Über Autistic Rimworld Performance Modding Guide

For extreme TPS autists

Goal: Focus on performance, getting TPS back

Credentials: Dude just trust me, it costs nothing to read and try what I write

If you have common performance problems I would be genuinely surprised that following this does not help you at all

Table of Contents: Navigate as you see fit, but I highly recommend you to read the whole thing if you are retarded

1. Common Sense

2. That Vanilla is a mess

3. Improving the mess in Vanilla Rimworld

4. Modding: Basics

5. Trusted Modders

6. Black Book

7. Performance Extremism

8. My Modlist

Chapter 1: Common Sense

It is necessary to impart common sense because many users who encounter performance problems in Rimworld do not posses it, for example they might know and understand that Rimworld is an unoptimized piece of shit game not designed for the long games at all, but they do not behave as a mod user accordingly, they stress Rimworld's already fragile base by doing retarded things like installing every single animal mod or installing every single mod belonging to a framework like HAR or Vanilla Expanded.

Common Sense is not doing this. Common sense is only running what is relevant to your current playthrough and not having mods in just for no reason, for example if you know you are going to play in the Ice Sheet, then there is no reason to have mods focused on the Arid Shrubland, this is just common sense. Almost everyone could probably take out several mods each playthrough because of the change in biomes and the different playthroughs they are going for, but they do not, they just keep every mod in their list for "just in case" or "too lazy to remove" thus draining their resources for no reason.

Further common sense is reading the mod page of every mod you download and checking for incompatibilities, many people install mods without fully reading, and then they encounter incompatibilities which were totally avoidable like various mods not working with highest ranked mods like Prepare Carefully and being listed in the incompatibility section. Furthermore, from personal observation I have come to know that the overwhelming majority of mod users do not even check, let alone read the mod options, which many mods add that often allow you to tweak settings to your likings and even improve performance in many cases like turning on and off specific costly features like Facial Animation for enemy raiders in [NL] Facial Animation.

Regularly look over your modlist between playthroughs and always ask questions like "Did I use this mod last time?" "Was this mod balanced?" "Did I enjoy this mod?" "Do I actively use this mod or just have it as a gimmick that I barely interact with?" "Would I miss this mod if I removed it?" Mercilessly cull mods in your modlists with these questions in mind, don't worry I operate under this mindset and I'm still running 350-400 rimworld mods despite my stirct regime.

Chapter 2: That Vanilla is a mess

Unfortunately, the reason why I even have to write this guide in the first place is because vanilla Rimworld is an unoptimized mess that quickly becomes undone with the strain of mods, even loading a couple of mid to heavy mods will quickly tank your TPS and it is very obvious mid to late game. Nothing is optimized in vanilla and nothing was geared for long play because Tynan wants you to fuck off from the planet in 5 years and not play dollhouse with pawns as a colony simulator forever. He does not care about long term optimization, his design as a whole clashes with the way his playerbase actually plays, but this is the situation you are dealt with if you want to play Rimworld.

Chapter 3: Improving the Mess in Vanilla Rimworld

Truly essential for any solid base for TPS focused Rimworld modding, do not skip this!

The very first step to gaining some TPS is fixing a lot of the retarded shit in vanilla.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2479389928

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2934420800

https://github.com/bbradson/Fishery

https://github.com/bbradson/Performance-Fish

https://github.com/Ryan-rsm-McKenzie/rimworld-PerformancePatches

Just install all of these without question and put them in your modlist, if you are reading this you are too much of a grug to argue with, just know that they basically fix and optimize a crapton of vanilla behaviour. But this is just common tier shit, almost every long term modder knows and uses these, now time for the time more esoteric stuff that you would only find in a shady guide like this and which you will also not like.

Particular areas of vanilla that are laggy and need their own fix:

All alerts are laggy

For example "mental break warnings" "starvation warnings" "penning warnings" etc

You can disable them all or individually using rocketman or dubs performance analyzer, this might be weird or make your game harder but trust me it is worth the TPS gain to disable them, you will get used to playing without alerts over time.

Vanilla UI is laggy

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2608654598

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2661792499

Install these mods to make vanilla UI toggleable, this will improve your performance, remember to check options and customize it, the more things hidden the better.

Rimworld colonist bar is laggy

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2623453038

Install this to replace it.

Rimworld fire effects can be improved

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2652749788

Install this and set the right options to get more performance friendly fire!

Rimworld vanilla animals are laggy, particuarly the roping and penning mechanisms added in ideology are certified performance shitters if you keep animals, so it is in your interest to actively cull the mechanic and return to pre ideology, there are several methods to this but the one I use which does not require any dependency is the "Animals are smart mod" which removed all the roping from animals

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2616755380

Vanilla pathfinding is laggy, there are multiple mods that address it but the one I use is from the same author as many of the above mods

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2603765747

Mechanoids added in Biotech are laggy, use this mod to aleviate the problem somewhat

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885792215

All Emotes in vanilla rimworld are laggy and you benefit from removing them

Remove healing emotes: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2008662979

Remove sleeping emotes: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2024071585

If you can find a mod that removes other emotes/effects like the ones that children and meditations have then I strongly recommend you install them too

Rimworld random relations are laggy, use this to remove it: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2583377522 It is a shit mechanic anyway

Rimworld "idling" that is when any pawn does not have a task is always one of the laggiest behaviors in the game

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2891653515

Use this mod to add less laggy customized idle behaviors at least for your own pawns, other idle behaviors like those of caravans will still be laggy.

