Brilliant indie management sim Rimworld is scrapping its use of the Unity Engine for its own, in-house Waylith Engine.
Usually, games changing engines can be a disastrous situation, at least for games that fans have heavily modded. As games switch engines, a lot breaks. Hell, look at the disastrous launch of Football Manager 26 last year.
Even when games are updated, sometimes, saves break, new bugs appear, and all mods break as fans rush to update them. With Rimworld’s new game engine, however, “the vast majority” will remain perfectly functional in the beloved PC game.
In a statement to fans, developer Ludeon Studios explained that Rimworld 1.7 will be the first version of the game running on the new Waylith Engine. “The game looks and plays exactly the same, but in our tests performance is improved by 2-4x,” the developer told fans.
While performance gains will obviously differ from rig to rig, the developers explained that late-game states that use over 1,000 mods can still see doubled performance under the new engine. Additionally, many mods made for the old version of Rimworld still work under the new engine.
“We stress-tested a late game colony and saw 2.2x better performance on 1.7 compared to 1.6. A modpack with 1,500 mods (!) went from 14 minutes to 6 minutes to load,” the developers said.
Right now, the game’s new engine is available to test on a beta branch of the management sim, and it’s working extraordinarily well. While there are some bugs to be squashed by the time its fully released, fans are already experiencing the new build and marveling not only at its performance gains, but the fact that the majority of existing mods don’t need to be updated at all.
With that said, some mods are, of course, non-functional at the moment and will need updating. The developers explain that, as per usual, non-functioning mods will be highlights in the mod manager as “potentially unsupported”. However, the new engine also means that fans will be able to create larger-scale mods that are more performant than even the biggest mods on the old engine.
“Waylith also gives modders more to work with,” the developer stated, adding that fans can “use the latest C# language features” which make it “easier to write complex mods without negatively impacting the game’s performance”. Additionally, players will be able to make “big visual changes and complex custom effects” more easily.
The developer finished off by teasing the future for the studio, adding that the new engine will power games outside of Rimworld. “RimWorld isn’t the only game on Waylith,” they said. “We’re working on something new! It may be a little while before we can share more details, but we couldn’t resist telling you.”
