RimWorld Together review: 40 hours of co-op with no desyncs
We played RimWorld Together for 40+ hours with 289 mods on Linux and Windows. Separate colonies, one shared planet—and a live-visit feature we could not get working.
Everyone who has ever wanted to play RimWorld with a friend hits the same wall: the game is single-player by design, and the mod that promises to fix that is famous for desyncing. RimWorld Together refuses the problem instead of solving it. You do not share a colony — you share a planet. Two colonies, two clocks, one world map, and a server in the middle that passes visits, raids, caravans and trades between you.
Multiplayer · 40h+ played
Forty hours across a 289-mod medieval overhaul, one player on native Linux and one on Windows, and not a single desync — because there is nothing to desync. That architectural choice is the whole review: by giving up the shared colony, RimWorld Together buys back mod tolerance, stable performance and the ability to log off without ending your friend's session. The recommendation survives a genuinely awkward finding below — real-time visiting is a preview feature and it never completed for us — because the asynchronous game underneath it is finished, and the asynchronous game is the point. If what you want is co-op that survives a heavily modded long game, this is the one that works.
The problem it refuses to solve
The obvious way to build RimWorld multiplayer is to run one colony on two machines and keep both simulations identical, tick for tick. That is what Zetrith's Multiplayer does, and it is why that mod's most-searched companion phrase is "desync". RimWorld's simulation is enormous and every mod that touches pawn behaviour is another chance for two machines to disagree about a coin flip.
RimWorld Together never makes that promise. Each player runs their own colony at their own speed on their own machine. The server holds the planet and everyone's save files, and relays the things that actually need to cross the wire.
What it actually changes
Once you are connected, the world map stops being scenery. Your friend's settlement is a real tile you can caravan to. Trade is a genuine two-way market rather than a randomly generated trader ship, and prices are whatever the two of you agree they are. You can send aid to a colony that just lost its harvest, and you can send a raiding party to one that did not lose enough.
The part that surprised us most is the offline layer. Settlement maps are stored on the server, so raiding a friend who is asleep is not blocked — you play against the last saved state of their base, and they find out what happened when they log back in. It turns a co-op mod into something closer to a tiny persistent server, which is a genre RimWorld has never had.
Because nobody shares a colony, nobody waits. Your friend can pause, save-scum a surgery or log off for a week, and your game keeps running at whatever speed you set. In a colony sim where one player always wants 3x and the other always wants to micromanage a wound, that is not a compromise — it is the feature.
Mods: the part everyone gets wrong
The mod's own pitch says you can play "regardless of mods or DLCs", and that sentence causes more confusion than any other. It is true in a narrow sense and misleading in a practical one.
What is true: RimWorld Together does not need per-mod compatibility patches, because it is not synchronising your simulation. Our 289-mod load order — Medieval Overhaul, Vanilla Expanded, A RimWorld of Magic, Vehicle Framework, Dubs Bad Hygiene, the lot — ran without a single mod-specific problem. The in-game "potentially incompatible mods" warning is a generic scan for Harmony patch overlap, not a curated blacklist, and the wiki says outright that you can usually dismiss it.
What is misleading: the server sorts every mod into Required, Optional or Forbidden. Miss a required mod and you are refused at login. Once a required list exists, turning on something the server has never heard of will also refuse you. That is the correct behaviour — it fails at the door instead of corrupting a save — but it means "any mods you like" really means "any mods the admin has approved". Set anything that touches world generation, factions or biomes to Required, and do it before you generate the planet, not after.
RimWorld Together vs Zetrith's Multiplayer
These two mods are not competitors so much as different answers to different questions, and the honest comparison starts with the numbers: Zetrith's Multiplayer has 460,595 Workshop subscribers to RimWorld Together's 113,634. It is the better-known mod by a wide margin, and if you want the thing people usually mean by co-op — two players in one base, both hauling, both building the same wall — it is the only mod that does it.
What it costs you is fragility. Deterministic lockstep means both clients must agree perfectly forever; mods need explicit compatibility work, there is a community spreadsheet tracking which ones behave, and Google's own autocomplete for that mod fills in "desync", "keeps desyncing" and "wrong random state on map 0". It also requires Prepatcher, which RimWorld Together declares as a hard incompatibility — you cannot run both.
RimWorld Together trades the shared base away and gets robustness for it. Pick Zetrith's if you and one friend want to build one colony together on a modest mod list. Pick this if you want a heavily modded long game with people who play on their own schedule.
The catch
Four, and the first one will change how you plan a server.
Real-time visiting and raiding did not work in our tested build. Everything above about the world layer holds for the asynchronous path, where you play against a stored copy of the other colony's map. The live version — both players online, in the same base, at the same moment — is a preview feature, and in our game it never completed once: a WAIT dialog appears on entering the other player's settlement and stays there until you kill the process. No crash, no error, no timeout. Staff on the project's Discord described the mod in August 2026 as not having "same tile play yet", with the preview setting offering real-time raiding and visiting on top; other players in the same channel report the same hang, one of them on a completely unmodded install. Treat it as an experiment, not a feature you plan around.
You must plan the mod list before you generate the world. The planet is rebuilt on each client from a stored set of parameters, so a mod that changes world generation, factions or biomes cannot simply be added to a running server — the world everyone already has will not contain it, and a player joining later can end up with a different planet. Content mods are fine to add mid-save; world mods are not. On a 289-mod list, sorting that out afterwards is not fun.
