RimWorld – Announcing the Waylith Engine and Update 1.7

Summary

Hey everyone, big news today!

We’re announcing update 1.7, which moves RimWorld from Unity to the Waylith Engine, our own in-house engine built by Ludeon Studios. The game looks and plays exactly the same, but in our tests performance is improved by 2-4x.

You can try 1.7 right now on the unstable beta branch - see “Testing update 1.7” at the bottom of this page for details.

Performance improvements

Compared to 1.6, 1.7 on the Waylith engine has faster startup time, game load time with big mod lists, map generation, world generation, general ticks-per-second, and just about everything else. Your colony of 40 colonists, 200 ducks, and 100+ mods will run much smoother.

We stress-tested a late game colony and saw 2.2x better performance on 1.7 compared to 1.6. A modpack with 1500 mods (!) went from 14 minutes to 6 minutes to load. (These are just our results; individual performance improvements may vary due to your specific PC or mods.)

Savegames, mods, and compatibility

You don’t need to do anything when switching to 1.7.

• Savegames: Your 1.6 savegames will load on 1.7, and 1.7 saves also work if you go back to 1.6.
• Mods: The vast majority of mods work on 1.7 without any changes from the authors. Some may show up in yellow as “potentially unsupported” - this is only because the version number changed.

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Read the full news on store.steampowered.com →

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