports of RimWorld running into black screens and seemingly random crashes. One cause for that can be conflicting security settings for the operating system. Specifically "ASLR bottomup" being turned off will cause certain mod to not be loaded correctly. By their nature, mostly highly technical mods and important frameworks are typically affected, what causes severe consequences of gamebreaking nature. Since the list of affected mods and different way this issue plays out is quite long, it's recommended to just check your system settings first if you're running into issues like described. Here's a handy guide on Reddit explaining the process!

• Aerocraft Framework is pretty much unmaintained and has a list of game breaking bugs and incompatibilities. High risk and not easily removable from an ongoing save without breaking even more. Highly recommended not to use!
  UPDATE: Seems to be fixed. Mod still of questionable maintenance though.

• Integrated Implants in combination with Athena Framework (as well as its bugfixed fork!) causes world generation to break consistently. Both mods seem to be currently unmaintained, so there's no immediate solution on the horizon. A risky workaround can be to have one of the mods disabled while generating a new game and just add it back later. But that still leaves a chance for later map generation to cause similar errors again. Integrated Implants also has other issues though, so the better solution here is to avoid it in the first place AND to use the bugfixed fork of Athena Framework no matter what.
  UPDATE: There are still ongoing issues with this. The exact reasons are unknown though. We hope for 1.6 this to be finally resolved, but so far it's still a case.

• Enhanced Beliefs suffers similar issues like Athena Framework due to being by the same author who's currently unavailable. The issue mostly is related to serious performance degradation over time and less about game breaking bugs. But given the situation it should still be avoided.

• Rim War is extremely buggy and has been for years. Even in cases where it doesn't cause game breaking situations, it will massively degrade your game's performance over time. Do yourself a favour and wait for some kind of modern replacement - many troubleshooter in the community won't even pick up your case if they see that mod on your list, just by default.

• Ambient Rim has ongoing issues to trigger sound (FMOD) bugs that seem to be related to bird-sounds. The rest of the mod seems to work fine, but bird-sounds can break or even crash the whole game engine in some - but common - cases. Ideally the bird-sounds should be disabled completely to prevent that issue, optionally drastically reducing the 'distance' for the sounds in the mod's settings could work, but this will likely just reduce the likelihood of the error happening.

• SpeakUp has longstanding issues of breaking RimWorld's 'grammar resolve' which is a core method the game uses for all kind of things - typically faction & quest generation - but has mostly been seen to break some modded quests (VFE-Deserter.) Despite that being long known, the author doesn't seem to be able to fix those issues. Recommendation here is a hard-avoid. The risk of it causing save-breaking issues is way too high for something that just adds 'flavour' to the game!

• Anthro Race has a highly destructive way of overwriting the base pawn which is a compatibility-nightmare and potential source for a never ending list of mod-conflicts. Hard avoid! Author is aware but apparently also not able to fix it easily themselves, so some people are already on the case to potentially fix the issue for them. If that happens, you'll find the link to the fixed version here!