Vanilla Default Unlimited Ingredient Radiuses are laggy

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2909706985

Install this mod to set a default ingredient radius and make it better, the less space the pawns have to look for stuff the better

Filth is laggy

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2629981384

Use this mod to quicken up filth diseappearing outdoors where you are unlikely to clean, you might think this is something minor but it does adds up a lot over time

Vanilla save files are laggy and will keep accumulating increasingly large sizes as long as you keep playing. Your save files can start out 3 or 5 mb and end up at 40 megabytes or higher just midway through.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2978713095

This mod allows you to shrink the sizes of your save files, most significant for long play.

There are a whole lot of other problems with vanilla beyond these, but I only listed the stuff that I know to have fixes. For example stuff that I know are further performance draining such as rot stink gas and linkables, but I never saw any mod that optimizes them.

Chapter 4: Modding Basics

Memory Usage: Rimworld mods use memory, depending on how much RAM you have this segment may or not concern you, if you are low memory with like 8-16 gigs of RAM then you should read this, if you have 32 gigs of RAM then you can probably skip this unless you are exceptionally retarded.

A common mistake many mod users make is not knowing about Rimworld mod memory usage and how much memory individual mods consume, this leads them to installing all sorts of memory heavy mods together that no self aware mod user would do, which will lead to unity crashes on game launch and memory leaks. If your modded Rimworld is crashing on load-up, this is almost certainly why.

The first thing to do is to become aware of mod memory consumption, this is most easily achieved by using a mod called Graphics Settings+

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1678847247

This will allow you to check which mods are the highest memory consumers by displaying them in order of greatness. Generally speaking mods that are below 100 megabytes are largely fine, mods that are 200 megabytes or above mid sized and mods that are 500 megabytes or absolutely heavy. You should use your basic common sense on what to keep and what to remove based on how much RAM you have and what you need, but I'm afraid I cannot instill common sense into you if you don't have it, then just remove the largest ones like a grug.

Texture Optimization

Memory usage chiefly comes from textures, and a good rule of thumb to keep is that any mod with a lot of textures is going to be memory heavy. Modders rarely optimize their textures for performance, which is one of the most common problems and why they are heavy, but fortunately you can resize textures manually yourself or use programs to optimize them for performance.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1847679158

One program for this is the Rimpy mod manager, which has a texture optimization feature, just click on it and select all your mods and let it run for a while and it will have auto created more performance friendly files for all your textures, keep in mind it only works with Graphics Settings+

With my 350-400~ mods sized modlist I am comsuming 9 gigs of memory on launch which then goes to 4-6 gigs during actual playtime, for reference and just to show that you can still have a lot of mods while pruning. This is also an acceptable amount of load for a modlist of my size.

Mod Load Order

I would say this is actually less significant in rimworld than in many other modded games where the wrong load order can result in major fuck-ups or crashes, over the years I barely encountered load order problems in Rimworld, but mind you they can still happen so proper load order is sensible mod user behavior, and furthermore it allows you to easily have every type of mod in their own section.

My own load order largely follows the very old guide somewhere on the rimworld wiki and it goes as follows

1. Prepatcher > Harmony > Fishery > Core > Performance Fish > Official DLC > Cherrypicker

2. Vehicle Frameworks and Vehicle Mods > Hugslib (Following the old SRTS logic mainly)

3. Framework mods

4. Map Gen Mods (Biomes, Faction Bases, Geological Landforms, Biome Transitions, Real Ruins etc)

5. Medical, Surgery and Bionics mods (I also put Gene mods here but not sure if this is correct since i never came across any relevant information regarding this)

6. Pawn Graphic mods, hair, bodies etc

7. Trait mods

8. Storytellers

9. Graphical/Texture replacements

10. Patches to vanilla content and features, simple XML stuff, for example: No Burn Metal, Bo's Milkable Animals, Silent Doors, No more sleeping ZZZss, Dismiss Trader etc

11. Psycast mods, I would also put any logic or behavior heavy mod like Psychology and Common Sense here if you use them

12. Storage Mods

13. Furniture mods, Material Mods, Item Mods, Tech mods, Faction Mods

14. Farming Mods, Food Mods, Drug Mods, Animal Mods

15. Sound&Music mods > Speak Up&Interaction Bubbles > Camera+ > Character Editor, Savegame Shrinker > RJW if you use it > Rimmsqol > Dubs Performance Anaylzer > Graphics Settings+ > Rocketman

Types of Mods to be wary of:

The mods that will be listed here are not an absolute "never install these types of mods" but rather "do a double take, think twice" before installing them and they should be generally among the first to be considered for removal if you have any problems or performance issues. I use many types of mods that I will list here myself, but I have sorted them out largely through trial and experience and know that similar mods often have problems or are a source of performance problems. Many of these categories will not be obvious or self evident as performance problem causers, so just trust me.

