How One RimWorld Modder Tripled His Players With AI NPCs and Turning Passion Into Income
How You Can Too at https://player2.game/profile/developer
If you’ve ever stared at a little NPC hauling bricks at 3x speed and thought, “What are you thinking right now?” — this one’s for you.
AI and LLMs have quietly become the most powerful NPC design tool modders have ever had. Not just for “more text,” but for characters that feel alive, react to the world, and remember what’s happened to them.
Today I want to share the story of Gerik Uylerk (a.k.a. Gerik), the creator of EchoColony and the one who helped onboarding RimTalk to player2 for RimWorld — and how building AI NPC mods with Player2 didn’t just bring his pawns to life… it nearly tripled his user base and turned modding into a real source of income for him.
And if you’re a mod developer, I’ll show you exactly how you can do the same with your own game or mod.
“I didn’t want longer text. I wanted characters that felt alive.”
“I noticed that there were already some mods using AI to generate stories or enhance certain aspects of RimWorld, but none of them really matched what I wanted. I didn’t just want longer text or more complex storytelling. I wanted characters that felt alive.”
Gerik has been a developer for years, and like many of us, he’s obsessed with strategy and management games. RimWorld in particular.
Every time he watched a pawn eat, build, or wander around camp, he had the same question:
What would this little person say if they could actually talk to me?
That question eventually became EchoColony — mods that give RimWorld pawns their own voices, memories, and opinions, driven by AI and their in-game experiences.
Instead of the player writing the dialogue, the pawns talk for themselves. Their words come from their traits, relationships, battles, and daily life in the colony.
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out Gerik’s RimWorld NPC chat in action — watching pawns banter and process battles together is honestly wild.
From “AI sounds cool” to “oh wow, this actually works”
Gerik had experimented with different AI APIs before Player2. You probably know the drill:
Complicated registrations
“Where is my API key again?”
Long docs, rate limits, logins, portals…
So when he tried Player2 for the first time, his reaction was basically: wait, that’s it?
“You just download it, install it and that’s it. No complicated registration, no jumping through confusing pages just to get an API key. I had been testing different AI APIs for a long time and it was the first time I found something like this.”
For RimTalk and EchoColony, he wired things up so that the mod could work:
With the Player2 desktop app, for players who just want plug-and-play
With a manually assigned API key, for power users who prefer that route
Once integrated, two things stood out immediately for him:
“The first one was the speed of the responses. I can have long conversations with the NPCs and it never gets overloaded.”
“The second thing is the very generous free usage… I’ve never run out of the free quota. It’s amazing.”
For a game like RimWorld, where you can spend hundreds of hours in a single save, that matters a lot. Players don’t want to worry about running out of AI just because they talked to their pawns too much.
Did AI NPCs actually bring more players? Yes. A lot.
This part is simple:
“Without exaggerating, I’d say it practically tripled my user base. Even though I added different AI options, none of them caused the download numbers to grow as much as Player2 did. Everyone loves an AI that’s easy to use.”
Mod players are not asking for more complexity. They want:
Click, play, talk — no dev account, no extra forms
NPCs that respond quickly and stay in character
Something that “just works” in the background
Player2 is built around that exact idea: make it frictionless for players, and flexible for mod developers.
That combo is what drove the spike in adoption for EchoColony and RimTalk. The tech is cool, sure — but the usability is what brought the crowd.
Turning passion into income: the revenue share program
Gerik didn’t start doing this for money.
He started making mods during a difficult moment in his life, mostly as a way to keep his mind busy and pour energy into something he loved. Then something unexpected happened:
“I realized that doing what I love could also become a source of income. That gave me back a lot of motivation.”
With Player2’s revenue share program, he gets a transparent monthly payout based on player usage, plus extra from game jams and prizes.
No legal labyrinth. No predatory contracts. No tiny-print conditions.
“There are no complicated contracts, no endless requirements or impossible conditions. You just focus on making fun mods or games for the players.”
We handle the boring parts: billing, infrastructure, and tracking usage. Modders like Gerik focus on the fun parts: making weird, delightful, emotional NPCs that players get attached to.
