The best Rimworld mods 2023

What are the best Rimworld mods? There are plenty of Rimworld mods out there to add extras and quality-of-life tweaks to your playthroughs, ranging from basic improvements to brand-new mechanics. With such a vibrant modding community at your fingertips, you might be a little lost on where to start – so we’ve picked out the very best of the bunch just for you. What’s more, the vast majority of these Rimworld mods are available from the Steam Workshop, so they can be installed with the simple click of a button.

Rimworld is a colony management game with a very simple premise: you must ensure the survival of a ragtag bunch of colonists, each with their own randomly generated skills, backstories, and idiosyncrasies. Depending on the AI storyteller settings, your experience might fall anywhere between a ‘wholesome farming game’ and a ‘relentless cascade of disaster’. If you’re ready to move on from the horrors that have befallen your colonies during the mod-free experience of Rimworld, then our collection of the best Rimworld mods is for you.

Here are the best Rimworld mods:

Rimworld Multiplayer should be your first port of call if you’re looking to experience the outer-space city builder with friends. This mod allows you to play with as many people as you want, though we recommend a maximum of eight players to keep the cooperative chaos under control. It’s fully compatible with the latest patch and expansions, supports multi-colony setups, and has its own mod support. We’ve put together a more comprehensive Rimworld Multiplayer guide if you want to read more about how this one works.

One of our biggest gripes with earlier versions of the strategy game was that visitors had very little purpose – they would wander into your map, stay around for a little while, and then wander off home. Occasionally traders would come, but they were few and far between. Well, here’s a Rimworld mod to fix that. Hospitality gives you the ability to build guest rooms, direct visitors, and improve (or damage) your relations with a faction by having your colonists dote upon them. It also adds a lot of new possibilities, such as opening a hotel to serve colony-brewed beer or starting a human trafficking ring. Er, maybe not that last one.

Have you ever spent far too much time refreshing your band of starting weirdos? Looking for someone who knows not to hold a knife by the pointy end, or who is capable of slapping a bandage on someone but won’t threaten to burn your colony down? EdB Prepare Carefully lets you modify your initial colonists and items to create your ideal start, either by using the optional point limits to retain a sense of balance or dispensing with them altogether, leaving you free to design gifted and talented colonists. If you have a tendency to grow attached to your colonists, then this Rimworld mod is an ideal option for you.

Colony Manager allows you to appoint a manager who’ll automatically assign jobs to colonists in order to keep the colony stocked with wood, meat, and livestock. This means you no longer need to keep an eye on dwindling supplies since they’ll automatically be topped up by your colonists as soon as possible. You will, however, need to start a new save in order to use this mod, given that it introduces a whole new work type into your playthrough.

Colonists have pretty unreasonable expectations for the size of their rooms – after all, they’re trying to survive a crash landing not staying at an Airbnb. Thankfully, Realistic Rooms brings required room sizes more in line with reality, making it easier to create compact bases without upsetting your ungrateful pawns. It even comes bundled with a Reduced Beauty Debuff, to avoid colonists pitching a fit whenever the smallest pile of dirt accumulates in their home.

Your colonists are constantly saying all sorts of bizarre, fascinating things to one another – which you’ll most likely miss unless you’re constantly checking the social log. Thanks to Jaxe’s Interaction Bubbles, these quips and questions will automatically appear over your colonists when they speak, so you’ll never miss an interaction again. It can be added or removed at any time without breaking your save files.

Sometimes, your colonists aren’t so smart. They won’t haul all the ingredients they need at once, or they will cook food in a dirty room. However, with the Common Sense Rimworld mod, their behavior is a little more, well, sensible. Instead of wallowing indoors while yearning for a little outdoor recreation, they’ll seek it out themselves. They’ll also avoid standing around in bad weather, clean up after patients, put items back in the inventory when interrupted, and more. If you prefer your Rimworld colonists on the sillier side, you’ll be pleased to know that all of these behaviors are optional, leaving you free to pick and choose at will.

