Expands RimWorld 1.6's Odyssey transport-shuttle system with a family of buildable, role-distinct craft and a typed-capacity system — each shuttle carries colonists, mechs and cargo as independent pools, instead of vanilla's single shared mass limit. Includes a fully autonomous transport drone and is multiplayer-compatible.
All are research-gated off the vanilla Shuttles project, built in the Odyssey architect category, and
cost a rare ShuttleEngine (trader/reward only — engine count scales with size). The vanilla Passenger
Shuttle is folded into the same capacity system as the baseline all-rounder.
| Craft | Crew | Mechs | Cargo (kg) | Fuel | Range | Role |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Passenger (vanilla) | 4 | – | 250 | 400 | 62 | balanced all-rounder |
| Troop | 12 | – | 100 | 550 | 120 | fast squad insertion/extraction |
| Cargo | 2 | – | 1250 | 600 | 85 | dedicated hauler |
| Heavy Cargo | 4 | – | 2500 | 800 | 70 | flagship hauler — slow, thirsty, short range |
| Mechanitor (Biotech) | 1 mechanitor | 6 bandwidth | 50 | 650 | 90 | mech strike carrier |
| Transport Drone (Biotech) | 0 | – | 1000 | 650 | 200 | autonomous courier |
Crew = seat count; Mechs = a bandwidth budget (sum of each mech's BandwidthCost); Cargo = item/animal mass with crew and mechs excluded. Fuel is sized so a full tank covers a comfortable round trip; range is the hard launch-distance cap.
- Typed capacity — colonists (by count), mechs (by bandwidth), and cargo (by mass, excluding crew and mech weight) are tracked and capped independently, with clear load-dialog readouts and over-cap warnings.
- Autonomous transport drone — no pilot or crew. It can be sent to any tile and lands & holds its cargo in the field (a persistent world object that survives the origin map being abandoned), then recalled, sent onward, or told to form a camp (spins up a real map with the ship on it). At a friendly settlement it gifts its cargo for goodwill and stays put to fly again. Strands (and can be camp-refuelled) if it can't afford a trip.
- Multiplayer-compatible — the world-object commands are MP-synced; the API stub ships with the mod, so it also runs fine without the Multiplayer mod installed.
Rooted on the vanilla Shuttles project: Shuttles → Troop → Cargo → Heavy, and a Biotech branch
Shuttles + StandardMechtech → Mechanitor → Drone (also needs HighMechtech). All in a dedicated Shuttles
research tab.
Original ¾ directional art per craft (Textures/Things/Building/OSV/<Craft>/, the Biotech one under
Biotech/Textures/...), rotatable + paintable (Graphic_Multi + CutoutComplex + _m paint masks).
- Field charging — a landed Mechanitor shuttle doubles as a chemfuel-powered mech charger with no
power grid. Flip on its "Mech charging" toggle (off by default — it drains the fuel the shuttle needs to
fly home) and low colony mechs that can't reach a real charger walk up to the hull and top up from its tank.
A real
Building_MechChargeralways wins; the shuttle is the field fallback. - Mech-bay expansion research — two Biotech projects raise the Mechanitor shuttle's carried-mech bandwidth budget 6 → 12 → 18 and widen its field-charging line 2 → 3 → 4 mechs at once. It boosts the existing craft (no new variants), so ships you already built benefit the moment the research finishes.
Feature-complete and stable for singleplayer. Remaining before release: a multiplayer test of the autonomous-drone world commands and the mech-charging toggle (troop/cargo launches are already MP-verified).
See CLAUDE.md for the dev guide and the full backlog.
Portions of the materials used to create this content/mod are trademarks and/or copyrighted works of Ludeon Studios Inc. All rights reserved by Ludeon. This content/mod is not official and is not endorsed by Ludeon.