What makes a great AI NPC mod? (Gerik’s advice)
If you’re a mod developer thinking, “Okay, I want to try this”, here’s some of Gerik’s best advice.
“A key aspect is that every NPC should feel organic and alive, with their own personality, their own conflicts and their own way of seeing the world. But the most important thing is that your game or your mod has to be fun.”
Here are some practical principles you can steal immediately:
1. Tie dialogue to what’s happening in the world
NPCs shouldn’t feel like floating chatbots. They should react to:
Recent battles
New constructions or disasters
Relationships, breakups, betrayals
Injuries, mood, needs, traits
In EchoColony, some of the best moments come after battles, when colonists process what just happened — celebrating victory or grieving losses in their own way.
Those small, grounded reactions are what make them feel real.
2. Avoid over-decorated “poetic” AI
It’s tempting to prompt your NPCs to sound clever and literary. But if every line reads like a dramatic monologue, players will eventually disengage.
“If the NPC… talks in an over-decorated way, like it’s reciting a fancy template, then it stops feeling like a character and becomes a simple question and answer machine.”
Instead:
Keep the voice consistent with the NPC’s traits
Let them be simple, grumpy, weird, awkward — not all of them need to be geniuses
Use shorter lines during gameplay, save longer ones for big moments
3. Remember: fun > fancy AI
A technically impressive AI that isn’t fun is still a bad mod.
Don’t overcomplicate setup or UI
Don’t force players through walls of configuration
Give them one button: “Talk to NPC”
Make sure what comes out is entertaining, not just impressive
“That’s what you should aim for: characters that truly live inside the world, not characters that only answer questions.”
Why mod developers love building with Player2
Here’s what stands out for modders like Gerik:
🧰 1. Simple to integrate
You can support:
App-based usage — players just run the Player2 app
API key usage — for web users who do not want to or can not use localhost
You don’t have to build your own infrastructure, auth, or billing.
⚡ 2. Fast, reliable responses
Long conversations, heavy play sessions, lots of simultaneous NPCs — and it still stays responsive. That’s crucial for keeping immersion.
🎮 3. Generous free usage for players
Your players can talk to NPCs for a long time without touching a paywall. That makes it easier for your mod to spread and build a community.
🤝 4. A dev-focused community
“There are developers helping each other every day, and there’s also a team behind Player2 that listens to users, considers suggestions and keeps adding improvements.”
Need more TTS voices? Better dev tools? People ask — and we ship.
Okay, I’m in. How do I start building my own AI NPC mod?
Here’s a simple path you can follow:
Step 1: Pick the game & the fantasy
RimWorld, Mount&Blade, and Minecraft are the most popular games on our platform right now
Skyrim, Sim4 are commonly asked
Step 2: Decide how NPCs “know” the world
Think about what you’ll pass to the AI:
Current mood / health / traits
Recent events (e.g. “lost a friend in battle 2h ago”)
Relationships (e.g. “married to X, hates Y”)
Context of the conversation (is the player interrogating? comforting? joking?)
You don’t need to send everything — just enough for the AI to roleplay convincingly.
Step 3: Wire your mod to Player2
Check Web API and Localhost API docs depending on your need
Integrate the APIs in your game
Upload the mod from the creation console above
Gerik even made it so that everything can be done from inside the game itself, which massively improves UX for players.
Step 4: Ship it, then iterate with real players
Want to build the next EchoColony?
Gerik turned a simple question — “What would my pawns say?” — into:
A set of beloved AI NPC mods
A tripled user base
And real monthly income through Player2’s revenue share program
If you’re a mod developer, then this is your moment.
Start making your NPCs alive with Player2.
Build something your players will still be talking about after the game is closed.
And if you do?
We’d love to feature your mod next.
Really solid breakdown of the modding economics here. The part about NPCs needing to react to recent events rather than just generic dialogue is spot-on, that kind of contextual memroy is what separates a chatbot from something that actually feels embedded in the game world. The usage-based revenue share model sounds way more straightforward than typical mod monetization, nice to see that kind of transparancy in the space.