Modlist Building

How to assemble a modlist is typically an issue of personal preference. New players though, run into the same issues leading to broken setups, poor performance, or endless troubleshooting. There are some general rules and ideas though - based on long years of experience - that saves time and headaches. Until we drop a full guide, here's the essentials to help prevent you starting your journey by building a modlist for a week, just to end up to troubleshoot issues with it for another two - especially if it's your first endeavour into modding, you will surely have more fun actually playing the game, than to deal with errors and broken saves!

• Know Your Limits
  Don't chase too many mods on your first try - compatibility scales exponential with the number of mods in total. Every single mod must play nice with all others to result in a stable modlist. Avoid pre-made Steam collections entirely (see our guide). RimWorld is typically played by restarting your playthroughs regularly, which gives you plenty of chances to expand and adapt your modlist later anyways. Better to have 200 mods and get to actually play the game, than to add 500 in one rush and have the game blow up after just 2h in-game!

• Build in Batches
  Never activate your whole modlist at once and expect things to work out of the box. Add 10-20 mods at a time, launch to catch startup errors immediately and fix them before adding more - that way you know exactly which batch of newly added mods broke things. Additionally: Start with complex/technical mods (frameworks, performance) first, then mechanics/UI, content, tweaks, retextures - as a rough outline. This groups mods that are likely to clash with each other and avoid you having to go back multiple steps in the process - nothing worse than adding an important framework many other mods on your list need late and finding out that it doesn't work correctly with a bunch of other, similarly important mods already on your list.

• Ensure Proper Load Order
  The use of a mod manager is not only highly suggested, it's pretty much obligatory if you want to build any modlist greater than just 2 or 3 dozen of mods. The concept of loadorder and its importance is quite complex and addressed in its own guide on our site, but in the vast majority of cases, just relying on your mod-manager's auto-sort feature should be good enough to start out with at least. Ignore most of the existing loadorder-guides you can find on the internet - most of those are HIGHLY outdated and at best reflect some standards relevant in earlier versions of the game. Fortunately Ludeon changed quite a bit over the years, making this topic less and less relevant for the average user.

• Avoid Redundancy
  Two (or more) mods dealing with/adding the same type of feature or content are on average more prone to conflict - avoiding such kind over redundancy is a often overlooked and underestimated way to ensure a stable modlist. Especially with overlapping mods it's important to check their mod pages for information about known incompatibilities or even specifically guaranteed compatibility between each other. As an example based on a common 'trap' users fall for: The Biotech DLC has drones for cheap labour like hauling or cleaning yet many people are still adding 'classics' like "Misc. Robots" to they lists, which predate the DLC and in essence offer the same content. This mod is not only known to be unreasonable hard on performance for modern mod-standards, it's also a common cause for actual errors given its ancient code-base and lack of long-time maintenance. Respecting content-overlap would have been able to avoid the user from picking that mod to begin with, and any eventual other problems that come from it - and all that without actually missing out of content either!

• Ditch Old/Dated Mods
  Old mods don't necessarily have to be worse than modern equivalents, but in many cases they have worse performance or lack specific cross-compatibility with other, newer mods you might want to use as well. This applies to mod which show up as the most 'popular' ones on the Steam Workshop as well. With how things work, popularity and user-count there is measured over the lifetime of a mod, so older mods often show up as used by hundred of thousands of people, but those numbers include basically every user who ever subscribed to it regardless if they actually still using the mod or are even still playing RimWorld. This leads to a sort of feedback-loop where new and unexperienced users subscribe to old and often badly maintained mods more experienced users know to be problematic, starting their modding-journey already on the wrong foot. Ultimately this point is mostly influenced by actual experience though, and that comes through practice which new users of course don't have. To help a bit with selecting solid mods over known problematic ones, we offer some examples in the recommendation-section of our site!

• Start Fresh After Breaks
  The game did release a major update? You haven't played in a few months and decided to come back to RimWorld? Better to nuke and rebuild your old setup! Don't recycle your old list and better scrap everything, ideally starting with a completely fresh install and re-download of your subscribed mods. But don't stop there - don't just re-enable the mods you already know blindly, there's a good chance some alternative for a long used mod has been released in the meantime that simply does a better job. Mainline updates and new DLC-releases also spark the birth of new mods like nothing else - some of them might be tempting but could conflict with older mods on your list. Having to re-assemble a modlist every time you come back to RimWorld might sounds tedious at first, but it's a learning-experience and once you know what you're doing, you can assemble a fresh, sizeable and stable modlist in below 1h - which is less time invested than re-using your old setup and having to weed out new issues for hours or even days first. RimWorld is a game most users come back every now and then and are playing it for years - so investing some additional time now to pick up the basics will benefit you in the long run ten-fold!