Wall Light is, well, a light that goes on the wall. This simple Rimworld mod is deceptively useful – sleek and unimposing, these lights can be mounted on any wall in your colony, removing the need for ugly lamps that take up space. You can also research ‘Coloured Lights’ and turn your colony into a garish nightclub, and configure how many materials it costs to make as well as the radius of the light itself.

It’s a tough life out on the Rim, but even as your colonists fight for their own survival, their moods and opinions can drastically plummet after the slightest inconvenience. A super-intelligent doctor might have just saved their life, but their happiness is eclipsed by a romantic rejection or a spot of rain. Grim Reality brings a dose of realism to your fussy little pawns, lessening the impact of insignificant drawbacks, while also increasing the impact of truly terrible occurrences.

The one thing your Rimworld experience has been lacking thus far is toilets. Dubs Bad Hygiene adds a complete and fully functional hygiene system to the building game, including a sewage system and plumbing infrastructure to keep your colonists clean and waste-free. This Rimworld mod also adds irrigation systems, hot tubs, and central heating – it even includes the kitchen sink.

Dylan’s Children, School, and Learning mod adds pregnancy and children to the game, though thankfully they somehow pop out as fully formed teenagers, which we’d encourage you to avoid picturing in your head. The upside is that the kids are immediately useful. You can build blackboards and school tables where your colonists will teach skills to children – but they’re only capable of learning for one year before becoming adults.

The ultimate goal of Rimworld is to build a ship and make it off the planet. However, Save Our Ship 2 massively expands the mid-to-late game by letting you pilot the ship yourself. You can store colonists and items on board and travel to distant worlds, leaving your colonies behind in the hands of allied factions – but don’t worry, you can always come back and visit if you’re feeling a little homesick. In the meantime, you can battle space pirates or even indulge in a little piracy yourself and trawl through the wreckage for treasure. Whether you fancy yourself an intrepid explorer or budding conqueror, this is the ideal Rimworld mod if you find yourself longing for the stars.

Vanilla Expanded is a huge collection of Rimworld mods that expands the space game in several new but carefully balanced directions. As they’re all made by the same team, they’re guaranteed to work together seamlessly – and together, they add bags of new content, including texture mods, more furniture, expanded armor and weapons, more animals, improved cooking, fishing, plants, factions, and books. With this Rimworld mod, the sky truly is the limit.

A Rimworld of Magic completely overhauls combat by introducing 12 magic classes and six fighter classes to Rimworld, each with its own set of abilities and development trees. There are also a bunch of new apparel and equipment options and new events. While playing about with magic is undeniably fun, we’ve noticed that it can often be pretty overpowered – though you can tweak some of the settings yourself in-game to claw back a little more challenge.

Combat Extended changes Rimworld’s entire combat system, rebalancing armor and shields, injuries, and melee and projectile fighting. The frustrating percentage-based shooting system is completely gone, replaced with a ballistic model. As far as we’re concerned, it’s a definite upgrade in all areas, but it does come with a couple of major caveats. For one thing, this Rimworld mod requires a new save, and it can’t be removed from that save once applied. It also doesn’t play nice with other mods.

Replace Stuff

Ever wanted to replace, well, everything in your world? Using the Replace Stuff mod, you have the ability to swap out anything for anything. Take your bed and replace it with a bigger one. Your weak walls? Gone. Replace them with something more hard-wearing to ensure no one can break in. This mod is great because you can use it for practical reasons, or if you just want your things to look nice, you can customize them to make your space perfect.

Now that you’ve got all the best Rimworld mods at your disposal, it’s time to pile your digital plate high with all of them simultaneously and then try to figure out why your game won’t load. Of course, we recommend testing a few at a time as they’re almost certainly not all compatible. If you’re curious how we got on with the vanilla version, check out our Rimworld review. Alternatively, we’ve got a collection of the best games like Rimworld if you simply can’t get enough.