Rimworld - What mods should I get?

[unseenmage]

Just got Rimworld.
Have only had Steam for a year.
Sifting through mods is intimidating

What mods for Rimworld does the Playground suggest?

[Spacewolf]

The giddy up mod pack is nice, doesn't change too much but still has a beneficial game impact. Plus it looks cool and should really have been put into the base game.
Megafauna, alpha biomes, alpha animals and magical menagerie add more beasties for you to have fun with.
A rimworld of magic can give you that extra spark.
Then I have fish industry because it makes sense plus afew item and research packs like industrial clothes and weapons.

[unseenmage]

Thanks a bunch. Added!

[Techwarrior]

I have somehow managed to keep my version of the game from updating past 1.0, so some of these likely made it into the base game.

Personally, I like Set Up Camp, Rimfridge, and Sidearms.

[DataNinja]

Ah, Alpha Animals was already gotten, that was gonna be my big suggestion. (Though, I'm probably biased by my patronage. )

For other ones that are more QoL stuff:
-Allow Tool (General QoL UI stuff)
-Fixable Mood Debuffs Alert (Just lets you know if something's amiss)
-Better Pawn Control (Admittedly, can get a bit complex, but it lets you switch schedules around once you get the hang of things)
-Automatic Night Owl (Means your Night Owls won't get a schedule that makes them unhappy by default)
-Pharmacist (Allows setting general rules for what types of people get what medicine for what severity of injuries)
-CleaningArea (Lets you designate a zone to clean, so it's not the entirety of your home zone - which you usually want even in areas where you aren't cleaning because of fires.)
-Heat Map (great overview of if things are too hot or too cold)
-CM Color Coded Mood Bar [1.1+] (Lets you keep track of your colonists moods better)
-Minify Everything (***Note that this one does make the game easier, because it lets you move and steal odd things if you exploit it. And it can break things like wind turbines if you move them. But I personally like using it in non-exploitable ways because it's frustrating to, say, not be able to move workbenches.)
-RimHud (Gives some better visuals on the UI when clicking on pawns.)
-[RF] Rational Romance (Continued) (This one I like just because it makes more fun compatibilities (and makes "Gay" not a basically dead trait slot, because more people will be that way), and it also reduces the frustrating insistence pawns have of never listening to rebuffs.)

-HugsLib, Harmony, and Vanilla Expanded Framework are all needed for a lot of mods, too, so I'm listing them separately as it's more of a "mod-skeleton"

These are all the ones that I suggest that don't change vanilla very much, and just increase QoL. Because, being 100% honest, I would play a game of vanilla first. Then you'll find what parts of the games you want to tweak. (For instance, I was frustrated I couldn't heal brain scars, so I added a mod to let me do that.)

For bigger changes, though, I like What the Hack. Android Tiers is pretty neat, too.

[NichG]

I like the one that lets you build roads on the worldmap. I forget what it's called, but there seem to be a few of them right now - Roads of the Rim or RimRoads or something...

[unseenmage]

I'm definitely going to just play the regular game for a while.
The little s*its just keep being sad and dying.
Like I get what the game devs were going for but wow.
The in game people really need more happy thoughts from just seeing leaves in wind or sunrises or any other nature based fractal patterns.

He'll just having then cheer up from each other's company seems impossible.

[Anteros]

I'm definitely going to just play the regular game for a while.
The little s*its just keep being sad and dying.
Like I get what the game devs were going for but wow.
The in game people really need more happy thoughts from just seeing leaves in wind or sunrises or any other nature based fractal patterns.

He'll just having then cheer up from each other's company seems impossible.

There's a mod called "beautiful nature" that makes Pawns happier when outside. I do get your complaint though. You go into Rimworld expecting a chill colony builder, but in reality the core gameplay loop of making pawns happy is just so incredibly tedious. It gets much easier as you learn what types of things make them happy, but it never stops being tedious. You can also edit the scenario to make breaks less common.

I use a mod called prepare carefully to customize my starting colonists. You could also use it to make them more optimistic if you dislike micromanaging that aspect of the game.
I'll also recommend "replace stuff" as quality of life. It lets you draw blueprints over top of other blueprints and have pawns automatically replace what they need to without having to manually deconstruct every tile.

I saw someone recommend alpha animals earlier, and it's very good. Be aware that a lot of the added animals are not balanced though, and taming them makes the game much easier.

I also recommend just straight up not enabling the Ideology DLC at first. It basically adds no content except a bunch of restrictions on your colonists and various things that lower their mood. Both of the DLCs add a lot of tedious "gameplay" that wasn't present in the base game. At least the Royalty DLC added some content to go with it though.

[Techwarrior]

I'm definitely going to just play the regular game for a while.
The little s*its just keep being sad and dying.
Like I get what the game devs were going for but wow.
The in game people really need more happy thoughts from just seeing leaves in wind or sunrises or any other nature based fractal patterns.

He'll just having then cheer up from each other's company seems impossible.

There are several easy ways to boost mood in a big way.

