RimWorld is one of the most-played management sims, pitting players against the wilderness on one of the planets at the galaxy’s edge. Whether or not players survive is up to them and the characters they’re in charge of. While the vanilla game is fun, you can improve it with different mods.
Whether you want to make the game a little easier or add more depth, there is likely a mod that will suit you. Luckily, you can find a wealth of mods through the Workshop section on Steam. Unfortunately, you can’t mod any of the console versions of RimWorld. Here’s all the information you need about the best Rimworld mods to play in 2022.
Best RimWorld mods in 2022
One of the best parts about playing RimWorld on PC is the ability to mod nearly anything you don’t like about the game, allowing you to customize it fully. Readers should note that many of these mods will require the Harmony tool or HugsLib to work effectively.
1. Common Sense
You’ll likely come to appreciate your inhabitants as the game goes on, but it’s safe to say that they can sometimes be a little less than smart. Living on a desolate planet can be taxing on your mood and resources. It’s compounded when your villagers do stupid things like combining bad ingredients or ruining perfectly sorted materials.
With the Common Sense mod, your inhabitants will begin to consider their moods, sorting locations, and other major improvements to maintaining mood and food. No more cooking in dirty rooms or leaving a mess behind after healing a patient with the Common Sense mod.
2. Medical Tab
Having a healthy settlement is the key to progressing, and having an infection spread through your inhabitants can be devastating if you’re not careful. However, it hasn’t always been easy to know how your inhabitants feel until they get sick or bleed to unconsciousness.
With the Medical Tab mod, players can get a new medical overview tab that shows stats for Colonists, Animals, Prisoners, Visitors, and Hostiles at a glance.
3. Children, School, and Learning
One of the most important reasons to have kids in history was to have more hands to work on the farm and otherwise provide for their family. Now, you have the same option to grow your flock in RimWorld‘s Children, School, and Learning, with women now able to get pregnant. The teenagers pop out near-grown and will become full-fledged adults in one in-game calendar year.
In the year that the children exist as teenagers, players can use school and lunch tables to teach the characters new skills. This will ensure that when they come of age, they’ll be productive members of society. It can be really useful in filling any low-skill areas in your settlement, so you do not have to rely on strangers roaming around your area.
4. RimWorld Multiplayer
While there is a lot to do in RimWorld, it can be lonely founding your fledgling settlement by yourself. With the RimWorld Multiplayer mod, you can easily establish neighboring or warring settlements with friends, playing out your unique adventures. This mod works with Steam’s systems as is, meaning that you should just be able to invite players using the mod’s interface.
Players will be able to connect through LAN, Steam, or port-forwarding. The mod should work with Ideology, Royalty, and most vanilla features, but players are encouraged to reach out on the Discord server to resolve any issues.
5. Research Reinvented
In the original RimWorld research process, players will assign a research project and have one of their villagers stand at a table for five weeks studying something. This is a long process if you’re trying to get to later machines, but Research Reinvented reimagines it. Players can reverse engineer projects like Turrets in this new mod by finding them out in the world.
Players can research weapons and other machines to make sure they can craft as many copies as needed. If you don’t have any items to reverse engineer, you can always use the Theory research option to use a method similar to the vanilla research mechanic.
6. EdB Prepare Carefully
At the start of every new game in RimWorld, you’ve just crash-landed on a planet on the outer edge of the galaxy, forced to survive. However, it can often be random, leaving the player with a random amount of resources and gear. With the EdB Prepare Carefully mod, you’ll get full control over your colonists, their gear, and their relationships with one another.
To use it, you’ll need to click the Prepare Carefully button while editing your crash survivors for the first time. You can even save a preset to return to that same group and gear the next time you start a new game.
7. 1-2-3 Personalities
A great part of RimWorld is how the characters’ random behavior can generate a unique kind of storytelling. Rivalries can erupt, and friendships will blossom if you leave your inhabitants alone for long enough. With 1-2-3 Personalities, players can give their colonists new ways to behave and talk with varying degrees of depth.