Logic mods:

Examples: Common Sense, Pick up and Haul, Replace Stuff, Locks&Locks 2, While you are at it, Breachable Embrasures, Animals Logic, Better Infestations etc. If it is a mod that changes how any pawn behaves, then it is a logic mod.

Mods that change the behavior or logic of pawns. They are one of the most common sources of TPS loss and it is because they are fairly popular and mass installed. Usually they are fine in vacuum, but they conflict with each other, like as a direct example Pick up and Haul is fine on its own but Pick up and Haul + While You Are At It together break things. Sometimes though they break things on their own Breachable Embrasures is incredibly laggy in any late game sized raids and can freeze the entire game with its raider path calculation.

Another problem with logic mods is that while they can interact well with vanilla there is no telling how they will function in a large modded environment, for a hypothetical, a logic mod involving pathfinding, it might work perfectly fine on vanilla terrain but what about modded terrain or terrain that behaves differently from vanilla? There are no gurantees and I would say they are the type of mods both most likely to break things and lead to performance losses often in not obvious ways. Like if you find weird bizarre behavior such as pawns not eating or pawns just standing around after years of everything being fine, then it is highly likely that a pawn logic mod or a work mod broke something.

Personally I dislike using these type of mods the most, on my modlist you will find one or two of them, but most of the time I prefer to suffer vanilla behavior rather than risk things breaking and tps being fucked.

Work Mods

They fall into 2 categories, mods that modify vanilla work behavior and mods that add new types, the former is likely to cause problems while the latter has a minor TPS effect.

Examples: Quarry (New work type quarrying), Work Tab, Work Manager, Fishing (New work Type fishing) etc.

For the first type many of the comments from Logic mods apply, while the second type is a lot less obvious, but basically they snowball and the more new work types you add the higher the drain on your TPS becomes, this is because the jobdriver is one of the laggiest components of vanilla rimworld as it constantly checks each pawn for what work they can do and assigns them new work, by adding a bunch of new work types such as quarrying, fishing, writing, etc. you are putting even more strain on this already shitty calculation process which can result in TPS losses, but depending on your modlist you might not notice anything from adding new work types, it is just something that can snowball with a lot of other things.

Frameworks:

Examples: Jectools, Outpost Core, Bill Doors Frameworks, Vanilla Framework Expanded, Humanoid Alien Races etc.

Largely speaking the issue with frameworks is not about them in a vacuum but the behavior mod users commonly exhibit when using them, namely the mentality that once they install a framework they feel the need to install and try out every mod using that framework, like installing HAR and running 10 different alien races at once or installing VEF and running almost every single VE mod at once causes far more damage than the frameworks themselves and is generally a very bad modding mentality to have that quickly snowballs into a lot of performance loss.

That said sometimes the Framework itself is performance heavy, chief in example being the Vanilla Expanded Framework. Tests have been conducted which shows that the Vanilla Expanded Framework just on its own can cause a game with 50 pawn 900 TPS to go into 600 TPS with nothing else loaded, there is very little good reason for this and incredibly few mods exhibit TPS loss on this level in similar tests.

https://arch.b4k.co/vg/thread/461922046/#q462437153

There have been a lot of other bad reportings involving this framework including running modules and scripts for mods using the VEF framework that are not loaded regardless of whether you use it or not. That said this particular framework has a shitton of defenders and is very popular, in fact you will not find its performance problems mentioned on any of the other Rimworld performance guides. I play with VEF and VE mods on and off myself but the amount of people excusing garbage coding and optimization is legitimately annoying.

Lighting Mods

Examples: Wall Lights, Glass&Lights, Floor Lights, Open Doors Don't Block Light, Auto Light Switch, any mod that adds its own lights (practically every other furniture mod)

One of the least obvious mod types to be wary of, but yes it is here for good reason, unfortunately it is hard for the common mod user to detect the bad ones, but basically any light mod that just hooks into vanilla light behavior and does not modify anything is going to fine and safe to install, whereas light mods that modify the light system or add their own changes and calculations could cause major TPS loss mainly via glow grid updates, I think one of the mining co mods from the old days was an example of this, also Open Doors Don't Block Light, but it has been a while since I encountered direct problems.

Mods that add idle entities

The vanilla "idle" behavior, which is the behavior that entities do when they aren't given a "task" is one of the heaviest and most laggy actions in Rimworld, and as such any mod that adds idle entities worsens the problem and should generally be avoided, if you care about performance you should want to reduce idle entities as much as possible, and not add to it. Encountering mods that add idle entities is a matter of trial and error but for example the crafted entities in Rimworld the Dark Descent is one of the worst and heaviest examples I have seen, other mod examples of this involve Aliens vs Predator and Typhon.

Dynamic Graphics mods

Examples: Facial Animation, Holsters, RJW Sized Apparel etc. Basically any mod that adds graphic that is dynamic (it changes) rather than being a static texture (does not change)

Individually most of these are fine but together they have a tendency to snowball into massive performance loss due to constant draw calculations that only get worse the more elements being checked are present, that is mods that add dynamic graphics to pawns will increase the performance cost of every pawn and it gets worse the more pawns you have on. Out of these, Sized Apparel is very bad with its calculations unless it was fixed since I last checked out. While Facial Animation is surprisingly well optimized for what it does and is highly tweakable.

