RimWorld Ditches Unity for In-House Engine, Says Saves and Most Mods Will Still Work, and Everything Runs Twice as Fast

which is an absolute masterpiece.

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"We're announcing update 1.7, which migrates RimWorld from Unity to the Waylith Engine, our own in-house engine developed by Ludeon Studios. The look and feel of the game is exactly the same, but performance has improved by 2-4x in our tests.

“You can try 1.7 right now in the unstable beta branch... We stress tested a game colony and saw 2.2x better performance in 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.)

"Your 1.6 savegames will load on 1.7 and if you go back to 1.6 the 1.7 save will work too."

Those are the "wipe your glasses, rub your eyes, triple check you did the math right" numbers that the new Waylith RimWorld engine is throwing out, but it looks like it's the real thing. On Reddit, players testing the new engine are finding impressive results: "At 120 fps and 900 [ticks per second]. Usually my max is 700/60." "Impressive." Although they also report that the new build is RAM hungry: "It eats up RAM like there's no tomorrow. 12-13GB of RAM straight at boot is... something."

Another user accomplished his Ludeon modpack feat by downloading 1,477 mods into the game and hitting go, reporting a drop in load times from "at least 30 minutes" to six minutes and 17 seconds.

That's pretty mind-blowing and pretty impressive, especially considering save games and even most mods can happily go back and forth between the previous Unity RimWorld and its new Waylith iteration. I'm not sure what Dark Gods Lodeon was associated with, but it seems like a worthwhile bargain.

Oh, and the studio curiously signs off: "RimWorld isn't Waylith's only game. We're working on something new! It might be a while before we can share more details, but we couldn't tell you."

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One of Josh's earliest memories is playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was too young to do so, and he has been irreparably addicted to the mind game ever since. His writing has appeared in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play just about anything and has written too much about everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His deepest love is for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition exceeds its budget. He thinks you're too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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