"We’re announcing update 1.7, which moves RimWorld from Unity to the Waylith Engine, our own in-house engine built by Ludeon Studios. The game looks and plays exactly the same, but in our tests performance is improved by 2-4x.
"You can try 1.7 right now on the unstable beta branch… We stress-tested a late game colony and saw 2.2x better performance on 1.7 compared to 1.6. A modpack with 1,500 mods (!) went from 14 minutes to 6 minutes to load. (These are just our results; individual performance improvements may vary due to your specific PC or mods.)
"Your 1.6 savegames will load on 1.7, and 1.7 saves also work if you go back to 1.6."
Those are some 'wipe your glasses, rub your eyes, triple-check you did the maths right' numbers that RimWorld's new Waylith engine is spitting out, but it seems to be the real deal. Over on Reddit, players who are trying out the new engine are finding impressive results: "Stable 120 fps and 900 [ticks per second]. Normally I have at max speed 60/700ish," says TheLemonFox. "Impressive." Though they also report the new build is RAM-hungry: "it eats RAM like there is no tomorrow. 12-13 GB RAM directly at startup is… something."
Another user attempted Ludeon's own modpack feat, loading 1,477 mods into the game and hitting go, reporting a decrease in time to load from "at least 30 minutes" to six minutes and 17 seconds.
It's fairly mind-boggling and very impressive, especially given save games and even the majority of mods can be happily bounced back and forth between RimWorld's previous Unity version and its new Waylith iteration. I'm not sure what dark gods Ludeon has been communing with, but it seems like a worthwhile deal.
Oh, and the studio signs off with a little tease: "RimWorld isn’t the only game on Waylith. We’re working on something new! It may be a little while before we can share more details, but we couldn’t resist telling you."
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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.