According to the mod page, there are 1,300,000 different combinations of characters that can be implemented as part of this mod. These new personalities will drive everything about a character, from how they behave to the relationships they form.
8. Replace Stuff
One thing that’s not so fun about the vanilla RimWorld is that you can’t easily upgrade buildings with new materials. If you want to build something where one of your current buildings is, you have to deconstruct the first one before replacing it with another, which can take a lot of time. With Replace Stuff, you can just build over the top of your existing walls, doors, and furniture.
There are bonus features as part of the upgrade, such as bed owners keeping their designated beds and cold rooms staying cold while the upgrades are implemented. This is a well thought-out mod, with the mod page detailing dozens of ways players can use it.
8. Interaction Bubbles
As stated above, the natural storytelling in the game is one of the best parts of playing long sessions of RimWorld. Players can follow along in the log as the characters react to the world around them and each other. However, it can be somewhat difficult to follow along in the log where everything else happens.
With the Interaction Bubbles mod, you’ll see characters’ social interactions above their heads as it happens. This makes following each interaction much easier since you’ll know what the NPCs are saying and doing.
9. Hospitality
Sometimes during your session in RimWorld, a touring faction will pass through your settlement’s area on the map. They don’t want to harm you, they’re just there for a friendly visit as they pass through to their destination. You can interact and trade with them, but it doesn’t really go beyond that. With the Hospitality mod, you can provide a welcoming stop for them, complete with beds and activities.
If you impress them enough, you may even be able to recruit them to join your settlement. This gives you a new depth of action when neighboring factions visit. You’ll even be able to set up selling areas and vending machines to help make some money from the faction members that don’t intend to stay.
10. Expanded Prosthetics and Organ Engineering
Living on a planet without major medical infrastructure means you’re on your own when you lose a limb. If you’re lucky enough not to bleed out, you’d have to live without that organ or limb in the vanilla version of RimWorld. However, with Expanded Prosthetics and Organ Engineering, you can research and provide your colonists with new artificial organs and prosthetic limbs.
You’ll initially start with the ability to make peg legs and hook hands, but you can learn to make regular prosthetics for bionics through research. While bionic weapons can be expensive, they boost the character who was previously at a disadvantage.
11. Defensive Positions
When your base is under attack in RimWorld, you must immediately send every inhabitant to a defensive position. This can take a long time, depending on your base size and how many colonists you have. With Defensive Positions, you can save your defensive layouts and then send your villagers to them with a click of a single button.
This will save you time and prepare you to defend your home settlement. If you choose the advanced mode, you can save up to four defensive posts per colonist.
12. Vanilla Expanded Animals
The regular animals in RimWorld are great, but they aren’t diverse at all. Your colonists will repeatedly eat the same three animals for years before you can finally build your spaceship. However, with the Vanilla Animals Expanded mod, you can get a huge boost to the ecosystem inside the game.
This mod adds dozens of new animals to the game, from Lions to Mandrills and everything in between. Certain animals will only spawn in their specific biomes, but that just means that some are more valuable for trading based on their rarity.
13. Color-Coded Mood Bar
Keeping tabs on many settlers can be difficult, especially when you’re the only thing keeping them happy. An unhappy colonist means they’ll be less productive and get into more fights. With the Color Coded Mood Bar, you can keep tabs on all of your settlers in one place and know exactly how much attention they need to become happy again.
14. Map Reroll
When you start a new session of RimWorld, you’ll need to pick where your colonists crash land on the island. Unfortunately, randomly generated maps don’t always provide the best options for your playthrough. With Map Reroll, you can change your map until it looks good enough or pick from a near-limitless selection of maps to find the perfect one.
15. Realistic Rooms
With the way that room sizes work in RimWorld, you have to make a pretty big room for it to count, making individual bedrooms a hassle. When your colonists see the room as too small, it won’t provide the buffs your character needs. With Realistic Rooms, your colonists will get the benefit from much more compact, realistic-sized rooms.