I thought I’d seen it all in vanilla RimWorld. I’d harvested my first organs, built my first human leather armchair, and watched my colonists have mental breakdowns over eating without a table. I genuinely believed I understood the depths of this game’s madness. Looking back now, I can only laugh at my naivety.
The Gateway Drug: Quality of Life Mods
It started so innocently. I remember telling myself I’d just install RimHUD to see colonist stats more easily. That’s all. Just one tiny mod to improve the interface. Then I noticed those ugly standing lamps taking up floor space and thought, well, Wall Light isn’t really changing the game, is it? It’s just common sense.
Before I knew what was happening, I was 47 mods deep, watching my colonists milk genetically modified spider-cows while robots cleaned up after my army of combat-trained guinea pigs. The transformation happened so gradually I didn’t even notice it. One week I was keeping things vanilla with just a few UI improvements. The next week, I justified Prepare Carefully because it wasn’t really cheating, just reducing randomness. By week three, I was deep into a medieval playthrough with Rimworld of Magic, and by week four, I was genuinely asking myself why my cyborg vampires shouldn’t have lightsabers.
The Essential Mods That Ruined Vanilla Forever
Combat Extended was where things really started to change. I thought vanilla combat wasn’t realistic enough, so I installed this mod thinking it would add some tactical depth. What I got instead was pure trauma. I watched my best shooter get their jaw blown off by a squirrel that landed a lucky critical hit. Combat transformed from simple point-and-shoot affairs to desperate scrambles where we all died because I forgot to account for wind resistance when calculating artillery trajectories.
Then came Prepare Carefully, why should I start with my unskilled colonists where my starting colonists cant even pick up the damn stuff “will never haul” or cant clean or build. Those times are over as my super soldiers make sure the first steps are easy and a big base can unfold. I also have the option to save my created colonists and after a wipe reload them in a new game.
Save Our Ship 2 took my war crimes interplanetary. Not content with atrocities on just one planet, I built a ship, fought space battles, and discovered that colonists can indeed have mental breakdowns in zero gravity. The first time someone had a tantrum and started punching the hull while we were in vacuum, I realized that if there was one thing RimWorld needed, it was definitely more ways for everything to go catastrophically wrong. I really love that Odyssey has created also a complete new way to build and live on a ship.
The “I Have 200 Mods and My Game Takes 45 Minutes to Load” Experience
I’ve reached what I call “Mod Singularity.” It’s that point where you have so many mods installed that you’re not even sure what’s vanilla anymore. My mod list looks like a too large CSV file for importing data and troubleshooting conflicts requires a PhD in computer science and the patience of a saint.
I have three different mods that add chickens, and they’re all incompatible with each other, but I can’t remove any of them without breaking something else. My colonists can craft smartphones and nuclear reactors, but they still can’t figure out how to eat at a table consistently. I’ve completely forgotten what the vanilla main menu looks like. My game crashes if I look at it wrong, but I’ve learned to quicksave every 30 seconds as a survival mechanism. I spend more time in the mod configuration menu than actually playing the game, carefully adjusting load orders like I’m defusing a bomb.
But thx to the latest 1.6 Version this is now history. But I still have a 200 mod 1.5 installation on a backup that contains all the mods.
The Psychology Mods That Hit Too Close to Home
Psychology was where things got unexpectedly real. The mod makes your colonists feel like actual people with complex emotions and relationships. I watched in horror as my best researcher developed anxiety because I made them work too many night shifts. Suddenly, all those war crimes felt personal. These weren’t just pawns anymore; they were people with feelings I was destroying.
Speak Up made it worse. My colonists now chat with each other, sharing their hopes, dreams, and opinions about that time I fed them human meat during a particularly rough winter. Nothing quite prepared me for reading my favorite colonist casually mention over breakfast that they were planning to murder their spouse. The casual tone of the conversation made it so much worse somehow.
Embracing the Madness
RimWorld mods are like potato chips in the worst possible way. I started with something simple and harmless, and now I’m running a colony of cyborg catgirls fighting dinosaurs with plasma weapons while my automated drug lab funds my bionic limb replacement program.
I haven’t seen the vanilla game since 2018. Sometimes I wonder if I need help, but then I see a new mod that adds craftable tornadoes and all thoughts of recovery vanish. This is my life now, and honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
HoloRim, this is the mod that made you click this article right?! I saved it for the end 🙂
A typical Anime overhaul in Hololive style for your Rimworld addiction – https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3065106466&searchtext=holorim
