Rimworld Hospitality
RimWorld Hospitality turns idle visitors into guests you can house in guest beds, sell to, and recruit — with a diplomatic cost. What it does, the 1.6/Odyssey catch, and who it's for.
Wondering what the point of RimWorld's visiting factions is? RimWorld Hospitality is the long-running answer. It turns idle visitors — the pawns who wander onto your map and leave — into guests you can house in guest beds, sell to, and eventually recruit, and it ties their comfort to your standing with their faction.
Gameplay · 700h+ played
Seven hundred hours of active play in one colony and it has never once left the load order — which is about the strongest thing you can say about a RimWorld mod. It's the one that finally gave visiting factions a point: hosting, recruiting and running a small business off your guests turns dead-air visits into a system you build the colony around. The catch below is real — the Odyssey space layer is only half-done and it isn't clean to remove — but on-planet, in a long game, it's essential.
The problem it solves
In the base game a friendly faction's visitors are pure decoration. Hospitality gives that visit a shape — three beats, from arrival to a possible new colonist.
Each group is a bunch of unique visitors — real pawns with their own skills, traits and home faction. Recruitment isn't a button: a colonist set as Negotiator builds a guest's trust by spending time with them, and the higher their trust and your negotiator's social skill, the better the odds when you attempt the recruit from the Guest tab.
What RimWorld Hospitality changes
The reason to care about visitors is now reciprocal: treat a faction's people well and your goodwill with that faction climbs alongside your Hospitality rating. Whether a given recruit is worth it becomes a real decision, and you control exactly who you invite over and who you leave alone.
Guest beds and the guest economy
Underneath the diplomacy, Hospitality is a small business sim bolted onto your colony. Providing rooms, guest beds and joy raises your Hospitality rating; the rest is about getting money out of your guests' pockets.
- Guest beds and rooms — comfort, beauty and joy feed the Hospitality rating, and you can charge a bed price that scales with the room's quality.
- A shopping area — mark a zone (shelves and containers count) and guests buy the stuff you leave up for sale, from art and drugs to spare gear, straight out of storage.
- Chores — happy guests pitch in and help with your colony's work.
- Comms Console invites — you control which faction you call over instead of waiting for a random visit.
- A Guest tab — every present guest, their recruit difficulty, and the faction-anger price of taking them.
- Vending dispensers and a cash register — automate sales and control opening hours.
- A HugsLib settings page — toggles for guest behaviour, including whether guests drop their inventory; handy if a mod conflict is causing lag.
Add-ons to add to your collection
Hospitality is the hub of a whole family of add-ons — part of why it has stayed one of the community's current favorites for years. Each is its own Workshop item you subscribe to alongside it; hit Add to Collection to bundle them. Several now run standalone too, serving vanilla caravan visitors even without Hospitality, so you can pick just the ones you want.
- Gastronomy — a sit-down restaurant: guests or your own colonists order meals from a waiter and pay at the table.
- Hospitality: Storefront — a staffed shop on the cash register; a skilled seller can even close deals above a guest's budget, moving high-value apparel, weapons and art.
- Hospitality: Casino — slot machines with an adjustable house cut plus a poker buy-in; your own colonists always play for free.
- Hospitality: Vending machines — 24/7 self-serve machines with a pricing strategy; it fills the gap between the free shopping area and a staffed Storefront.
- Hospitality: Spa — charges guests to use a pool, hot tub or sauna from Dubs Bad Hygiene, the big plumbing-and-bathing mod by Dubwise it plugs into.
- Cash Register (Continued) — the shared building Gastronomy and Storefront run on; sets opening hours, menu and staff shifts.
Most are community-maintained — Adamas (tomvd) keeps Storefront, Casino, the vending machines and Spa; Gastronomy and the cash register have their own continued versions alongside Hospitality (Continued). The original Workshop post keeps a recommended-mods collection, and there's a much-watched video explanation if you'd rather see it in motion; if something misbehaves, the RimWorld community on Reddit and in the Workshop comments has covered most edge cases.
The catch
It leans on Harmony and HugsLib, and it wants to load as late as possible — after your storytellers, faction mods and Vanilla Expanded Framework — or the Guest tab can fail to appear. It also keeps a long list of known incompatibilities: any mod that gives guests animals or slaves, several bed mods, and some food-selection mods that trigger a constant alert and lag. The Continued maintainer has fixed a batch of these and keeps the list current, so a heavy modlist still needs a load-order pass.
