Like a few others mentioned, the only mod content integrated any time recently was animals art in the 1.1 free update, provided by Oskar Potocki. We also hired him to do art for Royalty. And of course he's in the credits and was thanked in both the 1.1 and Royalty announcements.
Royalty is 100% original and created by us.
Of course there are some passing resemblances to some existing mods, but it's nearly impossible for this not to happen. There are 5,000+ mods for RimWorld, and there are only so many natural and obvious ways to expand the game. So modders have been anticipating things we were going to do for years now, back into the alpha days.
In some cases they actually came after us, it's just that we've been developing Royalty in secret for 16 months so we released later. (e.g. Psychic Awakening mod has a surface similarity to Royalty's psychic powers; it was released in November while we internally implemented psychics around summer.) And in each ...
Read more