The main matter here is always to ask "is this dynamic graphic worth the TPS loss?" when installing them, in my personal case I always say yes in regards to Facial Animation, but even more puritanical performance autists may beg to differ.

Script Heavy Mods

Examples: Rimworld of Magic, Rimwar and Pawnmorpher

This should be obvious, but creating a well optimized script heavy mod is like the ultimate test of a modder, they are mods that add completly new features not present in vanilla and do entirely new things. Unfortunately, most modders are not skilled enough to do this without significant performance loss but they make them anyway. Pawnmorpher is a top tier example of this, almost everything in it is super heavy and laggy from the constant checks, the scripts and even the individual hediffs that are kept track on every pawn. Rimwar is an amazing idea as a mod but in practice means consigning your performance into oblivion. Exercise highest of cautions with such mods and basically only go for mod authors you trust.

Giga Mods

Mods that are extremely heavy and large, containing a ton of content, textures and new defs. The only things more impactful would be total overhaul mods which Rimworld does not have many notable examples of.

Examples: Alpha Animals, Illya Tech, JurrasicRim, Megafauna, Vanilla Expanded Insectoids, Vanilla Expanded Empires, Rimworld of Magic, Pawnmorpher etc

There are reasons to be wary of these mods from multiple fronts, for one they are all memory heavy and are chief contributors to memory leaks and unity crashes due to memory overload, the average modder uses several giga mods and it is a prime source of their problems. The average gigamod is several hundred megabytes, contains potentially hundreds if not thousands of textures and adds a shitton of defs, for example a giga animal mod adding 100 new animals will also add 200 defs for the meat of the animal and the leather of the animal. On top of this they may also contain very expensive and heavy scripts that further drag down the TPS much like a script heavy mod.

Extreme prejudice should be exercised against these mods and should be one of the first targets of any mod culling. Never have these mods on "just for the sake of it" because they are almost all are a major drain on resources. Playing with 10 or more Giga mods is already insanity especially if you are running an already large and extensive modlist, they are far better suited for smaller modlists and specialized playthroughs focusing on their content, but most players do not want to hear this, these types of mods are extremely popular and people would sooner spring to their defense than remove it. I would say an average large modlist can afford to run about 3 gigamods~ with minimal drain, depending on what it is.

Reference Mods

Any mod that focuses on modding in content from another established franchise such as Warhammer, Mass Effect, Halo, SCP or whatever rather than doing original content.

This may be me going full autism, but I don't think I ever played with a reference mod that was well made, they are almost all universially performance heavy, poorly balanced and loaded with a shitton of stuff like a Giga Mod. The reason why they probably suck is because their primary goal is creating the reference and including as many references as possible rather than creating a good and balanced mod. I admit this is fully my personal autism at display here, but I genuinely tried out a lot of reference mods and they always had problems in one form or another.

Testing performance in game

Any mod user can do live testing thanks to the existence of Dubs Performance Analyser which displays your TPS and allows you to check individual processes, it should be essential to have it on to any large modlist user.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2038874626

It is worth taking a look at the performance of a colony that has arrived mid to late game and seeing what is taking the most resources and contributing to the most performance drain, it can be very effective in spotting the bad apples in your large modlists. There are basically 2 types to pay attention for, mods that have a constant high drain and mods that occassionally "spike up" but otherwise have minimal or little impact, the spiking ones can be detected by looking at the min vs max differences, there are a lot of mods that have a strong spike when certain events occur but are otherwise negligible for example the mod Remote Tech spikes up every time you build a power conduit because of the way its unique power systems are handled.

Mod Errors

Whenever your game loads up it is pretty useful to check what dev mode messages you get, chances are that if you are running a large mod list you will get at least some errors either in red or yellow variety, red being the more severe type of errors. Try to read these individually and see what they say and what mod is the source of the errors. A lot of these errors can be basically harmless like telling you that raiders will not be able to afford some item or that X item from Y mod is not smeltable properly, but a lot of other times they can be a signifier of worse problems. When you get these errors try to at least always identify the source and do a test run to see if everything is working proplery.

This should also really be under "common sense" but mod users clearly do not possess it as I have seen them continue with major problems like dev mode not opening. Problems like that should always be eliminated at earliest opportunity, though when it comes to error themselves it is a matter of experience. Furthermore it is a worthwhile to open up Dev Mode mid to late game or any time you feel like the TPS is tipping to check the dev log, because a lot of times everything can seem fine early game but then midway you open the dev log and find it is full red error spam, if that happens that can be a major hit to your performance. You basically never want error spam in your dev log under any circumstance.

Chapter 5. Trusted Modders

Modders who I know to be skilled and capable, and whose mods I would happily install with minimal checking just from the fact that it was made by them regardless of content. This is basically just a recommendation section. Feel free to skip it.

