Ludeon Studios has announced that RimWorld's update 1.7 moves the colony sim from Unity to the Waylith Engine, the studio's own in-house engine, PC Gamer and Rock Paper Shotgun reported. Ludeon said in a Steam update that the game looks and plays exactly the same, but that in its tests performance improved by 2-4x.
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.
Ludeon said those were its own results and that individual improvements may vary by PC and mod setup. According to Rock Paper Shotgun, the studio listed faster startup, faster loading with large mod lists, quicker map and world generation, and higher ticks per second among the gains.
Saves, mods and hardware
Saves made on version 1.6 load on 1.7, and 1.7 saves also work if a player returns to 1.6. Ludeon said most community mods keep working after the switch; some may show as "potentially unsupported" because of the version change but still function. The studio also warned that 1.7 may not run on PCs more than 10 years old.
Update 1.7 is available now on Steam's unstable beta branch ahead of its official release. Players testing it on Reddit reported higher performance and working mods, both outlets said, while some noted sharply higher RAM use. PC Gamer cited another Reddit user who loaded 1,477 mods and reported the load time falling from "at least 30 minutes" to six minutes and 17 seconds.
Ludeon closed its announcement by saying RimWorld is not the only game on Waylith, and that the studio is working on something new it is not yet ready to detail.
