Rimworld is one of my favourite games, having clocked in just over 1000 hours in it playing through various scenarios, it is a game that always manages to deliver something new and different. At its core, Rimworld is a self-described story generator, it gives the player a colony of people to take care of with the ultimate goal of building a spaceship to fly off the planet whilst in the background the game will generate a random sequence of events to either help or hamper the player. It takes liberal and admitted inspiration from Dwarf Fortress but as well as changing the setting, Ludeon Studios also added in a layer of visual clarity and user friendly controls, something that many people were asking from Dwarf Fortress for virtual decades. Rimworld rapidly took off and and it is today the 54th most played game on Steam, averaging around 25,000 daily players a number it has steadily maintained since 2020. The DLCs which came out for the game added interesting and alternative ways of playing from a simple nobility system to the more complex religion or genetics systems, but Rimworld doesn’t owe its reputation and popularity purely to its DLCs.

The modding scene of the game is massive with over 23,510 mods at the time of writing on the Steam Workshop. For comparison looking at Nexusmods, the only games with more mods are Skyrim, Fallout 4, New Vegas and Oblivion, all titles published by Bethesda whose games are known for being extremely moddable. This would make Rimworld the 6th most modded game in the world (as I have to assume Minecraft would be ranking up here as well). Yet, despite these impressive numbers, Rimworld’s modding approachability is a far cry from most other games due to its reliance on Steam Workshop. This is a particular problem as similarly to Bethesda games or Minecraft, Rimworld is a game that tends to invite the player to have a list reaching the hundreds of mods and more, something Steam Workshop supports extraordinarily poorly.

Whilst there is no denying that Steam Workshop has helped many modding scenes bloom with its low barrier to entry as even the most tech ignorant people can find their way to clicking a subscribe button, it scales very poorly with large numbers of mods due to its poor search and filtering performance. As a game gets more and more mods over long stretches of times, it becomes increasingly more difficult to find either what one is looking for or just plainly browse in the hopes of discovering something new. Looking at the most downloaded files of all time will show outdated files which had a huge surge of popularity on launch but which have since been integrated into the game or whose author simply dropped support for, but only looking at recent mods will make one miss out on a lot of older but still good and updated content. Obviously one can look at both but combing through dozens of pages gets tedious quickly. Usually this is where the filtering and sorting systems come into play to allow the user to exclude mods they are uninterested in and show the most relevant mods on top.

Looking at Skyrim’s modding scene, Nexusmods does this quite well, allowing to specifically search for graphical mods, mods adding items, or mods altering characters’ appearance for example. It also allows users to include or exclude specific keywords or to search within a specific range of time. Finally, when it comes to sorting, the default option of most endorsed/highest rated is a decent one but it can easily be switched to a most downloaded option which can be more helpful. Put together this allows users to drill down rapidly to the exact mods they’re looking for…and for players who want to stay away from the nitty gritty of modding the collections feature allows for a similarly deep search system, narrowing down specific themes or look for lists that include specific mods all for an easier set up.

The Steam Workshop has none of these functions; or more accurately it has all of these functions but they are all incomplete or inferior. It is possible to filter by tags, but the tags are preset which in the case of Rimworld means that it is only possible to look for specific version tags and whether a mod is a real mod or a translation, there are no specific categories nor themes. Keyword search is non-existent, there is a regular search bar which works about as well as any fuzzy search bar on any given website (which includes the one on this site but I don’t have 23,500 articles to search through). It is possible to look for mods specifically published in the last week, three months, six months and year, otherwise users are forced to look at a list of all mods published since the release of the workshop which is inconvenient for a game that has had modding support for over half a decade. Sorting options are equally lacklustre as the “most downloaded” option cannot be time restricted, any time specific search has to be done using the “most popular” option. “Most popular” is Steam’s nebulous sorting system averaging, rating, download count, comments, favourites and mod views with undetermined weighing; whilst it performs decently when removing time restrictions, it starts falling apart when looking at 6 months and below.

As such one would easily forgive a new Rimworld player from wanting to avoid the individual mod installation process and to look at one of the Workshop’s collections. Unfortunately, Steam Workshop’s collections manage to be even worse as collections do not track the number of subscriptions they get so the only way of sorting is by “most popular” and the lack of theme, language or keyword filtering makes it impossible to find any sort of specific collection. There is a star rating system for collections but it is impossible to sort by highest rated which renders this functions moot. Looking at the most popular listings at the time of writing, the majority of modlists are in Chinese or are kitchen sink collections which are often outdated and dysfunctional. Lacking any guidance from the Workshop due to its terrible user experience, the next stop on a modder’s journey in Rimworld will usually be the official Discord server which is where we open our second can of worms.

Discord filled a market niche that established software like Mumble or Teamspeak simply refused to expand into, serving as more than just a functional VOIP system, Discord servers have become central hubs for various gaming communities, but Discord also sucks at being a central hub. Whilst servers can be split into different channels, they tend to gravitate to a “general-mash-everything-together-channel”, meaning that hundreds of people at any given time could be typing in that single channel. This is the case on the Rimworld Discord which only has the “mod-general” channel for mod related discussions; alternative channels such as mod-updates, mod-development, mod-art and mod-ideas have very strict rules about what is allowed in them. There is no troubleshooting channel, no recommendations channel and no modlist sharing channel, it is simply all bundled together in the general channel. This has two issues: One, if a user has a question they can only ask in the general chat and hope that that someone will respond to them and that their message won’t just get buried by some other ongoing discussion. Two, if a user is looking for a specific piece of information, if it isn’t pinned they need to use Discord’s search function which is exactly as efficient and well functioning as Steam Workshop’s, except it has to parse through millions of individual messages. Discord has released a threads function which is similar to forum threads but few servers make proper use of it and in the case of Rimworld, it is reserved to the mod-updates channel which functions as a glorified feed of mod ads.