⦁ Dubwise https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197976408970/myworkshopfiles/?appid=294100

⦁ Chicken Plucker https://steamcommunity.com/id/chickenplcker/myworkshopfiles/?appid=294100

⦁ 삼치구이/CeroForGrill https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197992196542/myworkshopfiles/

⦁ FSF https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=1126939590

⦁ Mr Hydralisk https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2881658444

⦁ [SYR] Syrchalis https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=1474000866

⦁ DimonSever000 (Though his content and balancing is another matter) https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2266573460

⦁ Dr Zhivago https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198062060169/myworkshopfiles?appid=294100

Chapter 6: Black Book

Modders/Mods that I distrust, when it comes to the modders that this isn't to say that I neccesarily don't or would not use one of their mods, just that I expect to face bugs or performance issues if I do use one of their mods based on their previous track record. There will also be a lot of mods and modders I'll miss mentioning as bad apples simply because I did not remember them from the top of my head at the writing of this and looking over the entire workshop modlist would delay the writing of this for too long.

⦁ SirMashedPotato is the negative example used in "Mods that add idle entities" the way his Rimworld the Dark Descent absolutely tanked my performance with just a handful of idle entities killed my trust in him as a modder. https://steamcommunity.com/id/SirMashedPotato/myworkshopfiles?appid=294100

⦁ EdB Prepare Carefully - Notoriously incompatible with a wide number of mods, coded like shit, just searching Prepare Carefully in the workshop will bring you a ton of mods up who mention it because it is incompatibe with them.

⦁ Torann - Creator of Rimwar and Rimworld of Magic - Rimworld of Magic is one of my favourite mods, so I do not list them out of malice

⦁ Roolo - Creator of many great mods that are now maintained in superior and more performance friendly form by other modders like owlchemist https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198042626816/myworkshopfiles/?appid=294100

⦁ Oskar Potoczki - TPS drain of VEF aside which I already mentioned his mods are often filled with bugs and game breaking problems even after years of release, not to mention vast array of incompatibilities and VE mods not even being compatible with each other. Also just to bring some evidence to his sloppiness.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/changelog/1938420742

This is the changelog of Vanilla Events Expanded. The mod was released in 2019 and it says right here that in Update: 20 Jan, 2023 @ 5:31pm "- Fix hunting party crash to desktop" among other thing, which means that this bug was in his mod for 4 years after release, a fact that I can attest to as someone who continuously used this mod. This is the quality that you can expect from Oskar Potoczki and VE right here, a game crashing bug taking 4 fucking years to address. I'm being extra harsh here because he is basically a paid modder.

⦁ Sarg Bjornson - King of the Giga Mods. His mods are most often heavy in both script and textures, balancing is often poor, some areas can have crippling bad coding leading to TPS loss, otherwise I actually like his mods and his creativity

⦁ Neronix17 - Enormous Faggot https://steamcommunity.com/id/durge13/myworkshopfiles/?appid=294100

⦁ aRandomKiwi - Several examples of heavy logic mods such as Hunt for Me, Kill for Me, Guards for Me ETC https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198059955795/myworkshopfiles/?appid=294100

⦁ Machine - Creator of two mods, Raise the Roof and Better Infestations, both are fairly heavy on the TPS https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198001936748/myworkshopfiles/?appid=294100

⦁ Ayameduki - Creator of very heavy race mods that are often both poorly optimized and balanced, you can encounter several TPS killing problems with his races especially the one that has the splitting and reviving (forgot which) https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198413693021/myworkshopfiles/?appid=294100

⦁ Fluffy's Breakdown https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2584064444 Makes the shitty repair job even worse by adding a ticking component to every single break-downable building, TPS effect increases the more stuff you have

⦁ Cybernetic Warfare and Special Weapons https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2155485488 had a sizable TPS impact last time I used it (which was a while ago), never seen another weapon mod spike up anywhere as bad in Dubs Performance Analyzer

⦁ Some Things Float https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2940072380 - Excellent way to kill your performance, last time I tried it did not work correctly with map gen mods like map designer, it did not obey its own options settings and is all around a very laggy mod with what it does

⦁ Proximity https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2156644611 A shitty framework that only shitty TPS killing mods like More Archotech Garbage use

⦁ Steve's Animals formerly Bastion https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2479431577 Giga animal pack, poor performance, many animals straight up do not work properly

⦁ Apocrypha 2033 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2970206222 Typical Example of a Giga Mod, it has 1200+ textures and several hundred megabytes of memory usage, I really like the look, but hard avoid if you care about performance

⦁ Expanded Roofing - TPS heavy like all roofing mods https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2879451927&searchtext=

⦁ Biomes! Series - The most tps heavy biomes you can play on

⦁ MOHAR - A HAR sub-framework for specific races like Moyo, unlike HAR itself, MOHAR is poorly optimized and more performance heavy, unless you are going to focus on playing with specific MOHAR races I do not recommend it

⦁ [SZ]/Diamond J [[SZ] Denotes a series of Chinese made mods focusing on Chinese focused content https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2411388723 Often poorly made, equally poorly balanced, the one with the animals and raids had poor performance and gave TPS loss. One of the modders involved in this series has been accused by commenters of maliciously updating the [SZ] mods to brick mod user saves, comment sections are full of drama. Just stay away.

⦁ Antimatter Annihilation - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2113692574 Broke my save last time I tried to play with it, has various TPS heavy components, seems it has been abandoned by its dev, last updated a year ago.

