Ludeon Studios' RimWorld, which used to run on Unity, is moving to the developers' in-house game engine, Waylith. Starting with update 1.7, the team will move their colony sim to the new engine entirely. As the developers state, the game looks and plays the same, except now its performance is 2 to 4 times better.

Ludeon Studios reports that on the new engine, the game shows noticeably faster startup time, game load time with big mod lists, map generation, world generation, and general ticks-per-second.

After the team ran stress tests on the latest update, they registered 2.2x better performance with a late-game colony. They also achieved 2.3x faster load times for a modpack that had 1,500 mods. Ludeon Studios added that Waylith ensures a smoother overall experience, although individual improvements may vary depending on your PC and mod list.

The best thing about the update is that you don't need to do anything manually to transfer from 1.6 to 1.7. All of your saves from the previous version will load on RimWorld 1.7, and vice versa: if you decide to go back to 1.6, you'll have your 1.7 saves.

The team warns that even though most mods will work on 1.7 without any changes, some of them may get a yellow "potentially unsupported" warning simply because of a different version number. Because of this, each modder needs to test their mod in RimWorld 1.7 and mark it as 1.7-compatible to get rid of the warning. 

The 1.7 Waylith Engine-based update is available on the unstable Steam branch. You can try it out and help the developers test it. As they hinted, RimWorld is not the only game running on Waylith, as they're currently working on something new.

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