RimWorld Vanilla Weapons Expanded — every weapon ranked
Every weapon in Vanilla Weapons Expanded and its ten sibling modules, ranked S to F. Filter by module, pick your shooter, toggle vanilla in.
Vanilla ranged weapons tier list → Vanilla melee weapons tier list →
Vanilla Weapons Expanded is not one mod, it is eleven. The core module adds 38 weapons on its own; ten sibling modules bolt on lasers, coilguns, exoframe-only heavy weapons, quick-draw sidearms, non-lethal capture tools, neolithic clubs, scrap guns that jam, a Western arsenal and an Anomaly-flavoured bioferrite line. Vanilla Weapons Expanded adds dozens of guns across those eleven modules, and it hangs off the core game’s combat mechanics rather than replacing them. This tier list ranks the whole expanded arsenal in one place and says what earns a slot in your RimWorld colony’s arsenal. Pick a role, filter down to the modules you actually run, and toggle the base-game weapons in to see where the mod sits against vanilla. Every number is computed from the mods’ own Defs with the same formula the vanilla weapon tier lists use.
✦ Crit Pick Patch 1.6 + VE 800+ hours played Scored at normal quality
Short version: the shotguns run the table. Close range is where RimWorld’s accuracy maths is kindest, and VWE adds five of the best short-range guns in the game — the trench gun, the sawn-off, the charge shotgun and the laser shotgun all outscore anything vanilla has except the chain shotgun. The coilguns break the armour ceiling outright at 200% penetration. Everything past 35 tiles, mod or not, is punished by the same distance maths that put the vanilla sniper rifle in D.
9/10 — Eleven modules that mostly earn their slot: a handful land a little too strong and a couple a little too weak, but the rest drops into RimWorld’s own progression as if it had always been there.
How the ranking works
Guns are scored on raw DPS × the chance a shot actually lands at the range the weapon fights at × armour penetration. Raw DPS is damage × burst size divided by the whole firing cycle — warm-up, the gaps between shots, cooldown. Hit chance is RimWorld’s own maths for an average shooter: accuracy compounds per tile, so a gun that fights at 45 tiles keeps only a fraction of its paper accuracy while a shotgun at 11 tiles keeps most of it. That is why a 40-damage anti-materiel rifle lands in D and a sawn-off sits in S: one of them hits. Hit chance compounds with distance, so the worse the aim the harder a long-range gun is punished — pick the wielder above the grid (poor shot, average, sharpshooter) and watch the whole board re-tier.
Melee is scored on melee DPS weighted by the square of each attack’s damage, multiplied by armour penetration — the game’s own weighting, so a longsword is judged on its cuts and stabs rather than its weak pommel bash. Every melee weapon here is made from a material, so the grid has a material selector and one tier scale runs across all of them. Steel is the neutral baseline; sharp blades climb on plasteel and higher still on obsidian, blunt weapons climb on uranium, and everything sinks on wood. Bioferrite (Anomaly) sits just under obsidian for blades and adds psychic sensitivity on top. Skysteel is the odd one out — it comes from Alpha Animals, not from RimWorld, and it is never the top damage material: it multiplies sharp and blunt alike by 1.1 and earns its place through 50% more hit points, not through output. A weapon vanishes from a material it cannot be made from — the tribal axe takes stone or wood, so it shows up under obsidian but never under steel; the combat knife is metal only.
Explosives, flame and non-lethal weapons are not scored on DPS at all; area, stun and denial do not compare to sustained fire, so those tabs are tiered on what the weapon does. Grenade belts are apparel, not weapons, and are tiered on how many charges they carry and what they carry.
The same formula, run over the base game, reproduces the tiers on the vanilla ranged and vanilla melee tier lists exactly — all 21 guns land in the tier they already have there in all three shooter grids — 63 of 63 — and every melee weapon lands in its published tier in all four of that page’s material grids — 56 of 56. Numbers come from the Vanilla Expanded repositories’ 1.6 Defs, at normal quality. Weapon icons are Vanilla Expanded team art, shown for identification with credit.
