Building your first mod list is easy: hop into the Workshop, sort by subscriptions and install the first hundred of them. An hour later the game turns into porridge of conflicts. The right way is to start small: foundation first, then convenience, then content. Here is the proven set nearly every player starts with.
The foundation: libraries and performance
Without these mods half of the list below will not work. Harmony is the patching engine for every other mod. HugsLib is the utility and logging library. For heavy mod lists optimizers are a must: Performance Fish speeds up the game's inner loops, while RocketMan unloads pawns and distant maps.
Quality of life: mods that change nothing but save hours
- Common Sense — pawns stop doing dumb things: they close doors, keep dirt out of the house and put out fires.
- Allow Tool — mass selection, forbidding and urgent hauling in one click.
- Camera+ — zoom out beyond the standard limit, smooth camera, markers at far zoom levels.
- Replace Stuff — swap wall and furniture materials without deconstructing: the freezer stays frozen.
- Dubs Mint Menus — searchable bills, plants and research menus.
- Smarter Construction — pawns no longer wall themselves in while building.
- RimHUD — a panel with the full condition of the selected colonist.
- Interaction Bubbles — colonist speech bubbles right above their heads.
Content: new possibilities for the colony
Once the foundation is ready, add content. The Vanilla Expanded series is the gold standard: start with Vanilla Expanded Framework, then Vanilla Furniture Expanded and Vanilla Weapons Expanded — they feel like official DLC.
- Hospitality — guests and hotels: visitors pay for their stay and leave happy.
- Combat Extended — realistic combat: ballistics, armor, suppression. For those ready for hardcore.
- EdB Prepare Carefully — fine-tuning of your starting team.
- Character Editor — an editor for any pawn right in the game.
- Humanoid Alien Races — a framework for non-human races: xenos colonies and fantasy.
How many mods to install
Start with 10–15 mods from this list and play. Add 3–5 mods per new campaign — that way you always know what exactly changed the game and can easily trace an error to its source. Mod lists of 200+ are a separate sport that calls for different tools.
Every mod in this selection is in our catalog: RimWorld mods — with descriptions, screenshots and supported game versions.
Harmony
by Brrainz
Harmony is the shared patch library used by many RimWorld mods. This mod provides Harmony to the game so other mods can depend on one common version instead of each shipping their own copy. For play
Common Sense
by avil
Common Sense gives RimWorld colonists dozens of optional smart behaviours: cleaning before work, whole-stack hauling, spoilage-aware food choices and more.
Vanilla Expanded Framework
Vanilla Expanded Framework is the code library behind the entire Vanilla Expanded series for RimWorld - the shared machinery for custom gizmos, user interfaces, hediff and health effects, animal behaviour, gene tools and event utilities tha
Hospitality
by Orion
Host, entertain and recruit visitors. Grow faction relations with happy guests and vending machines.