A Confession, and a Credential
I have a regret to report. When Odyssey launched, I had a hunch that it might be the last RimWorld DLC. I told no one, and I wrote nothing down. Now Ludeon has announced update 1.7, and I am left to make my case after the fact, like a man insisting he called the coin toss after it landed.
So let me establish standing before I start predicting. I have a little under 2,000 hours in RimWorld. I started around the Royalty DLC and played off and on until Odyssey, which ate roughly 1,000 hours on its own. I play on Losing Is Fun with No Pause, a mod that removes the pause button and makes an already cruel game crueler. My mod list otherwise runs to P-Music, a mod that silences the clunk when you change game speed, and Harmony, the library No Pause needs to run. I am as vanilla as a man with No Pause installed can be.
I am a devoted fan, but not a daily speculator. I don’t comb patch notes for runes. That said, I think I see where this is going.
What 1.7 Actually Is
On October 12, Ludeon announced update 1.7. Its headline is that RimWorld is leaving Unity for the Waylith Engine, a game engine Ludeon built in-house. By their account, the game looks and plays exactly the same but runs two to four times faster. It’s on Steam’s unstable beta branch now.
That is the whole update. There are no new creatures, genes, biomes, or tweaks to any DLC. Ludeon swapped out the game’s foundation and nothing else.
The choice makes sense. RimWorld is an unusual game, a simulation where every pawn, bullet, and duck wants processor time. General-purpose engines like Unity are sledgehammers built for every kind of game at once. A studio making something this specific eventually wants a tool shaped for the job.
The results show. Shambler Assault was the one raid that reliably brought my modest PC to its knees, with so many bodies on the map that the game crawled. In footage of 1.7 testing, I saw ten times the usual raiders running cleanly at 3x speed, and at No Pause’s 4x speed too. For the record, that’s really 16 times normal speed, though everyone calls it 4x.
Why an Update With No DLC Is a Signal
RimWorld’s version numbers have a rhythm. A new number usually arrives alongside a DLC, plus a pile of free features for everyone. Update 1.6 came with Odyssey, and it brought fishing, new tasks, and multithreading that cut lag considerably. The one past exception was 1.2, which shipped without a DLC.
That rhythm matters because Ludeon’s whole business runs on it. You buy the base game at a modest price, then buy each DLC when it arrives. There’s no subscription, no battle pass, and no store full of hats. You own what you paid for, forever, like the good old days. It’s an honest model, and it rewards the studio for making each expansion worth buying.
So when a studio built on DLCs ships a major update with no DLC, no content, and no hint of either, it’s worth noticing. It has been well over a year since Odyssey. Fans have been waiting for the next hit like it’s Go-Juice. What we got instead was a new engine and one parting sentence: RimWorld isn’t the only game that will run on Waylith, and Ludeon is working on something new.
The Odyssey Ceiling
Here is the hunch I should have published. After Odyssey, how do you expand RimWorld further?
Odyssey gave us gravships, shuttles, and fast travel across the whole planet. Biomes that were once a punishing caravan trek became a short flight away. The map got smaller in the best way, and the game got enormous. Short of interplanetary travel, there isn’t much frontier left.
What remains is connective tissue, small additions that make the DLCs fit together better. Anomaly is the obvious case. It plays nicely with Ideology and largely ignores the rest. Ludeon left a perfect idea on the table: derelict space stations, abandoned and dark, with shamblers in the corridors and a revenant somewhere in the vents. That’s worth doing, but it’s a patch, not a new chapter.
I think Ludeon reached the same conclusion I did. You can’t add much more to RimWorld without rewriting RimWorld. Waylith is what rewriting it looks like.
The Part Everyone Forgets
There’s a piece of RimWorld history I think the community has lost track of. Tynan Sylvester’s original idea wasn’t a crash-landing survival story. It was a colony sim set in space, where your ship was your home. Early on, the concept also leaned toward a mercenary theme.
The space version was too complex to build, so he started smaller. Three people crash on a rimworld and try not to die. That scenario became the game we know, and everything since has been built on top of it.
Viewed that way, Odyssey isn’t just another expansion. It’s the original vision, finally achieved, a decade later and five DLCs deep. Once you’ve built the thing you set out to build, you’re done with that blueprint. Then the question becomes what to build next.
If you want the full story, this documentary on RimWorld’s development covers it.
The Prediction: RimWorld 2
I’ll say it plainly. Ludeon’s next game is RimWorld 2.
Ludeon has kept its description vague, saying only that something new is coming. Ludeon has always kept its cards close, and I read the vagueness as expectation management, not a sign that this is unrelated. A studio doesn’t sit on a franchise this beloved and walk away from it. It rebuilds it.