Pick a role, pick your modules
laser shotgun S
What’s good
- Strong sustained output (~15.4 raw DPS)
- Cuts through armour (56% AP)
- Reliable hits where it fights (~43%)
What’s not
- Ultra-tech — late-game, trader or salvage only
- Not craftable — loot, trade or salvage only
// guns · average shooter · all modules — tap a weapon for the numbers behind its rank, and the catch
What Vanilla Weapons Expanded actually adds
The core module is the one that changes a run. It fills the gaps vanilla leaves: a trench gun and a sawn-off shotgun for the early close-range hole, a lever-action rifle and semi-automatic rifle between the bolt-action and the assault rifle, a marksman rifle and an anti-materiel rifle at the top of the industrial tree, and a full charge-weapon line up to the charge missile launcher, so spacer tech is not just one rifle and one lance. Every one of them slots into RimWorld’s existing weapon progression instead of jumping over it. It also adds three logical research projects of its own — trench warfare, heavy weapons, laser targeting systems — so the new guns unlock on their own track rather than being handed to you. You also discover weapons on raiders long before you can craft them.
What the February 2026 rework changed
The version you install today is not the mod people remember. The change notes put it at 19 February 2026: a v2.0 rebuild with a new author line-up, renamed weapons (the old hand cannon is now the heavy revolver), new weapon categories, and full support for the Odyssey weapon-trait system. Muskets and flintlocks moved out to Vanilla Factions Expanded — Medieval 2 and the whip was dropped. The old build is still archived on the old-version branch, which is why guides written before February describe an arsenal that no longer matches the mod. One correction worth knowing: the official FAQ still says the charge sniper rifle was removed — it was, on 19 February, and then re-added the next day as a new design. It is in the mod, and it is ranked here.
Weapons that also do a day job
Several pieces carry unique utility on top of their combat numbers, which is why a colony ends up equipping them for reasons that have nothing to do with raids. The harvesting-friendly hatchet gives +3% plant work speed, so a forester can carry it and still chop; the construction-boosting hammer and the shovel each give +5% construction speed, and the shovel is a genuinely respectable melee weapon on its own terms. The stealth-focused compound bow carries +0.85 hunting stealth — animals notice the shooter far later, which makes it the hunting weapon in the mod rather than a combat one. These are read straight off the Defs, not inferred from the description.
Unique weapon traits and the Odyssey DLC
If you own Odyssey, the core module adds 23 unique weapon variants — one for most of its industrial and spacer guns, from the crossbow up to the charge sniper rifle. The module fully supports the unique weapon trait system introduced in the Odyssey DLC and carries mod-specific categories like akimbo, bipods, fire selector and saturation feed. Coilguns goes further and defines six new unique weapon traits of its own — inertial core, bypass relay, overdrawn coils, ionized sabot, hypercapacitors and inverted rail tuning. Mechanically they inherit every combat value from the base weapon and change only the art and which traits can roll on them, so they are not ranked separately on this page: a unique battle rifle scores exactly what a battle rifle scores. Coilguns and Quickdraw add their own unique variants the same way.
Where the weapons actually show up
The modules do not just sit in your crafting menu — several patch pawn kinds so the weapons spawn on enemies that suit them, and only on appropriate enemy pawns. Makeshift guns are handed to scavengers and, if you run VFE Pirates, to scrappers. Frontier rewrites the loadouts of eleven VFE Settlers pawn kinds, from bandits and bounty hunters up to the sheriff and the mayor, and sets what they are willing to spend on a gun. Grenades gives destructive grenadiers and pirates a frag belt. Tribal skips patching entirely and rides the base game’s neolithic weapon tags, so tribal raiders pick its clubs up on their own.
The siblings each answer one question, and each carries distinct tactical advantages. Laser and Coilguns are the late-game answer to armour: the gauss line penetrates at 200%, the laser sniper rifle at 100%, and nothing in vanilla comes close. Heavy Weapons gates five oversized guns behind an exoframe or the Tough trait and makes them wear out as you fire them; the handheld mortar in that module is the only weapon here with indirect fire capability, needing no line of sight at all. Quickdraw trades cooldown for a near-zero warm-up, so its guns fire first in an ambush. Non-Lethal is the only module here that is not about damage — a dart gun, a taser, tear gas and a stun baton, for players who recruit rather than bury. Tribal, Makeshift, Frontier and Bioferrite are flavour lines with real mechanics attached: neolithic clubs with no research at all, scrap guns whose burst length is a dice roll, Western revolvers with a flat 10% chance to double their damage, and a Bioferrite mod that introduces a secondary fire paid for in bioferrite; the mod introduces no new damage model to go with it. Core rounds the set out with utility throwables — area-denial smoke grenades, tactical stun grenades — and a close-quarters flamethrower.
Which Vanilla Weapons Expanded modules are worth installing
Install these
- Core — 38 weapons and three research projects; the only module that is close to essential.
- Coilguns — three guns, but they solve armour, and it is the most actively maintained repo in the family.
