Rimworld Best Steam Deck Settings

RimWorld is an incredibly captivating and addictive game that combines elements of colony management, survival, and storytelling. What makes it truly awesome is its intricate and unpredictable narrative generation, where you oversee a group of survivors as they navigate harsh environments, fend off threats, and build a thriving community. It's a game that keeps players engrossed for hours on end, thanks to its unique AI-driven storytelling and the constant challenge of making life-and-death decisions.

With the Steam Deck, you can now carry your colony management adventures wherever you go. The game's default settings already run impressively well on the Steam Deck, delivering a seamless gaming experience. But if you want to maximize your battery life during those long gaming sessions on the go, tweaking some settings can be a smart move. Adjusting graphics and performance options can ensure you get the most out of your Steam Deck's battery, allowing you to enjoy Rimworld's immersive gameplay for hours on end, wherever you are.

Rimworld Best Steam Deck Settings

Rimworld runs great on the Steam Deck (well enough to warrant a Platinum rating on ProtonDB), so you can expect a nigh-perfect simulation experience out of the box. If anything, the game's greatest weakness on the Steam Deck has nothing to do with performance at all, but the controls.

As is the case with many keyboard-centric games on the Steam Deck, it takes a lot of messing about to find a control scheme that works for you. Just know that you're not going to be happy with the default setup and be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get down and dirty with the Steam Deck's control settings.

Even if the game runs great on the Steam Deck, as PC gamers, we're always searching for ways to improve the in-game experience. In the case of Rimworld on Steam Deck, that means extending the battery life of Valve's portable gaming machine. To that end, I've tinkered and tweaked all possible settings to give you the configuration below, which offers the best possible battery life in your favorite alien planet civilization simulator.

Max Battery Life Settings (Native@40fps | ~2h30m)

We've already established that Rimworld runs great on the Steam Deck, so we'll be looking to make improvements to battery life. This configuration is designed to squeeze out as much playtime as possible on a single charge.

When trying to save battery life on the Steam Deck, the first thing we do is to reduce the screen's refresh rate to 40 frames per second. No, 40 is certainly not as satisfying as the coveted 60 fps, but it's still a very good experience, especially after accounting for the added battery life you get from it.

The next step is to set a limit on the Deck's TDP, which keeps the device from drawing more power than it needs to run Rimworld. For this, all I did was test individual Watts settings until I found the lowest value that still delivered a stable 40 frames-per-second experience.

Finally, we set a ceiling on the GPU Clock Frequency, which keeps the graphics unit from pushing itself harder than necessary.

Altogether, these changes give us an additional 30–40 minutes of battery life without significantly degrading the gaming experience.

You can still make some changes to get even more playtime out of a single charge, but not without noticeably reducing the game's visual quality. For instance, you can also squeeze out another 15–20 minutes by setting the screen's refresh rate to 30Hz. You can also try setting the game's resolution lower than native (1280x800) for some added battery time and performance.