⦁ Android Tiers - Notoriously one of the heaviest HAR race mods, also counts as a Giga Mod due to the absurd amount of content it has. Imo there is little reason to play with it in Biotech era and many of its part have been now made standalone

⦁ AOC Cleanup Devil - One of the MOHAR using race mods, seems to be additionaly heavy on its own, a lot of AOC items and equipment have weird ticking components on them, draining further TPS when present

⦁ Bill Doors Props - Notably Memory Heavy for a prop mod https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3118374245

⦁ Locks - Messes with pathfinding calculations and increases their cost

⦁ Jectools well known poor performance framework, but a lot of cool old mods use it

⦁ Psychology (?) Seemed fine on initial testing then I did a longer play with it for a few years and it started throwing constant red errors, not enough to noticably slow the game but it was still strange&concerning, more testing is required. It is definitely not as bad as the reputation it sometimes has

⦁ Rikiki https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198021336326 Creator of the mining co and some other mods, mining co is one of the mods that cause performance loss from lighting glowgrid refreshing mentioned in earlier section

⦁ Aliens vs Predator - One of the heaviest HAR mods, certified performance killer, no longer actively updated or developed

⦁ Vanilla Expanded Empires - Massively populates History with World Pawns for its imperial system, my save file is several times larger when I use it than when I don't

⦁ Hospitality - Not bad by itself actually, but it populates world pawns with its visitors snowballing the world pawn size which does affect your save file size TPS, the problem here is not wih hospitality, but with vanilla, any other mod that similarly populates the world pawn list is also bad and should be avoided if you value TPS over these functions

⦁ JurrasicRim - Extremely heavy and large Gigamod, there is a version with only the dinosaurs and nothing else which is better but still Gigamod tier https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2567489721

⦁ VAE Facial Animations Expanded https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2890697696 Very memory heavy facial animation pack, almost 1 gig, if your modlist is already strained and near the limit then putting this in will probably get you an unity crash on load up

⦁ Vanilla Achievments Expanded - TPS heavy mod for no good reason, basically every achievment is constantly "being checked" if it has been completed causing a TPS drain, completing the said achievments stops them from "being checked" and frees up TPS though. At least this is how it worked last time I played with it years ago.

⦁ RJW Animation - Runs better than you would expect, but if you open dev log you should see that it likes to place red errors when initializing animations, does not seem to have a significant effect though

⦁ Fluffy - Work Tab and Colony Manager are well known to be TPS heavy, barely active anymore, many mods not properly updated.

⦁ Animals Logic - TPS heavy logic mod, also fuck animals

⦁ Colonist Bar KF - The Best Colonist bar mod to kill your performance

⦁ Avoid Friendly Fire - Just take the friendly fire if you want your TPS intact

⦁ Loft/Bunk Beds when they first released I have singled them out for making a save file unplayable, I do not care if they are fixed now, there is no good reason for a fucking bed mod to kill your performance

⦁ Real Fog of War - Kills your performance, unlike the fog of war included in the CAI mod

⦁ Medieval Times - A very old and very bad giga mod, just avoid

⦁ Call of Cthulhu Cults - TPS heavy even for a Jectools mod, still worth a single playthrough imo, just because it is cool

⦁ RimHUD - Minor TPS impact, which is never acceptable from mods like this, others will beg to differ

⦁ Path Avoid - Avoid any mod like this if you do not know what you are doing

⦁ Interaction Bubbles - Has a TPS impact as long as the Bubble display is turned on, turning off Bubbles using the added gizmo negates this. Completely fine to use it during slow moments and disable with gizmo when speeding through

⦁ Pawn Badge + Similar mods - Not worth the TPS cost

⦁ Combat Readiness Check - Poor unoptimized code from an old mod, many people use it for performance and make a mistake, rarely discussed but it is TPS costly

⦁ Holsters - Example of a TPS heavy dynamic graphics mod

⦁ Research Reinvented - Makes research more TPS costly

⦁ Where is my weapon - TPS impact, don't drop X mods might be better but never tried

⦁ Smart Medicine - Costly performance impact whenever someone is injured or sick

⦁ Realistic Manhunters - Worked fine for ages then all of a sudden it broke one of my saves and I isolated it as a cause

⦁ Vanilla Expanded Winston Waves - Will work fine 90% of the time but the other 10% of the time it can brick your save file by improperly scheduling events, which will make non Winston Wave events unable to fire (not intended) and during this state it will red error spam your dev log causing TPS loss, this state will remain until you manually go into your save file to clear scheduled events. I suspect this problem occurs when saving and reloading with Winston Waves one, but never did more testing, just be aware of this potential error when using it.

⦁ Don't Block Door - Shit code

Chapter 7: Performance Extremism

If I have not lost you yet, this is the part where you will grow tired of reading my shit. This is where I will make radical gameplay altering suggestions that will probably go against what a lot of players like. This is essentially a TPS maximizing page for large modlists. If you are a true TPS fanatic though, then every information here is worthwhile advice.

Caravans are laggy Get rid of them

Caravans upon arriving enter the "idle" state where they wander around doing nothing until it is time for them to depart, as I mentioned previously the "idle" state is the laggiest state for rimworld entities to be in, so this means that whenever caravans are around they actively slow down your game not just from the number of pawns they bring but from the persistent idling they do, they are actually more impactful to performance than even larger raids. On top of this they constantly populate history with the pawns they visited, increasing the size of your save file and lowering your TPS over time.