Two more things before you commit. It's clean to add mid-game but not clean to remove — pull it out only with no guests or visitors present and every guest bed deconstructed first, or you risk breaking the save. And on 1.6 / Odyssey the space layer is only partly covered: guests work fine on-planet, but the same isn't true in space — none arrive there, and taking guests aboard a gravship throws errors and makes them revert and leave on landing. Full Odyssey compatibility is described as still in progress.
700 hours in — and the community agrees
This is the rare mod I've never turned off. Across roughly 700 hours of active play it's stayed in every load order, because it fixes the one thing vanilla never did: it gives visitors a point. A dead faction-relations screen becomes a living loop — host well, watch goodwill climb, run a hotel or tavern on the side, and now and then talk a skilled guest into staying. Stack the add-ons on top (a Gastronomy restaurant, a casino, a spa) and it quietly turns into a colony-as-resort game inside the game.
Seven hundred hours in, it's the one mod I rebuild every colony around.
— our verdict
That enthusiasm isn't just mine. Hospitality lands on essentially every "best RimWorld mods" roundup — PCGamesN's 2026 list singles it out for solving the pointless-visitor problem, and it shows up on outlet after outlet as a near-essential pick. The maintained Hospitality (Continued) alone carries hundreds of positive ratings, and after roughly a decade it's still one of the most-subscribed gameplay mods on the Workshop.
The criticism is honest and worth stating plainly. In a big colony or a badly-ordered modlist it can cost performance, and it's genuinely load-order-sensitive with a long list of documented conflicts. Players still hit the occasional bug — guests getting stuck on certain jobs, and a hospital-bed "slept on ground" mood debuff the maintainer is chasing — and, as the catch covers, it isn't clean to remove and only half-covers Odyssey's space layer. Those are the reasons it sits at a 9 rather than a 10. None of them has ever come close to making me uninstall it.
Who it's for
- You want visiting factions to actually matter — diplomacy and social play.
- You like running a business: sell your art, drugs and junk, and bolt on Gastronomy, Casino or Storefront.
- You want a second, slower route to new colonists beyond raids and wanderers.
- You're playing a space or gravship-nomad Odyssey run — guests don't follow you off-planet yet.
- You keep a minimal modlist and don't want to manage load order and conflicts.
- You want install-and-forget — recruitment and hosting need active tending.
FAQ
Does Hospitality work with RimWorld 1.6 and Odyssey?
Yes, on-planet. For 1.6 the maintained version is Hospitality (Continued) by Zaljerem — the maintainer asks you to unsubscribe from the original for 1.6. Guests don't arrive in space, and carrying guests on a gravship currently throws errors and makes them leave on landing; full Odyssey compatibility is still being worked through.
Why does Steam say this item is incompatible with RimWorld?
If the Workshop marks the item as incompatible with RimWorld and tells you to please see the instructions page for the reasons why this item might not work within RimWorld, it usually just means the copy you're subscribed to isn't tagged for your game version, or a conflicting mod is loaded. On 1.6, subscribe to Hospitality (Continued) and check your load order — that message is a version-and-compatibility flag, not proof the mod is broken.
Do I need HugsLib and Harmony?
Yes — both are required. Also load Hospitality as late as possible, after your storytellers, custom faction mods and Vanilla Expanded Framework, or the Guest tab may not show.
Can I add or remove it mid-game?
Adding mid-game is fine. Removing is not clean: first make sure no guests or visitors are present and every guest bed has been deconstructed, otherwise removing the mod can break your save.
How do I recruit a guest?
Set one or more colonists as Negotiator, then build a guest's trust by hanging out with them. Open the Guest tab to see recruit difficulty and attempt the recruit; success rises with the guest's trust and your negotiator's social skill.
Does recruiting hurt my faction relations?
Yes. Taking someone from a faction lowers your standing with it — the Guest tab shows how much they'll hate you if the recruit succeeds, so you can weigh whether it's worth it first.
Who made it, and is it still maintained?
The original is by Orion (OrionFive), licensed under CC-BY-SA and GPL. Orion has stepped back after burning out on RimWorld modding and now mainly reviews pull requests; the actively-maintained 1.6 line is Hospitality (Continued) by Zaljerem.
