Rimworld Mega Base

[Fortun Bawa]

Oneof the hardest things, especially for new players but even veterans can suffer this, is to know where you're going next. It's very easy to let your colonists do "busy work" - hauling, cleaning, shuffling around - and never actually grow your base in any productive direction, or at least not very effectively. Have a plan, always move toward that plan, know what the next plan is after that, and move toward that as soon as possible.

Sometimes you'll have a "grand plan", a large combo dining room/rec room, or a hospital complex, or a vast kill box area, or maybe your entire colony pre-planned out - great, but don't feel you have to do it all at once. Break it down into smaller chunks, maybe temporarily partition it with cheap wooden walls, and "remodel" once you're in a position to progress with the larger project properly.

A perfect example is your very first building. You want to get your pawns indoors, and similarly with perishable items, and you want a freezer. Plan your freezer room, build that, but use it as a combination barracks/storeroom until you have your bedrooms and dry storage areas built. Maybe partition it for now for a smaller area for cool meat/perishables storage and another for comfortable-temperature barracks and workspace, done. Later, once your pawns have proper bedrooms of their own and you have dedicated kitchen and crafting areas, tear out the partitions to get the full-size freezer you want, and you're back on track for your master plan.

Expanding on that, if you plan for larger bedrooms, you can move to build a single 5x5 room, and divide that into four 2x2 bedrooms (using one as a prison cell or medical room), or six 1x2 coffin bedrooms, and tear out the walls as you later have the time/manpower to expand properly. And so on.

Especially early on, when you feel you need "everything now!", you can make do with "just enough", leaving room to build on those starts later once you have your feet under you and don't feel like you're putting out quite so many fires at once.

An efficient base allows your colonists to get stuff done and stay happy. They must be able to reach their assigned jobs in time, and the base needs to be pleasing and comfortable to work and live in. The base should also be secure, but that is probably the easiest part.

The most important principle here is to not put the living quarters in the center of the base. Bedrooms should be at the edge of the colony: they are not needed during the day and will be an obstacle, and during the breacher raid it's better to lose beds instead of fabrication benches.

Also, it is difficult to plan ahead how many beds you will need, unless you make a hard commitment to limit the head count of your colony (and to kill or sell everybody else...). If your living quarters have other buildings surrounding them, it becomes impossible to add more beds without creating an entirely new housing zone. This quickly leads to a cluttered base layout that is difficult to defend.

The recreation and dining area should also be off center, probably close to the sleeping area. Recreation and eating happens mostly in the morning and evening (before and after night time). Colonists visit this place only very sparingly during the day.

Make sure that related areas are close: kitchen, freezer, warehouse and factory floor. Some rooms are very frequently accessed from the outside (the freezer is one example). Provide short walkways to these places.

Colonists do not like to exist in a cluttered and ugly environment. They do not want to walk through disgusting places all the time. For example, do not put a dumping stockpile next to a Geothermal generator next to the main walkway of the colony.

Ugliness that is unavoidable can be countered with decor bombing. Make some really impressive sculptures, and put them right into the mess. Spreading a few large sculptures throughout your main stockpile will make it beauty-neutral or even "beautiful". Like all furniture, sculptures do not have to be kept roofed or indoors, so they can be placed anywhere. Smoothed floors and walls, as well as carpets, are an effective source of beauty (+2 beauty per tile), but somewhat work and resource intensive to make.

Comfortable furniture is very important. Keep a good carpenter (with high "construction" skill), and have them craft all the furniture in the base (especially the beds and chairs). Put a Dining chair or Armchair in front of all workstations (they are both "beautiful" and "comfortable"); they will not make anyone work faster, but their comfort ensures that the user will receive a mood bonus while using them and for a modest duration afterwards.

Securing the base is not difficult, as long as your floor plan is compact. You can simply surround the entire complex with walls, keeping a deliberate weak spot that enemies will most probably attack from. If you give enemies the opportunity to enter your base, they will take it, even if tactically unsound. If there are long hallways, you can use the doorways as natural cover, by having one shooter stand in each doorway and shoot down the hall at incoming attackers. This is an effective maneuver that can contain even mid-size raids and does not require any purpose-built defenses.