- Non-Lethal — if you recruit prisoners, the dart gun is a different game.
- Quickdraw — four guns, no new mechanic to learn, and the fastest draw in the game.
Think twice
- Heavy Weapons — five guns you cannot carry without an exoframe, and they degrade as you shoot.
- Laser — the good ones are not craftable at all; you are installing loot, not a tech tier.
- Makeshift — deliberately bad guns. Fun as a scavenger start, dead weight otherwise.
- Grenades — adds no weapons, only belts. Useful, but it is not what the name suggests.
Each module on the Steam Workshop: Core · Laser · Coilguns · Heavy Weapons · Quickdraw · Non-Lethal · Grenades · Tribal · Makeshift · Frontier · Bioferrite
The catch
Read the tiers as a ranking of the modded pool, not as a verdict on vanilla. Toggle the base-game weapons on and the chain shotgun is still the best close-range gun in the game and the charge lance still holds its own — it reads as a natural extension of the base game, not a replacement: the mod widens the arsenal, it does not power-creep it, and the two modules that clearly do out-scale vanilla (Coilguns and Laser) are gated behind spacer and ultratech research or are not craftable at all. The one exception worth naming: the core module’s charge shotgun and charge SMG land above almost everything vanilla offers at the same tech level, and if you run a low-tech colony you will never see them.
Two honest gaps in this list. Blast damage for the grenade launcher, rocket launcher, handheld mortar and fire bombs is not printed in the mods’ own files — those weapons inherit base-game projectile defs, so they sit in the explosives tab on role rather than on a number I could verify. And the Tribal module never declares armour penetration on its melee weapons, so those chips show the DPS and leave the AP blank rather than guess at it.
FAQ
What are the best Vanilla Weapons Expanded weapons?
Close range wins in RimWorld, so the trench gun, sawn-off shotgun, charge shotgun and laser shotgun top the list — they fight at ranges where shots actually land. For armour, the gauss revolver and gauss rifle from Coilguns penetrate at 200%, more than double anything vanilla has. The autocannon out-damages everything on paper but needs an exoframe or the Tough trait to carry.
How many mods are in the Vanilla Weapons Expanded series?
Eleven, as of 2026: the core module plus Laser, Coilguns, Heavy Weapons, Quickdraw, Non-Lethal, Grenades, Tribal, Makeshift, Frontier and Bioferrite. All eleven are maintained for RimWorld 1.6 and all need Vanilla Expanded Framework. Only Quickdraw hard-requires the core module; the rest run standalone, though several add extra content when core is present.
Is Vanilla Weapons Expanded balanced or overpowered?
The core module is tuned to sit beside vanilla, not above it — ranked together it does not feel overpowered, and base-game guns still hold the top of the close-range grid. Laser and Coilguns do out-scale vanilla, but they are ultratech and spacer respectively: the laser weapons cannot even be crafted, only looted or salvaged. Flip the with-vanilla toggle here to judge it yourself.
Does Vanilla Weapons Expanded need other mods?
Every module needs Vanilla Expanded Framework and Harmony, and nothing else. Quickdraw additionally lists the core module as a hard dependency. Heavy Weapons only loads after core rather than requiring it. Frontier and Grenades unlock extra content if you also run Laser, Coilguns, Quickdraw, Heavy Weapons or the VFE Settlers and Pirates mods, but none of that is required.
Is Vanilla Weapons Expanded compatible with 1.6 and Odyssey?
Yes. All eleven modules ship a 1.6 folder and declare support for 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6. The core module and Coilguns and Quickdraw go further and add Odyssey-specific unique weapon variants with weapon traits — those inherit the combat values of the base weapon and only change the art and the trait slots, so they are not ranked separately here.
Can I add Vanilla Weapons Expanded to an existing save?
Yes, you can add any of them mid-run — the mod is save game compatible. They add ThingDefs, research projects and recipes; nothing rewrites world generation. Load Vanilla Expanded Framework above the modules, and load the core module above Quickdraw and Frontier so their conditional content resolves. Removing a module mid-save will delete any of its weapons you own, which is the usual RimWorld caveat rather than anything specific to this family.
Does Vanilla Weapons Expanded work with Combat Extended?
Combat Extended replaces the entire damage and ammunition model, so every weapon here needs a CE patch to behave sensibly. The Vanilla Expanded repositories carried CE compatibility branches in the 1.4 and 1.5 folders and dropped several of them for 1.6, so patches now come from the CE side or from community patch packs. Nothing on this page uses CE numbers.
