Hundred percent this. Rimworld is a streamlined but pale imitation of the crunchy janky unmatchable experience of Dwarf Fortress. I played Rimworld a lot, over 900 hours. Until I realized all I ever did was play it for the mods. I did not like vanilla, the game is too arbitrary and annoying with its fetish for random events.
Whereas even when Dwarf Fortress bullshits things, it still feels like things happened behind the scenes to lead you there. DF is more about the simulation and the illusion of simulation, Rimworld is more about a man shoving dice up your ass and saying “I have decided you are having fun wrong, all your colonists now have exploding penis disease that makes them randomly die, at the same time that the digging raiders are sieging your base and there is a radiation storm and insectoid swarm so big your game is lagging, good day” and people just clap at that for some reason.
I always tweaked literally everything with Rimworld, with these absurd unstable modlists because the game was plainly unpleasant for me otherwise. This mod tweaks these two annoying game mechanics and has three dependencies, this mod tweaks this other thing and has one dependency, this mod… etc.
So half my play time was waiting for Rimworld’s main menu to load, and the other half was always spent chasing cascading game-breaking bugs because the combination of mods I needed, to not hate the game, was never stable. So then I never touched Rimworld again, because I stopped pretending I was its target audience, I’m not. It’s made for people with different interests.
With Dwarf Fortress, in the pre-steam versions, I only strayed from vanilla occasionally. The game was and is always good enough for me unaltered. Although admittedly I do like adding extra creatures, even back in the day with raw file edits, and Steam Workshop really makes that annoyingly easy. Wish the built-in mod managing UI was better, but then again, Rimworld’s sucked too, and I always replaced it with a better one via a mod, and eventually an external program (rimPy) entirely.
Nope, I can never touch Rimworld again, it’s not worth my time.
My instance Blahaj has downvotes disabled, so I just ignore/block things I don’t like and upvote what I do. I like that better honestly.