THE CRUNCH
RimWorld, which launched in early access in 2013, is moving off the Unity game engine. Developer Ludeon Studios has switched the colony sim to its own in-house Waylith engine with update 1.7, and says the change could bring performance improvements of 2 to 4 times while keeping the gameplay experience identical.
In the studio's own testing, startup time, game load time, world and map generation, and general tick-per-second performance all improved significantly. A stress test using a late game colony showed a 2.2 times improvement, though the studio did not share the test parameters behind that figure.
Mods benefit too: loading a mod pack with 1,500 mods dropped from 14 minutes to 6 minutes. Ludeon cautions that individual gains will depend on PC specs, so the headline numbers are promising if they scale rather than guaranteed for every setup.