RimExodus — Seamless World

RimExodus — Seamless World

Say goodbye to the disjointed "exit map → world map → reload" travel loop. RimExodus stitches adjacent world tiles' maps together, visually and functionally: colonists walk out of the base gate into the wilderness and on across invisible world-tile borders — no caravan, no loading screen. ⚠ Still in development and changes the map system deeply — expect bugs in odd places; reports welcome. The save format is settled, so play without worry. It can't be removed from a save, though; an unload utility may come later (to make maps compatible first).

What It Does

Every tile map is carved into a hexagon matching its world tile shape (pentagons too); adjacent tiles align through a "seam band": terrain, rock, and roofs blend across the seam, rivers and roads connect through. At a seam the neighbor's live terrain is already rendered beyond your border — colonists just walk across. Simply put: open-world RimWorld time! Hexagonal tile carving and seam alignment

• Seamless cross-map walking: order a colonist across a seam and they switch to the adjacent map with barely a hitch.
• Cross-map combat: line of sight, targeting, and projectile handoff work across seams — bullets hit the right target on the right map. Chase enemies across maps; they can chase you back. Disable in settings to restore vanilla combat. Shooting across a seam
• Incremental frame-sliced generation: neighbor tile maps generate as colonists are ordered toward the border, usually without pausing the game or a loading screen (saving blocked while generating — takes seconds).
• Rolling map dormancy: far maps go dormant (no ticking; contents preserved, reawakened anytime); farther maps are deleted and regenerated on revisit — freshly, so left-behind items, buildings, and terrain changes are lost. Home is never dormant or deleted. Both distances are adjustable.
• Native content integration: world-map POIs — faction settlements, ancient mechanitor compounds, ambushes, opportunity sites — generate as seamless tiles via the vanilla pipeline as you approach, naturally compatible with other mods' structures; camps too.
• Settlement traders: friendly settlements designate a "trader" from their garrison (question mark overhead); right-click to talk and trade — buy from settlement stock, sell your carried items, pay with carried silver. Full caravan trading semantics, minus the caravan. The dialog gathers every settlement interaction, including ones from other mods (e.g. Oberonia Aurea's diplomacy). Trading with a settlement trader
• Three-state world map icons: tile icons show active/dormant state in real time; select a tile to manually dormify or delete it.

Mod Compatibility

In theory, anything that doesn't modify base maps (the per-tile maps on the planet view) works. Adapted:

• Geological Landforms — fully adapted (landforms generate correctly on tile maps, preview included).
• MapPreview — previews faithful to the real terrain generation.
• Vehicle Framework — vehicles cross seams: drive up to a transfer spot; cross-map orders work. Large multi-tile vehicles get full-vehicle arrival validation (honestly refused if the far side has no room), and count as pawns for dormancy.
• Vehicle Map Framework — a vehicle carrying colonists on its map crosses normally.
• Perspective Shift — first-person WASD movement crosses maps fine; cross-map shooting works too.

Expected to be incompatible:

• RimSkyBlock (Edge of War sky islands) — its sky-island conversion breaks this mod's map setup, leaving those maps non-seamless, and its movement logic is uninvestigated and may cause extra issues. Not planned, given the tone clash.
• CE — of course that means Character Editor. As for Combat Extended… cross-seam shooting isn't supported yet; single-map combat works. Vanilla comes first; cross-seam combat and related mod adaptation later.
• As above, So below 2 — its map assumptions conflict outright: it must resize and re-split maps, and RimExodus can't keep tile borders smooth under that. The veteran multi-floor mod MultiFloors is adapted, though.
• Mods deeply modifying map generation, borders, or world tiles — untested. On conflicts, turn off "incremental generation" so tile maps use the vanilla synchronous pipeline (other mods' patches then apply, at the cost of a brief freeze).

Known Limitations

• If weather is force-modified and the source map is deleted before the source clears (e.g. its game condition hasn't ended), weather can never return to normal — the restoration path died with it.
• Designation-first commands (mining, chopping, etc.) don't appear in cross-map right-click menus (fine once you've crossed the seam).
• No cross-map hauling or cross-map work — this mod makes Odyssey more Odyssey, not one giant megabase.
• Odyssey space-layer maps and pocket maps (underground vaults, pits, VMF vehicle interiors, etc.) stay outside the seamless system, keeping vanilla behavior.
• Explosion AoE and mortar-style projectiles don't cross seams (they resolve where they land).
• Settlement trading only supports carried items (prisoners/slaves not yet); the trader is designated once at generation, never re-picked.
• Saving is blocked while an adjacent map generates (progress shows in the top-left corner).
• Neighbor rendering is approximate (no shadows/ripples); neighbors in another weather cluster follow the current map's sky.
• Connections around the planet's 12 pentagon tiles look slightly off, but movement is fine.
• Edge-spawned raids spawn near the seam, loaded neighbor or not. May be improved later (spawning from the outskirts of loaded maps) — undecided, pending research into conflicting mods.

Performance

Near-zero overhead when no cross-map action or generation is happening — but too many maps is itself a RimWorld performance problem. The mod adds no standing cost and mitigates it (dormant maps stop ticking, farther ones are deleted), but can't conjure TPS from thin air — don't hoard maps. A more aggressive soft-dormancy strategy is being researched (as of 2026.08.27): tickables on pawnless maps short of dormancy distance would tick at a reduced rate, so a dozen open maps would perform close to having pawns on only a few. See the GitHub README for a full breakdown.

Settings

Every entry has a tooltip — hover to see it, so it's not repeated here.

License & Credits

Open source under the MIT License; code on GitHub. Special thanks to Vehicle Map Framework — it proved cross-map modding possible and started this project. The architectures diverged too far to share code (VMF centers on pocket maps and vehicle crossings; RimExodus needed peer tiles in one world), so RimExodus was built from scratch — but without it, none of this would exist.

Links

Source and full documentation: GitHub Found a problem? Report it in the comments or on GitHub Issues — a log and repro steps help.