scheissgeist/overlord

Overlord is a mod for the colony simulation game RimWorld that lets Twitch viewers control a streamer's in-game colonists from their own browser window. A streamer assigns a colonist to a viewer, and that viewer gets a control panel showing the colonist's needs, health, and skills, along with a map view and the ability to draft, move, work, or change gear for that pawn. The system has three parts. The mod itself runs inside RimWorld, sending live game state and applying the commands viewers send. A relay server, which is a small Node.js program the streamer runs themselves on a service like Fly.io, a Docker container, or their own computer, passes messages between the game and the viewers' browsers. Viewers open the relay's web address, log in with their Twitch account, and either claim a colonist or wait to be assigned one. There is no shared public server run by the project, so every streamer needs to set up and host their own relay. The mod requires RimWorld version 1.5 or 1.6 and a separate mod called Harmony, which many RimWorld mods depend on to modify the game safely. It can be installed through the Steam Workshop or by downloading a release directly from GitHub, or built from source using a provided build script or the standard dotnet build command. Overlord can optionally connect to Twitch Toolkit, a separate popular streaming tool, so that viewers can spend channel points or currency to buy in-game items or story events for their assigned colonist, though Toolkit's own Twitch chat connection needs to be active for that to work. The project credits an earlier mod called Puppeteer as its inspiration but is a separate, unaffiliated codebase. It is released under the MIT license.