RimWorld 1.7 moves to the Waylith Engine: 2-4x faster, playable now on the beta

If you play RimWorld with big colonies or hundreds of mods, this one is for you. On October 12, Ludeon Studios announced update 1.7, which moves the game from Unity to the Waylith Engine, the studio’s own in-house engine. Ludeon says the game looks and plays exactly the same, but in its tests performance improves 2-4x. You don’t have to wait: you can try it right now on Steam’s unstable beta branch.

What changes with the Waylith Engine

Ludeon compares 1.7 against 1.6. The studio says startup time, game load time with big mod lists, map generation, world generation, general ticks-per-second and “just about everything else” are all faster. Its examples:

• Late-game colony: a stress test on a late-game colony showed 2.2x better performance on 1.7 than on 1.6.
• Huge mod lists: a modpack with 1,500 mods went from 14 minutes to load to 6.
• Busy colonies: Ludeon says a colony with 40 colonists, 200 ducks and 100+ mods will run much smoother.

The studio notes these are its own results, and your gains may vary with your specific PC or mods.

What you need to do

According to Ludeon, you don’t need to do anything when switching to 1.7:

• Savegames: 1.6 saves load on 1.7, and 1.7 saves still work if you go back to 1.6.
• Mods: the vast majority work on 1.7 without any changes from their authors. Some may show up in yellow as “potentially unsupported”, but only because the version number changed. Rock, Paper, Shotgun singled out mods surviving an engine switch as the most impressive part.
• To try it now: it’s on the unstable beta branch. The announcement explains how to opt in under “Testing update 1.7”.
• Older PCs: this is the part that matters most here. Ludeon warns that if your PC is more than 10 years old, 1.7 may not run on it.

RimWorld PC requirements

These are the Windows requirements on the Steam page. Steam lists no recommended spec:

If your machine is very old, read that minimum with care, given Ludeon’s warning about PCs over 10 years old.

Graphics aren’t the problem. Every card we checked clears the minimum by a wide margin, from the GTX 1650 and RX 580 up to the RTX 3060 and RTX 5080. canirun grades all of them S, “Overkill”. If you’re shopping for other light games on a modest rig, see our low-end PC games list.

On Steam Deck, Valve rates RimWorld Verified. Details are on its Steam Deck page.

Can your PC run RimWorld?

Here’s how your setup grades against RimWorld’s requirements:

Game	Rec. GPU score	Rec. RAM	Min. RAM	Your PC
RimWorld	—	—	4 GB	?

The full RimWorld page shows the grade for your detected GPU and RAM.

Sources: Ludeon: Announcing the Waylith Engine and Update 1.7, Update 1.7 announcement on Steam, RimWorld on Steam, Rock, Paper, Shotgun