Different structures suit the different needs of your colony. The maps generate with old structures around, sometimes just walls and others are squares/rectangles just missing some sections. If conveniently located, these can work perfectly as starting points, reducing considerably the initial workload of characters with low-level skills and reducing the beginning stresses when you still have nothing.

Currently, the first room we need to build is a storeroom, as items deteriorate if left outdoors or exposed. Place a stockpile zone covering most of the room except for the tiles adjacent to the doors as sometimes pawns may accidentally drop an item in the doorway, leaving it open and insecure. You can have multiple smaller stockpile zones set to allow specific different items to better organize them. Your storeroom should be built close to the workshop to minimize travel times for raw materials.

Give special consideration toward explosive items such as chemfuel or mortar shells as they may blow up and set ablaze your entire stock. Place them separate in a stone made compartment and far from the exterior of the base to prevent doomsday rocket launchers from hitting the items as they can pierce through walls. Place a firefoam popper here to protect against fires igniting your munitions.

The barracks is a room where multiple pawns share a single sleeping space. This is easy to host your colonists early in the game, but it proves inconvenient as walking pawns will disturb the sleep of other occupants, and non-lover pawns dislike sharing a room. Furniture such as bedrolls or beds improve their comfort. The better the furniture, the faster they wake up and become more productive during their schedules. You should upgrade your colony to provide private bedrooms once the basics are covered, and you can convert the barracks into something else such as a hospital or prison barracks.

You can upgrade a barracks with positive mood modifiers by placing sculptures, nice flooring, temperature control utilities and high-quality furniture like dressers and end tables which increase the comfort of many beds at once. A very impressive barrack can give positive mood buff to colonists sleeping inside, but they are still prone to get disturbed sleep' debuff.

Colonists like to eat as soon as they wake up. You may place a table and chairs inside at the beginning, but try to reinstall them elsewhere when you can as colonists entering to eat will disturb the sleep of others. Build the dining room close to the barracks once the sleeping quarters are done.

Bedrooms are private sleeping spaces which removes the "disturbed sleep" mood penalty caused by other pawns, and provides better mood bonuses than a barracks. Couples will want to sleep together and won't disturb the sleep of their partners. However, they will need a double bed.

The Freezer, Kitchen, Dining Room and Recreation Room are often adjacent to one another. The kitchen should be isolated from the other rooms to reduce dirt caused by walking in. The dining room and kitchen should be attached to the freezer so it isn't necessary to have to pass through the kitchen to get a meal.

Parties and wedding ceremonies take place at Gathering Spots where chairs are detected, and since pawns don't eat during these times, their proximity to the freezer is convenient to go get a meal and come back to the tables.

The Freezer is a stockpile room to preserve raw food, plant matter and fresh animal corpses. Across all stages, the freezer is an indispensable facility, because meat and prepared meals spoil very quickly, and it is impossible to keep a fresh food stockpile without a controlled freezing area.

In most places, this is accomplished with the addition of coolers set to freezing temperatures. Even though food freezes at 0 C (32 F) you should have your freezer at least set at around -4 C (24.8 F) or so since it will gain heat whenever a colonist comes in. In cold places, on the other hand, you may choose to save power by disabling the coolers, and instead let cold air inside through vents.

It is viable for butcher spots or butcher tables to be placed inside the freezer, as butchering is a short, intermittent activity for your cook, so the work speed penalty is not very impactful. Other workstations, such as crafting spots should be placed right outside to avoid the work penalty while benefiting from the proximity of the ingredients.

In any case, do not put your kitchen stove in this room. Besides the work speed penalty, the cooking stove needs to be in a clean environment which the freezer does not have, due to heavy foot traffic and blood stains from dead animal bodies.

Consider making an exclusive stockpile with high priority at the front of your freezer which only allows meals, so that cooks will always store them closer to ease retrieval. The same planning can be applied for two more stockpiles at the front of your freezer for meat and veggies, to speed up ingredient pick-ups (colonists assigned to hauling and trained animals will move ingredients from the back of the freezer to the front).

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