Fortunately they are very easy to get rid of, you can simply disable them in scenario settings or use a mod like Vanilla Events Expanded to disable the event there. You can them replace them entirely with the Trader Ships mod https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2046222331 that adds its own trader ship landing events or you can buff the orbital traders.

Disable Shadows for a small performance boost

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1780338926

Flora&Fauna are laggy Get rid of them

Probably the worst and most offensive thing I have said to Rimworld players so far, but yes this is true. Animals and Vegetation are simply not optimized whatsoever and have an effect on your performance. Pretty much anyone who ever had chickens in Rimworld and let them breed without control can know how fast those small critters can cause an effect on your performance, and likewise a lot of other people implictly understand that playing on sea ice is a lot faster (performance wise) than playing on any forest. Flora&Fauna are the reason why, every piece of flora, down to every individually simulated piece of grass is a constantly ticking element in Rimworld that is not optimized, likewise every single animal on the map is wasting your TPS with its idle behavior.

As such any mods that increase Flora&Fauna are your enemies if you are a TPS autist and mods that reduce them are your friends. Likewise the best performance biomes you can play in vanilla rimworld are Sea Ice > Ice Sheet > Desert > Extreme Desert > Arid Shrubland > Everything else. Of course forests are the most popular biomes among Rimworld playerbase so I do not expect anyone to change their playstyles, but I listed it as an option nonthless.

Optimizing Raids for Performance

Any Rimworld player who has ever reached late game and gotten doomstacks that took several seconds just to load then felt their TPS tanking from the massive 200+ entity doomstack raid knows that they can sink your TPS and even crash your game. Now what a lot of people do prevent reaching this point is doing something called "wealth management" but that is frankly boring and even more autistic than being a TPS autist, instead I recommend fixing this problem more conveniently with mods.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2927368319

The compressed raiders mod is the best tool for this option as it keeps the threat and danger level the same as what you would normally face but you get less pawns which are vastly stronger, for example instead of getting 100 enemies with the mod on you might 50 strong enemies decked out cybernetics and full of drugs effects. The mod itself has a wide variety of customization options perfect for tailoring it to your own experience. You can set how many enemy pawns to receive per raid and anything above that number will get compressed into a stronger pawn instead of more pawns.

Use your own logic and common sense what number and settings to use, everyone should know at what point raids start affecting their performance and just how much they can handle.

Storing Food Performance Free

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2645100914

This fridge mod disables the temperature code of anything placed in it rather than interacting with the temperature mechanic and freezing food, it allows for a more performance efficient food storage in your base this way.

Replace Vanilla Terrain Textures for a performance boost

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2255087854

And yes, I do agree that the textures are ugly.

Having a large number of pawns with no performance impact

Believe it or not this is possible, you just need mod for its again.

https://github.com/feldoh/PawnStorages

This mod allows you to "store" pawns in a nearly cost free state where they are not ticking or draining resources. This mod as such enables you to have potentially have hundreds of pawns without any significant effect on your resources. If you are lucky the "scheduling" might also work and allow you to set up different schedules for when the stored pawns should be active (it does not work half the time, it is a WIP mod).

Why not just use Cryptosleep caskets? Because they are still ticking and are a drain of resources, you can easily check this by starting on a map with an ancient danger that has cryptosleep pawns, if you open Dubs Performance Analyser you should be able to find the Cryptosleeping ancients showing up in one of the Dubs Performance Analyser. While this mod storage is truly cost efficient.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3034182013

This mod also nearly allows the same effect, it gives you the ability to "pause" any pawn, stopping every ticking effect on them, they will be in perfect stasis until you unpause them, this similarly allows you to have a large number of pawns with little to no cost.

Isn't this cheating? Well yes, but it is up to you to use it responsibly and it is your choice whether you care about having more TPS or not cheating more.

Optimizing Storage, being a hoarder with no performance impact

This is something often I have never seen discussed or mentioned in any Rimworld performance discussion so once again I'm treading new ground here, but hoarding items has a TPS effect, it is fairly small mind you, but the more you hoard the more it snowballs and many players play like hoarders so this is of interest to them. The reason for this is probably partially due to job codes like hauling. The hauling job code would scan every single allowed item and see if it "needs to be hauled" or moved to a different storage with higher priority, as such the cost of the haul code would increase with every haulable item and this is just 1 job script, I suspect there is a similar effect on other jobs.

Well fortunatuely mods once again allow you to hoard performance free, there are 2 main options at the moment.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2832382534

The first being a revival of the old RimSilo mod that allows you to pay for basically orbital warehouses where you can store a crapton of items and retrieve any time. The items stored here won't be on your map, so they will not count towards any calculations or code, instead they will be in perfect stasis until retrieved. Rimsilo has rising taxes for the storage space used so if your colony is not generating adequate silver every quadrum it might be expensive.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3021706489

The second option is the much newer Underground Vault mod that allows you to store items on your map but 'underground' which in effect is still the same as RimSilo's storage method where they are removed from calculations and are no longer active elements that could affect your performance once put underground. This mod even gives Cryptosleep vaults that actually do have cost free cryptosleep storage once lowered underground similar to the pawn storage mods.

With these mods basically you will never have to worry about the performance cost of hoarding ever again.

