I built RimWorld Planner because I wanted to plan a base without opening the game. That’s really all there is to it. RimWorld is one of those games where half the fun happens outside the actual game — in spreadsheets, sketches, and overthinking layouts that will inevitably collapse when raiders arrive. I just wanted a clean grid and a few tools to draw walls, measure distances, and imagine colonies that might never exist.
The project started simple, but then I got stuck on the idea of making it offline-first. I wanted something that could work entirely in the browser, without an account, without saving anything remotely unless you chose to. So now it does exactly that: maps are stored locally by default, and only if you opt in, they can be published to a small gallery on the server. No backend needed to get started.
Under the hood, it’s mostly JavaScript — no fancy frameworks, just some modular logic to handle drawing, zooming, saving, and exporting ASCII maps. I added compatibility with the More Planning mod, since I used it a lot in RimWorld and the format was easy to support. I’d like to connect it with other planners too, if anyone’s interested. The idea is to make it as open and adaptable as possible, so people can build on top of it if they want.
There’s also a Room Generator feature that tries to generate random rooms with different shapes and purposes. It didn’t work for a while (honestly, it broke more often than it worked), but now it behaves better. Every so often I add something new, or change how things work. It’s not finished — it probably never will be — but it’s usable. And that’s good enough for me.
Sometimes I think about projects like this as small proof-of-concepts of persistence: tools that don’t need a reason to exist beyond being pleasant to make and surprisingly functional once done. RimWorld Planner might be useless, but it works. And if someone out there finds it useful — or asks me to integrate it with something else — then maybe it wasn’t so useless after all.
→ Try it here: matteobononi.it/rimworld_planner/
