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RimWorld: the game is easy, the mods are the trap

I'll say up front that Ludeon keeps one of the most generous version shelves on Steam — every major RimWorld back to beta18 sits in a dropdown. Which is why the people who lose their 400-mod colonies to an update are never betrayed by the game. They're betrayed by the Workshop. This page covers both halves in their true proportions.

~9 min read| updated june 2026| app 294100

When update 1.6 arrived with the Odyssey expansion in July 2025, the forums replayed a thread title that could be from any RimWorld year: "Modders Unprepared For 1.6 Launch." It's the rhythm of this game — massive modlists, a major version every year or two, and a catalog where some fraction of mods crosses each gap late or never. The stakes are unusually personal here: RimWorld players run colonies, hundred-hour emergent stories living inside one save, and a version change mid-colony is the kind of variable nobody sane introduces. So the demand is constant: stay on 1.5 until the list is ready, go back to 1.4 where that one essential mod stopped, keep a beta18 install around for the nostalgia run. It's the same instinct behind downgrading to keep your mods working in any modded game — hold the game still so the mods stay compatible. Single-player game, no anti-cheat, paid — the calmest legal profile in this whole series.

01Ludeon's branch shelf

Open Properties → Betas on RimWorld and you'll find what every status section on this site wishes for: version branches going back through the game's whole life — version-1.5, version-1.4 and so on down to version-1.0 and even beta18, plus the occasional point build (the dropdown has carried entries like version-1.4.3563) and unstable for the future. Picking one swaps your install; picking "None" returns you to current. For most "I want old RimWorld" intents, that dropdown is the entire answer, and Ludeon deserves the same tip of the hat tModLoader got.

The familiar limitation is that Steam holds one install per game — and RimWorld is exactly the game where you want eras side by side (the 1.5 colony, the 1.6 experiments, the archival 1.0). DepotDownloader pulls any branch into its own folder, and RimWorld repays you by being delightfully low-maintenance to launch — no wrappers, no restart DRM, the folder just runs:

> .\DepotDownloader.exe -app 294100 -branch version-1.5 -username you -dir .\rimworld-1.5

02The Workshop trap — pin the mods, not just the game

The half everyone misses Pinning the game while staying subscribed to Workshop mods pins nothing. Steam updates Workshop content automatically, mod authors routinely drop old-version support when they update for a new major, and — the fact that makes this permanent — the Workshop keeps no version history: once a mod updates, its previous release is gone from Valve's side, full stop (the long version is in our workshop guide). A pinned 1.5 install subscribed to live mods will watch its own modlist rot in place.

The community's standard defense, recommended across the RimWorld wiki and forums: make local copies. Copy each mod's folder from steamapps\workshop\content\294100\ into your pinned install's own Mods\ folder — local mods load from there and Steam never touches them. Mod managers the scene already uses (RimPy, Mod Manager) automate exactly this. I've lost a modlist to exactly this, so I'll be blunt: do it on the day your list works, because the no-history rule makes mod archiving strictly now-or-never: the game's old versions will still be downloadable next year; today's version of a mod won't be. In this one game, the mods are more perishable than the game itself.

03Colonies and the Ludeon folder

Saves and config live outside the install: AppData\LocalLow\Ludeon Studios\RimWorld by Ludeon Studios\ (Saves, Config, and a ModsConfig that records your active list). RimWorld is XML-flexible, but cross-major-version save loading is the usual gamble and mid-colony version changes are how storytellers lose protagonists. The full archive of a colony you care about is a trio: the save folder, the local mods folder, and the game version name — with those three, any colony is replayable years later; missing one, it's archaeology. Disable Steam Cloud for the game while you're version-hopping, same as everywhere.

04Manifests for the gaps

The branch shelf is generous but curated — specific point builds between the listed ones (yesterday's 1.6 hotfix, a particular 1.4 build a modpack names) follow the standard route: release dates from the RimWorld wiki's version history matched against the manifest lists of your platform's depot on SteamDB's app 294100 page, then -manifest as in the universal guide. The game is small (a couple of gigabytes), so era archives cost nothing — which, given the mods half above, is not where your archiving attention is needed anyway.

05Status in 2026

RimWorld inverts this series' usual worry. The game side is about as future-proof as Steam gets: live branches across the whole version history, immune to manifest weather, from a studio with a decade-long habit of keeping them. The fragile side is the Workshop — no version history, author-driven updates, content that exists only in its current form. So the advice I'd give if it were my colony lands differently here: archive the mods, today, locally; the game will wait for you. It's the one page in this series where the depot system is the reliable party — enjoy the novelty.

the other branch-land colonyProject Zomboid: two builds, one folder →