Optimizing your base for performance

The fewer things that are going on in your base map the better performance you will have, but how would you go about achieving this thing? After all the more your base grows the busier things get and the more things will be happening. Well one way is outsourcing a significant portion of your production to be off map, which can be achieved mainly by 2 mods Empire and Vanilla Outposts Expanded

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3017452577

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2688941031

Yes, these are basically secret performance mods as long as you actually decrease production happening inside your base, otherwise they will just add to your performance cost as they have their own ticking elements. The best productions to outsource to these off the map sites are animal husbandry and farming/food making, this way you can skip the two laggiest elements of Rimworld while still receiving their benefits, but for ideal performance most of the productions will be happening off map. You can also just not produce anything, collect silver taxes from your off the map bases and then just manually buy anything you need, which is also a solid strategy, in which case it would be best to load up on several trade ship mods.

But what if you want to produce things inside your base? Well even that can be optimized.

https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2033979700

Project Rimfactory is technically also a secret performance mod as long as you adjust your playstyle in addition to using it. For starters it severely reduces the need for pawns once you get it going, you pretty much only need high level constructors who can replace any damaged or lost high level cost Rimfactory buildings, fighters and doctors, that is it, all other job types become entirely supplamantable with this mod on. You not needing as many pawns will improve performance and you not having pawns assigned to a bunch of jobs that are replaced by machines will also improve performance. Playing a relatively small human pop colony with Rimfactory is demonstratibly TPS efficient. Of course you can also just combine it with the cost free pawn storage mods.

On top of this due to recipe databanks and universal auto crafters, you can severely reduce your work stations and qued jobs all over the place, because it becomes possible to craft anything with just 1 station, you want a station that can cremate, refine, smelt and machine all at the same time? You can do that with Rimfactory and it is more TPS efficient. The Autocrafter and recipe database is compatible with almost every modded recipe and work station too, I only encountered a couple of things it did not work with.

Disabling Map Gen Mods after you generated a Map

Not many people know but map gen mods like Biome Transitions and Geological Landorms and Map Preview all have a constant performance impact even outside map genning, so you can gain a small boost by disabling them after you have generated your map, and yes you can do it safely. I have done it many times. Map Preview probably has the worst impact from these.

The Forbidden One: Rimthreaded and Rimworld 1.2

There exists an old mod that truly unleashes the performance of Rimworld, and shows you just a glimpse of what Rimworld could be if Tynan Sylvester actually gave a shit about performance. It is in fact far more effective than if you were to combine everything that I have listed here together. The problem? It stopped being developed and no stable version for Rimworld 1.4 exists, or for 1.3 for that matter. The most stable version was back in Rimworld 1.2 which is where you would have to roll back to if you wanted to use it, before Ideology, before Biotech.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2652641362

Nevertheless True Performance Autists might be interested in pursuing this option, and it is not like 1.2 Rimworld is barren in mods, Rimworld already had thousands of mods back then, many of which are no longer updated or only exist in entirely different forms, it could be interesting to some to go back and play with these older mods and experience a different than usual Rimworld, but you cannot reliably get older versions of mods on the Steam Workshop because of its auto updates and mod authors frequently fucking up older versions with their updates.

https://catalogue.smods.ru/game/rimworld/

So your option for modding becomes Skymods.ru which actually stores older versions of mods it has listed, but some of their older download links are defunct and if you cannot get it on Skymods then you are probably fuck out of luck from playing with the older versions of mods, and as more download links become unavailable this option narrows out further and further use, so if you find this an interesting proposition I recommend you try it sooner rather than later.

One thing I must address in regards to this is that Rimthreaded often has a reputation of being an incompatible mess that crashes with large modlists. As someone who has played 400+ sized Rimworld modlist with Rimthreaded on I can safely debunk this, I played for years and never had any major problems. I suspect this reputation once again has arisen from the fact that most mod users are frankly retarded and do not use common sense when installing and using mods, and such they probably did not read Rimthreaded's wiki and its list of incompatible mods that it does not work with.

https://github.com/cseelhoff/RimThreaded/wiki

Following their guide has worked for me flawlessly when using it.

Chapter 8: My Modlist

https://pastebin.com/JHq9CkYh

This is my current 364 mod amount modlist, currently running a 6 year old late game tier colony where I still have my 4 speed working. Thorughout the paper I mentioned 350-400 mods, that is because I'm currently playing without the ideology dlc, with the ideology DLC my modlist usually goes over 400, so it varies. The reason why I'm putting my modlist out there is to prove that I'm not talking out of my ass, you can be a performance autist and still run a large modlist with several heavy mods.

Of course as a responsible mod user I know exactly what to remove to make it run even better: VAE Facial Animation, Obsidia Expansion+All Submods, Pavia, Big&Small Framework + All submods, Prison Labor, Better Humanoid Mechanoid, Reinforced Mechanoid, Vehicles&Aerocraft + Submods. Those are some of the heavier mods in my modlist.

Conclusion

Doubtlessly I have left out plenty of things I wanted to cover with such a huge material, and it still came out as a rather lengthy text, even just following a small portion of my suggestions should be helpful to your TPS and you always have the option of doing all of them at once for maximum TPS autism. I hope this guide was useful to you as it was my first guide ever.