First is to make sure that their dining and recreation are taking place in a room that is at least Very Impressive. This is relatively easy to do by making sure the room with your dining table and recreation furniture is in a large room with a stone tile, sterile tile, or carpet flooring, preferably with Marble walls. Personally I make a 12x10 interior room with this parameters. This isn't something you need to do in your first few quadrants, but hopefully by the first year or so.

Second is to make sure that each colonist has their own bedroom of at least Decent impressiveness. This is again relatively easy to do by making a room with stone walls and floors. I personally make rooms that are 5x5 and are built into one structure of 5 of these rooms.

Third is to make sure that someone is keeping the colony clean. This removes a lot of stuff that makes the place less beautiful, ruining that impressiveness you worked so hard for and giving the Unsightly Environment thought. You can do this by manually adjusting the work priority of one or two colonists so that they clean things before certain tasks. I like to use my cook for this in the very early game so that they always clean up before cooking. Eventually you'll want at least 2 pawns dedicated to this task before other work.

Fourth you'll want to make sure that each colonist is taking time to enjoy themselves. Setting dedicated recreation hours for all colonists will make sure that they keep it higher than they if they're just set to Anything and gives them chances to interact with each other if it's at the same time. I personally give colonists two blocks of 3 hours dedicated to Recreation, one in the morning and one halfway through the workday.

[unseenmage]

Thanks for the recommendations.

I enabled god mode and played around with just how much bring and cleaning is required to keep a sad town happy.

It's a lot.


Would turning off the religious experience expansion turn off the neat ancient debris as well?

[DataNinja]

Thanks for the recommendations.

I enabled god mode and played around with just how much bring and cleaning is required to keep a sad town happy.

It's a lot.


Would turning off the religious experience expansion turn off the neat ancient debris as well?

I think that that's a vanilla 1.3 thing, no Expansion needed. I will note that if you're playing with Ideology, that's probably not the best to start with. Ideologies - especially things that swing more extreme - can really stack on a lot of mood modifiers. Which can be good if you know what you're doing... but for someone still getting used to the mechanics, guarantee it's making things way harder.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

I'm definitely going to just play the regular game for a while.
The little s*its just keep being sad and dying.
Like I get what the game devs were going for but wow.
The in game people really need more happy thoughts from just seeing leaves in wind or sunrises or any other nature based fractal patterns.

He'll just having then cheer up from each other's company seems impossible.

One pro-tip is to upgrade to making Fine Meals as soon as possible. In addition to being an enormous mood boost, it's also actually the most efficient in terms of nourishment (aside from nutrient paste, which you won't be able to make yet anyway). IIRC, fine meals require one plant-food and one meat-food.

Other people have mentioned cleaning already, but I've seen it argued that you're best off just setting every colonist to have cleaning priority at max. The argument being that it'll ensure the base stays perfectly clean, it won't take much time since the closest colonist is always doing it, and it won't interfere with other important tasks like Patient and Firefighting because those are higher on the list anyway (so as long as they're also at max priority, they take precedence). Haven't tried it myself yet, but it makes sense to me.

[Anteros]

One pro-tip is to upgrade to making Fine Meals as soon as possible. In addition to being an enormous mood boost, it's also actually the most efficient in terms of nourishment (aside from nutrient paste, which you won't be able to make yet anyway). IIRC, fine meals require one plant-food and one meat-food.

Other people have mentioned cleaning already, but I've seen it argued that you're best off just setting every colonist to have cleaning priority at max. The argument being that it'll ensure the base stays perfectly clean, it won't take much time since the closest colonist is always doing it, and it won't interfere with other important tasks like Patient and Firefighting because those are higher on the list anyway (so as long as they're also at max priority, they take precedence). Haven't tried it myself yet, but it makes sense to me.

I've found that they don't really prioritize cleaning unless they have literally nothing else to do, even if it's set to highest. I usually just have a designated cleaner/hauler that does nothing else. At least, once I have enough pawns for it.

Something else that's probably not immediately obvious to a new player. The difficulty scales with your colony wealth and the number of people you have. That legendary dining chair isn't always worth it when it's drawing in an extra 10 raiders down on your head. Likewise with extra colonists that don't really contribute anything important.

[Eldan]

Speaking of hauling and mods, are conveyor belts still a thing? I played quite a while ago, but I found those to be a godsend, because there was always so much hauling. Especially at harvest times. I often had rotting food because they didn't haul it to the fridge fast enough.

[Anteros]

Speaking of hauling and mods, are conveyor belts still a thing? I played quite a while ago, but I found those to be a godsend, because there was always so much hauling. Especially at harvest times. I often had rotting food because they didn't haul it to the fridge fast enough.

I believe they are mod only. Either that or I've missed a major mechanic. It's not impossible...

The trick is to stagger your harvesting since live plants don't degrade. Or what I usually do is just build my farm indoors even if I'm in a temperate climate since so many events will kill your crops otherwise. It's expensive power wise, but ensures something like volcanic winter won't kill your run.