Linux is a second-class client. The server runs beautifully on Linux and Docker, but the in-game version manager that downgrades or updates the mod is Windows-only. Client and server versions must match exactly to connect, so every time the server moves, the Linux player deletes the contents of the 3005289691 workshop folder by hand and extracts the matching release into it. It takes two minutes and it never stops being annoying.
Updating the mod is riskier than anything you do in-game. Two 2026 releases shipped with explicit warnings that saves from earlier versions are not compatible. Back up the server's Assets folder before every update, and do not update the mod and change the mod list in the same sitting.
40 hours in, on Linux and Windows at once
Our test is a fairly hostile one: a 289-mod medieval-fantasy overhaul on RimWorld 1.6 with all six DLCs, one player on native Linux, one on Windows, against a self-hosted server. Forty-plus hours later the honest report is that the cross-platform part is a non-event. Saves are RimWorld's own XML, the planet is rebuilt from a seed by the game's own deterministic world generator, and nothing about the wire format cares which operating system produced it.
That is worth stating plainly, because the search results for RimWorld multiplayer are dominated by people troubleshooting mismatches. With this mod the Linux friction is entirely in the version manager, not in play. The one routine interruption was the login refusal after one of us enabled something new without telling the other, which is the mod-list rule doing exactly what it is supposed to do.
Chasing the hung visit through the logs turned up two separate faults that are worth writing down, because neither is documented anywhere we could find and both are fixable.
Orphaned quests can freeze a save outright. On login the mod removes site world objects — the log prints a Removed site at tile line for each — but it does not end the quests attached to them. What survives is quest parts pointing at objects that no longer exist, firing their signal every tick until RimWorld gives up with Reached max signals per frame and the game locks. There were five of these in the second player's save. Deleting those quests cleared every associated error. If your colony freezes for no visible reason after a few sessions, this is the first thing to look for.
One of the mod's own factions is missing a pawn group. During world generation, RimWorld asks the mod's hostile faction for a Hunters group while building a work site; the faction only defines Combat and Settlement, so the log fills with has no usable PawnGroupMakers. Adding a Hunters entry to the faction definition fixes it. That means editing a file inside the mod, which a Workshop update will overwrite — worth knowing before you decide it is worth doing.
Neither of these is likely to be the cause of the hung visit. We are reporting them because they are real, reproducible and separate from it, and because the honest summary of a long debugging session is that we found two genuine bugs and still did not explain the symptom we went looking for.
Who it's for
Get it if
- You want co-op that survives a 200-plus mod load order.
- You and your friends play at different times and different speeds.
- Trading, raiding and visiting other players sounds better than sharing a stockpile.
- Someone in the group is on Linux, or is willing to host.
Skip it if
- You specifically want two players building one base together.
- Nobody is willing to run or rent a server.
- You want to drop it into a colony you already love — this needs a new world.
- Your group is on macOS, which the server does not support.
- You are counting on real-time visits, where both players are in one base at once.
FAQ
Can you play in the same colony in RimWorld Together?
No, and that is deliberate. Every player runs a separate colony on a shared planet, each at their own game speed. You interact through the world map — visiting, trading, sending aid, raiding — not by both controlling pawns in one base. If a shared base is what you want, Zetrith's Multiplayer is the mod that does that.
Does RimWorld Together desync?
There is nothing to desync. The mod does not run a shared lockstep simulation, so it has no tick synchronisation, no shared random state and no desync detection to begin with. Over 40 hours on a 289-mod list we saw none, because the failure modes here are different ones — a refused login, or a world mod added too late.
Why does visiting another player get stuck on WAIT?
In our historical test of 26.8.31.1, real-time visiting was a preview feature and never completed. Other players also reported the WAIT hang, including on unmodded installs, so the mod list alone did not explain it. Offline visiting and raiding used a stored copy of the other colony's map. We have not retested newer releases or established a current fix.
Do both players need exactly the same mods?
By default, close to it. The server marks each mod Required, Optional or Forbidden; missing a required mod refuses your connection, and once a required list exists, an unknown extra mod refuses it too. Since release 26.6.8.1 an admin can allow any mod list instead, and admins always bypass the check themselves.
Does RimWorld Together work with Odyssey?
Release 26.10.15.1 remains the final supported RimWorld 1.6 version. Release 26.10.20.1 added support for RimWorld 1.7 unstable. Our recorded test used 26.8.31.1 on RimWorld 1.6.4871 with Odyssey; that remains historical experience. We have not retested the newer releases, and the 2 November release notes do not establish a stable RimWorld 1.7 launch.
Can I add a new mod to a server that is already running?
Content mods, yes; world mods, no. New items, buildings and pawn kinds are as safe to add as in single-player. Anything touching world generation, factions or biomes is not, because the planet was baked from its parameters when the world was made. Back up first, then have an admin upload the new list.
Does it work between Linux and Windows players?
Yes, and in play it is seamless — we ran exactly that setup for 40 hours. The one gap is housekeeping: the in-game version manager is Windows-only, so a Linux player who needs to match the server's version replaces the mod folder's contents by hand. The server itself runs on Windows, Linux and Docker, but never on macOS.
Why does it say my login details are invalid?
Usually it is not the password. Client and server versions must match exactly, so a server that has updated while you have not will turn you away. Check the server's release version first, match your client to it, then compare mod lists.
For other colony mods, see our RimWorld Mods Library and our Hospitality review.
