Performance Mods

UPDATE: With the performance improvements in RimWorld 1.6 there's a good chance for Rocketman to become fully obsolete. There's no confirmation yet what will happen to the mod and we will change this page whenever things are more clear, but there's a good chance for Rocketman finally being able to retire with 1.6 - just to keep that in mind.

RocketMan is one of the earlier and most popular performance mods out there. It generally tries to optimize many different bottlenecks in the basegame (glowGrid, pathfinding, etc.) and also has a routine to cache mod-content for successive game-starts, which in effects speeds up the game-initialization.

Keep in mind to follow the loadorder-recommendation (dead-last - on basically every modlist) and that the mod can increase how much RAM your game uses, since this is part in how it optimizes some functions. When troubleshooting issues and removing mods from your list, it is also advised to disable RocketMan for that time, since it can produce distracting errors in your log from mod-removal.

Performance Optimizer has a wide variety of optimizations (mostly due to caching) for a list of basegame methods which are known to behave slow. Additionally there is a list of opt-in features that allows to disable certain aspects of the game completely - like disabling all sound or UI elements. Those features are not needed in regular situations though and keeping it on default settings is good enough for the average user.

In general Performance Optimizer has been working extremely stable for quite a while was only part of issues or incompatibilities in very fringe cases. It is specifically recommended to use for people who lack performance on mostly vanilla games when other performance mods are considered unnecessary.

While Performance Fish is quite a bit more aggressive than other performance mods, this aspect also makes it one of the most potent tools we currently have at our disposal. It focusses mostly on bottlenecks in the game that typically hit the hardest in lategame saves but even just in general, the increase of maximal TPS some people have seen by adding it to their setups is massive. When it got one of the more significants feature-updates back in 1.4 some people reported immediate gains of 600 TPS and more. Which is roughly TWICE the speed in addition of what RW's usual maximum speed is (360 TPS.)

Mileage varies of course and no two modlists are the same, but usually this mod will give you the most performance out of the box. Of course that means that it is a bit more prone for incompatibilities, but is just in general a stable pick on regular modlist. It is also only available on Github and has to be installed 'by hand' - so while still pretty simple, it comes with a barrier of entry. Of course we provide instructions on how to install it on our site (currently only in video format - written guide will follow.) It also has two dependencies; Fishery and Prepatcher. Fishery is available on the author's Github as well, while Prepatcher can be used from the Steam Workshop and is a general recommendation to use to begin with.

ATTENTION: Always use the original version from the author's Github. There are multiple (unauthorized) re-uploads of Fish on the Workshop which are all not kept up to date!