This has been pretty ambiguous, for me, and probably for all of you, so let me make this concrete and official, from this instant, to the eons ahead.

This mod has entered a life-support state ever since 9 June 2019. As I prepare this text, it has been 10 months and counting.

While I truly believe I have the ability to maintain this mod, I do not want to do so anymore.
I originally inherited this mod from ClosedDoors in late 2018, seeing that ClosedDoors seems to tell something. Something about the darkness of not knowing things.

I could see the clear line between RimWorld and reality, thus allowing me to develop the mod with this guiding question: what if the Rim is dark and full of terrors? How might someone from real life, such as me, react to/understand the darkness from the Rim, as if I am reading a friend’s letter?

But everything changed in June 2019.

There was a massive Anti-Extradition Bill protest in Hong Kong at that time.

While my stance on the protests are out of scope of this text, the events that has happened during the protests greatly broke my heart. News about the protests occupied the headlines of the local media. Claims, evidence, and rebuttals of police brutality were commonplace. Standards of reference were disputed; the choice of reference reflected people’s political stance, and thus could not be used reliably.

Real life became RimWorld. RimWorld became real life. There was no refuge. I could no longer rely on the guiding question to develop the mod, because I am now unexpectedly living inside my imagination, and it is not pleasant. It doesn’t make sense reading letters written by you and written for you, reading it on the same day as you have written it.

In turn, I saw the shadows of this mod in real life. As the shadows gaze into me with murderous intent, I am totally unprepared to gaze back into the shadow. The attempts on relating this mod to real life has left me scarred and weak.

The burdens have become too great for me to bear. Ever since the protests began, I have been trying to reduce my burdens elsewhere to leave room for reading the heavy daily news. But as I mobilize, together with the other citizens of my hometown, in January 2020, to brace for the Coronavirus, it has gone too far. The Virus was the last straw.

I then wanted to drop this mod, or at least minimize it to a point where I could still carry on with real life without much struggle.

Then, February came by. RimWorld v1.1 was released in late February, together with an updated Harmony and HugsLib. It was a brief yet chaotic time when everyone was frantically trying to understand why their mods all died at the same time. An update was necessary to keep this mod alive through the chaos.

At that time, I have finally decided, as I have written on the update news: “basic support will be provided to this mod”. This means, other than making sure this mod works in newer versions of the game (and perhaps Harmony and HugsLib too), I will not add anything new to it.

IMO this seemed different from discontinuing the mod, where I would totally forget about the mod and do nothing about it, so I have avoided wordings such as “this mod is dead”.


So there you have it. I have decided to provide only the most basic support possible to make sure I don’t suddenly go crazy with all this real life madness.

Other mods such as Elite Bionics Framework and Real Time Clock Plus are not affected by this because they are sufficiently disconnected from real life that I can safely work on them without triggering any crisis.

At the same time, I keep thinking that this mod will go to waste if I simply abandon it without doing anything about it. Seeing that I am not prepared to maintain such a special and somewhat popular mod, I am now inviting any willing C# modder to fork this mod and continue its rightful journey through the Steam Workshop. Forkers are free to use the ideas in the Suggestions thread, since I am not gonna make use of them anyways; consider the Suggestions thread a conveniently established roadmap to the future.

And that concludes my thoughts. Good that I have finally lifted a weight from my mind.