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!
Confirmed by Ludeon, there's currently issues with certain Intel CPUs of the 13. and 14. generation which appear to be related to the Unity Engine upgrade RimWorld got with 1.6. We don't have more in-depth insight into the issue besides the fact that this is not RimWorld-specific, but a widespread issue with affected CPUs and certain software. If the following description applies to you, make sure to follow the advice of updating your BIOS and/or check in over on the Ludeon Dev Discord to get confirmation by the developer themselves first.
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!
Shameless self-plug, but why not. I'll spare you boring details, but TSIND Power Armor QA is now officially released on Steam. The mod is a collection of tweaks (mostly improvements) for power-armor and related equipment, previously often split between up to a dozen different mods. There are still more features to come in the near future, so keep an eye on it - or better - let us know of any fitting features you want to see in the mod, so we can consider adding them!
Check out the mod here: TSIND Power Armor QA
On top of all chaos currently going on in RimWorld's modding community, there is currently a highly problematic trend of people uploading unofficial forks for popular mods. While this is a somewhat common practice in the community, to pick up mods that were abandoned by their original authors, there is a long list of highly problematic cases this time around.
Many of those forks are either without the original author's consent, against actual software licences, not actually update by the forker, badly updated by people without relevant knowledge and often with (bad) GPT-support. Long story short, many of those mods have shown themselves with game breaking issues and should - as general recommendation - be avoided like the plague!
Since the sheer amount of those cases doesn't allow to get into too much specifics, here an incomplete list of the most commonly affected mods with links to their proper - or at least; most trusted - version available right now. Keep in mind that this is an ongoing situation and things change by the minute, so if you're in doubt; better don't use a questionable mod at all and just wait for an official update to happen. This is not a drill! In many cases switching out those mods mid-save is not an option!
Pick Up And Haul - The most problematic case. Use THIS HERE!
Replace Stuff - With the long time mod creator Uuugggg sadly passing away recently, their mods are currently split between different people to preserve and continue. For the time being, you'll find many of his works continued HERE!
Run & Gun - Ferris is working on the update for Tacticowl, better wait for that one. You find multiple continued mods (mostly mods by Owlchemist) in Ferris' good hands HERE!
High Quality Textures - Unofficial fork has serious issues. Better wait for updates to either GS+ or Performance Fish!
Medical System Expansion 2 - Not an issue with a fork but generally some gamebreaking issues right now. Since it's historically near impossible to remove from saves, hard avoid and you might as well do that in general. It is fine-ish when it works, but raises the chance of bricking your save!
Hugslib, Allow Tool, Defensive Positions and other mody by Hugs - Even the official versions of those mods are not well maintained and the few that have been updated to 1.6 are still causing issues. If you must, stick at least to the ones by Hugs (Now; Symbolic - on Steam) and avoid any forks by all means. There's an ongoing argument as to finally remove dependency from Hugslib at all, but that's too complex as to go into here. If you can though, make your modlist Hugslib-free and just don't bother with the underlying issue.
Blueprints - This one - and other mods originally by Fluffy - had problematic forks even before 1.6 and things just got worse now. Better avoid if you can.
Any fork with 'FORZADO' in its title - Hard avoid, that shit basically became a meme over night and won't do you any good. One single exception: HERE!
If we ignore the lack of updates and activity on the Void Archives for the last few months (and yeah, we ARE ignoring that fact) nothing much has changed lately in RimWorld's modding scene. Collecting ongoing issues shortly before and after a major update usually is a moot idea though, since things change by the minute and the whole process should be considered a 'developing story' until roughly 6-8 weeks after 1.6 gets released. So also don't expect troubleshooters to be active much in that time - it's some of the least motivating scenarios in an already little motivating process, and volunteers typically get their motivation intrinsically to the process of their work.
Anyways, there is still a lot missing on our site with some more general guides being either planned or already written and just awaiting proof-reading and revision before being made public. As right now, there shouldn't be much topics specifically related to 1.6-aspects, since nothing much seems to change for mod-users. The community already has first insights in the upcoming performance-improvements of RimWorld and they seem to be significant across the board. Expect anything between +10-30% more max TPS especially for endgame scenarios - as well as vastly improved game-initialization-speed, especially with mods.
As a result, a long-standing pillar of the RimWorld performance-mod landscape will probably retire. Rocketman's improvements are more or less made vanilla now, and with Karim not being active in RimWorld modding for quite a while now due to personal reasons, it seems about to be the perfect time. We won't change performance-mods related info on our site yet though - since there's always a chance something changes until the release of 1.6 - but expect some updates there soon.
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!
Confirmed by Altered Carbon 2's author, Elite Bionics Framework patches are severely failing, causing game breaking errors. No known workaround or fix until those patches were fixed/updated which hasn't happened so far. Since EBF is long known to be quite a performance burden and can be a ticking timebomb breaking setups even mid-through if a mod it patches updates, we highly recommend not using EBF anymore in this day and age to begin with.
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!