I'm just now coming back to Rimworld for the new DLC. My custom scenario included a start-with entry for the pickaxe, so I was getting some errors. I thought I was going crazy until I came here and found that my pickaxe is just straight up gone.

Now, I'm not here to bang my entitled gamer drum and freak out about something being removed from a free mod, but I am a little bummed out because the tool bonuses were the primary reason I was actively using VWE. Its not a big deal since the assets for the pick are still there in the mod for the 1.3 version and I think I should be able to restore it with a few clever PatchOperations.

My question here is what exactly is going on with tools? As far as I can tell, the only publicly released info on this is the changelog. Based on the 75% nerf to the ones that survived the purge I'm assuming this was a balance change, but I see that the shovel gets to keep its 0.15 bonus to both plant yield and mining speed. Maybe that was just missed?

Is this really just a nerf, or are we going to see tools factored out to a separate Vanilla Expanded mod? Was this a bug fix and am I going to break my game if I mod it back in?

As an aside, while I get that editing the composited screenshots might be a bit hard you guys might want to at least delete the individual images for the removed tools from the mod description. The fact that the pickaxe is still there threw me off when I was trying to figure out what happened.