Nevertheless, some mod developers are quite active on Discord and as such, if one is lucky enough, it is possible to directly discuss an issue about a mod with its developer, although that isn’t always a positive. Discord users have a reputation for being socially inept and for good reason, they are subset of gamers who themselves have a reputation for being socially inept. It’s unclear if this is a result of the developers’ ego for making a popular mod or a reaction to the poor treatment of mod developers with frequent complaints and requests for changes to the mods they created, but either way, mod developers on Discord can feel…rough for the lack of a better word. A user can be the victim of a ranting insult spree by a mod developer for asking one too many “dumb question”, something that the Rimworld server doesn’t always punish when the mod developer is popular enough. There is also a level of unprofessionalism that mod developers have in Rimworld particularly when it comes to updates. Now this speaks to a level of entitlement from the users, mod developers are doing the work they do for free and updates shouldn’t be a given, but when a person offers a service for several years in the form a mod and they do not want to pursue the update process, updating the modpage to name an official successor or simply give the community the green light to continue the work themselves would be the polite thing to do. Instead, many developers rant on Discord about receiving many messages about updating their mod when they have lost interest or they’ll tease working on updates for months before simply disappearing without having released anything. Thankfully, many individuals decide to update mods themselves and release them to the public but because of how disorganised this is, with no formal handover and no proper search function on neither Steam Workshop nor Discord, it can be challenging to even be aware of these updated versions existing. The less lucky and less popular mods simply get abandoned and forgotten about which can be particularly sad when seeing a niche mod that has been released all the way back in 2018 and been updated through to 2023 before finally the author having moved on and nobody picking up the flame.

Ironically, a mod getting abandoned after years of updates can sometimes also be the best case scenario. The Vanilla Expanded modding team spearheaded by Oskar Potocki has done both an incredible amount of good and bad for the Rimworld modding scene. Vanilla Expanded as its name suggests started as a set of mods adding small things that the core game was lacking in such as animal diversity (a mod that has been integrated into the official game since then), weapons and furniture. The core philosophy was that anything added needed to feel like it should always have been in the game which Oskar did a stellar job at and he was even hired by Ludeon Studios to do artwork for the DLCs of the game. Vanilla Expanded mods became wildly popular, not only is the name of the series a genius marketing strategy (“vanilla+” being one of the most popular themes looked for in mods), Oskar’s artistic background meant that his mod pages stood out from anything else on the workshop with carefully assembled infographics and high quality artwork. As the series’ popularity grew, Oskar started working with more qualified developers, focusing himself purely on the design and artistic side of the mods. He also started a Patreon which grew to over 5000 contributors today allowing him to hire and pay even more mod creators to work with him. The Vanilla Expanded team as they should now be referred to started bringing out a slew of mods, most of which of high quality but herein lies the problem: the sheer amount of mods meant that the name Vanilla Expanded had lost all meaning. From mods adding catgirls to the Roman senate to a pirates mod whose reason to exist was to promote Oskar’s and his friends’ own game, it is difficult nowadays for Vanilla Expanded mods to be the de facto recommendation when they suffer from so much bloat and non vanilla friendly features. Nevertheless their popularity means that they are at least always well documented and updated…which isn’t the case of Oskar’s side project: The Rim Effect mod series.

With the release of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Oskar got Mass Effect fever and started a new project of converting Rimworld into the Mass Effect world. This was an ambitious project which fit Rimworld very well and was very anticipated. Similarly to Vanilla Expanded, the Rim Effect series had a roadmap of mods that were being worked on with release date estimations and regular updates on progress. Two years later however, Oskar was done with the Mass Effect game and as such decided to shelve the Rim Effect mod series as well. This was however before having released everything that was planned for the mod series according to the roadmap which is both unethical and unprofessional given that people were paying him on Patreon to deliver on this roadmap. Oskar has not named a successor nor a maintainer for the Rim Effect mods and the mods’ description pages make no mention of the mods being abandoned. This lack of professionalism also affects the Vanilla Expanded roadmap, with multiple release dates getting pushed back without justification or because Oskar got a new idea he wants to work on instead of some older idea he already moved on from before even releasing it. This would all be less of an issue if Vanilla Expanded hadn’t eclipsed other mod makers. Individual developers cannot compete with a group of people and a dedicated artist who are getting paid thousands of pounds each month to make hundreds of mods. Anything that doesn’t have the polish and presentation of Vanilla Expanded is easily dismissed and mod makers have to resort to trying to imitate Oskar’s style to get their mods seen. The Vanilla Expanded team over the last 4 years has released many mods one would consider essential but in doing so they have also brain drained and eclipsed competition which has made the Rimworld modding scene feel more cookie cutter and corporate than the official DLC.

There are still good mods out there and although it takes some additional effort it is possible to pick out the valuable mods out of the Vanilla Expanded kitchen sink, but this however brings us all back to how poor the Steam Workshop filtering, sorting and collections systems all are. Rimworld is a great game, it has even greater mods, it just should have had better tools for them before it reached critical mass and before Vanilla Expanded extinguished creativity.