Testing Mods

< Modding Tutorials

?

Under Review

This tutorial or guide is currently undergoing review and may be subject to further revision.

This page contains tips and tricks for debugging and testing mod content.

Development Mode

Main Article: Development mode

Usually referred to as just "dev mode", enabling this option gives you a large number of tools to help test both the vanilla game as well as mod content.

To enable dev mode:

1. Start RimWorld
2. Go to Options in the Main Menu
3. Under Gameplay, check the "Development Mode" box

Development mode will remain on until explicitly turned off, even if you close and reopen the game.

Debugging

RimWorld runs on Unity, which uses a modified fork of the Mono runtime. As of RimWorld 1.6 (Odyssey), the current versions are:

• Unity 2022.3.35 (https://unity.com/releases/editor/whats-new/2022.3.35f1)
• Mono (https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/mono/tree/unity-2022.3-mbe)

If you are using Rider, the easiest way to set up debugging for custom assemblies is to use Gareth's RimWorld plugin: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/21583-rimworld-development-environment

If you are not using Rider or do not want to use the plugin, there are instructions for setting up Doorstop manually here: https://github.com/pardeike/Rimworld-Doorstop

Tips

The following are specific tips for testing various types of mod content:

Weapons and Apparel

You can spawn weapons and apparel by using the "Spawn weapon" and "Spawn apparel" dev mode debug commands, respectively.

There are also debug output commands for showing the chance of spawning any given weapon or apparel piece, to help diagnose whether your tags are correctly configured.

Pawns

You can test custom pawns by using the "Spawn pawn" dev mode command. This will list out all PawnKindDefs in the game.

Incidents

You can use the Incident dev mode commands to test various incidents, including raids.

Jobs

"Toggle job logging" and "Draw pawn debug" can be helpful for diagnosing pawn AI.

Lords

Lords are group AI controllers used by everything from trade caravans to raiding parties.

• View settings -> Draw Duties (for seeing what each pawn does)
• View settings -> Draw Lords (for seeing what the Lord does)
• View settings -> Log Lord Toil Transitions (for reading what transitions happen)

Quicktest

When dev mode is enabled, there will be a Quicktest option on the Main Menu that instantly loads into a Crashlanded map with all default options.

You can also have the game load instantly into a Quicktest map on load by using the -quicktest command line argument:

C:/Path/To/Game/RimWorld.exe -quicktest

On Mac:

/Users/Username/Library/Application\ Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/RimWorld/RimWorldMac.app/Contents/MacOS/RimWorldMac -quicktest

You can make a shortcut to the game with this command line argument.

Alternatively, if you have a save file named autostart.rws, then game will load that on start.

Save Data

You can override the save data folder using the -savedatafolder command line argument. This is useful if you want to install the game on a USB drive so you can plug and play it from anywhere:

C:/Path/To/Game/RimWorld.exe -savedatafolder=C:/Path/To/The/Folder

You can also use relative file paths:

-savedatafolder=SaveData

Be sure the game is running with permission to modify the folder; it may not work properly if you run the game under default permissions on its own install folder.

You can combine the -savedatafolder with the -quicktest argument for a clean modding environment.

Mod Tools

• Publisher Plus by Jaxe (Steam Workshop) - Gives you more options when uploading a mod to Steam Workshop, including excluding files or folders from the upload.