Hyperdrive
Faster startup for heavy mod lists.
Every launch, RimWorld loads each mod’s XML, applies all the patches, and reads textures. On a big list that phase takes minutes. Hyperdrive does the same work, just smarter:
- Loads mod XML in parallel instead of one mod at a time
- Swaps the slow patch matching (XPath over the whole document) for an O(1) index
- Warms the texture files into the OS cache in the background so the loader stops waiting on disk
- Scales the loader thread count to your CPU instead of a hardcoded 2
- Respects your exact mod load order: parallel, but deterministic
- Harmony. Load Hyperdrive right after it.
On a 250-mod list cold start went from 5:14 to 2:32 (about 2x) on my machine.
It scales with your hardware. More CPU cores and a faster disk (SSD/NVMe) mean a bigger win. On a slow machine you may actually see startup get slower: the parallel loading hands out more work at once than a weak CPU or an HDD can keep up with. If that’s your setup, this mod isn’t for you.
Everything is done in memory through Harmony. No game files are touched, nothing is written to disk, and your saves are not affected. Add it or remove it whenever you want. If a patch can’t apply (after a game update, or a mod conflict) it skips just that one patch, logs it, and the game loads normally.
Works alongside Prepatcher and other mods. It only patches the loader, so the conflict surface is tiny.
Known incompatibility:
- Yet Another Optimizer. Both mods rewrite the same vanilla patch-operation methods to speed up the XML patch phase, and the rewrites collide, causing a hard crash to desktop during loading. Run only one of the two, or disable Yet Another Optimizer’s "fast patch operation" option to keep using both.
- Overlaps with Faster Game Loading (Continued). No crash, but both are startup optimizers that do the same job. They parallelize loading at different layers, so their work nests and fights for the CPU instead of adding up, and both run their own texture prefetch. Pick one as your main loader or, if you want both, turn off Faster Game Loading’s multithreading and let it handle texture downscaling while Hyperdrive does the parallel loading.
Bug reports are accepted only through GitHub issues[github.com], and only with a full report:
- your complete mod list (load order)
- your hardware: CPU model and core count, disk type (NVMe / SSD / HDD), and RAM
Without a full mod list and hardware specs a report can’t be acted on. Please don’t report bugs in the Steam comments.
https://github.com/vopaga/rimworld-hyperdrive
- v1.0.3: Initial release on Steam Workshop.
[ko-fi.com]