The closest precedent is The Binding of Isaac. The original was built in Flash, got a DLC, and hit the limits of its engine. Edmund McMillen rebuilt it on a new engine as Rebirth and folded the old content into one larger game. I expect the same here: the base game plus Royalty, Ideology, Biotech, Anomaly, and Odyssey, merged into one foundation on Waylith.
My second and bolder call is that your ship will be the default base. Odyssey will be the core of the sequel, not an add-on. You’ll build and fly your own vessel. Planetside colonies and the classic crash-landing start will still exist, but as options. RimWorld 2 is where Tynan’s original vision becomes the main event.
The Waylith announcement and the hiring support this. Ludeon has posted programming jobs this year, and according to Adam vs Everything, a streamer with over 10,000 hours in the game, it has brought on three new developers. A studio doesn’t staff up to maintain a finished game.
What a Rewrite Gets to Fix
A clean slate lets Ludeon finally address the complaints players have had for years. These are the fixes I expect.
- Raiders with some variety. By late game, raids feel stale. It’s the same mix of pirates and tribals, scaled up and sent at the walls. A sequel can give us more factions, more raid types, and enemies that behave differently.
- Relationships that make sense. Everyone complains about RimWorld’s romance and social systems, and with reason. A rewrite is the chance to fix them properly instead of patching around them.
- Raider bases that look lived in. Attack a pirate outpost today and you’ll find 25 raiders sharing five beds in conditions a mole would reject. Faction bases should feel like places where people actually live.
- Diplomacy with some depth. Right now, a faction gives you two things: small gifts and goodwill. Goodwill is trivially farmed by shipping a faction a heap of valuables, and human leather does the job nicely. In return, a friendly faction might send troops or answer a call for military aid. That’s the entire relationship. Hostile factions are worse. A pirate band is hostile to everyone, forever, with no alliances or rivalries of its own, until you spend a few hundred hours wiping it off the map. I want factions that ally with each other, feud with each other, and can be bribed, persuaded, or infiltrated. Players have been asking for stealth, sneaking into enemy bases, and the ability to pay a faction to do your dirty work.
- An economy that moves. RimWorld has no supply and demand. Prices are set, and traders don’t care if you’ve dumped 4,000 silver of wool on them. A world where your trading actually shifts markets would make the planet feel inhabited instead of staged.
The last two run straight into Tynan. He has said he doesn’t want RimWorld to become a 4X game, the Civilization genre of empires and economies. I can’t speak for the man. But I can point out that he has changed his mind before. He once said children wouldn’t be in RimWorld, and then Biotech arrived with children, including child raiders, which is cruel in the way only RimWorld can make funny. A clean rebuild is exactly when a designer revisits his old “no” decisions. RimWorld 1’s foundation was never built for a living, scheming world. RimWorld 2’s can be, and that would push the simulation further than it has ever gone.
None of these are small tweaks. Each one touches systems so deeply embedded in the current code that fixing them means rebuilding. That’s my point.
In Case I’m Wrong
I’ll concede the obvious: the new game might not be RimWorld 2. Ludeon has given us one sentence, and I’ve built a whole house on it.
Even so, I’m confident about one thing. Whatever they’re making will be a colony management sim. Waylith was built to run heavy simulations, and it wasn’t built to make a platformer.
If it isn’t RimWorld 2, I see two possibilities. One is a sci-fi game set in the same universe, a spin-off that isn’t technically a sequel. The other is fantasy: a Dwarf Fortress that most people can actually play. Dwarf Fortress is a masterpiece, but getting into it is brutally hard. A Ludeon take on that genre, with RimWorld’s readability and storytelling, would be a serious contender.
Here is my confidence ladder, from safest to boldest:
- The new game is a colony sim. Near certain.
- It’s set in RimWorld’s universe or next to it. Likely.
- It’s called RimWorld 2 and includes everything from the five DLCs. My call.
- Your ship is your default base. My boldest call.
The Catch
This won’t be free. People already complain about $15 DLCs that give them hundreds or thousands of hours, so a full-price sequel will draw some outrage. But you can’t pour a new foundation on top of the old house. Somebody pays for the excavation.
Mods are the other cost. If RimWorld 2 is a real rebuild, mod authors will have to start over, and players will have to rebuild their setups. I’m the wrong person to judge how painful that will be, since my mod list fits on an index card. But I’ve seen what modders have built for this game, and I don’t think a better engine will slow them down. Ludeon is already pitching Waylith as friendlier to complex mods, and that matters.
The Wait
The bad news is that I don’t expect new RimWorld content anytime soon. My guess is we wait at least a year before we see anything, sequel or spin-off.
The good news is that the studio is profitable, hiring, and has a new engine. Odyssey cost me a thousand hours of productivity. Whatever comes next will probably cost me more, and I’ll be glad to pay it.
This time, my prediction is on the record. RimWorld 2, with your ship as your home. See you in a year.