Wall

This article is about the constructable building only. For natural and smoothed walls, see Structure.

Walls are impassable structures primarily used to create rooms.

Acquisition

Walls are built and repaired by colonists assigned to construct. Walls are constructed with 5 Stuff (Metallic/Woody/Stony, 50 for SMVs) and take 135 ticks (2.25 secs) to build.

Wall construction may sometimes fail and waste the materials, more often with lower construction skill.

Summary

Walls are impassible objects that block movement, line of sight, and line of fire. An area enclosed by walls, doors, or other impassible objects like coolers is considered a room. Each room has its own temperature, cleanliness, beauty, wealth, and spaciousness stats separate from the surrounding environment. Walls can also support roofing, up to 6 tiles away in all directions. If walls, columns, and all other supporting objects are removed, then the roof will collapse and injure pawns and objects below. While most natural walls count as walls for the purposes of rooms, collapsed rocks do not.

Corners, i.e., diagonal walls, are not required to complete a room. Corners will provide weaker temperature and beauty insulation than vertical or horizontal aligned walls, but still create rooms. Pawns cannot travel or shoot through diagonal gaps. However, fire can go through diagonals. If there is an open door on the other side of the diagonal, then pawns can melee attack through.

Power conduits can be constructed below a wall, negating the conduit's beauty penalty. In addition, any floor under a wall is negated for the purposes of beauty.

Walls also provide excellent cover from projectile attacks, blocking 75% of shots. Pawns behind a wall with an adjacent free space will "lean" around the wall to shoot at enemies on the other side.

Special

Certain damage types are designed to deal more damage to impassible terrain, and to walls specifically:

Walls take 8x damage from Bomb type damage; 4x from being an impassable, and 2x for being a wall
Walls take 30x damage from Thump type damage; 15x from being an impassable, and 2x for being a wall
Walls take 7.5x damage from Breach type damage; 10x from being impassable, but 0.75x for being a wall

Meditation

Ascetics can meditate at a wall for a Meditation Focus Strength of 22%.

Analysis

Walls, or natural rock, are practically essential to create rooms and defensive structures. It's certainly possible to create a room of doors or coolers, but that is just more expensive. As impassible structures, they are important when controling enemy flow and creating killboxes. Sapper and breach raids will explicitly try and break them, but other raiders will path around so long as any target can be reached.

Material choice

Wall materials each have their own advantages and disadvantages:

Wood

Wood is easily obtainable in a vast majority of biomes, and are the fastest wall to create. They are very helpful when first starting a Crashlanded scenario, and often essential for Lost Tribe and Naked Brutality starts. However, wood is flammable. Other than raiders lighting it on fire, a bad dry thunderstorm or conduit explosion could end up engulfing your entire base in flames. Especially by the time you get to using Electricity, you should replace wood with another material.

Stone

Stone is very plentiful, but very time consuming. In addition to actually creating the wall, cutting up stone blocks takes quite a bit of work. However, stone is a fairly hardy material, and is completely fire-proof. Strategically placed sections of stone walls will act as a "fire break" to limit the spread of a fire while your colonists fight it.

Granite is the most durable wall material. Limestone is the 2nd most durable. Limestone and slate have no redeeming qualities as walls over granite, unless your biome happens to lack the harder stone.
Marble walls give +1 beauty to a room and colonists looking at it. They are otherwise the least durable stone wall.
Sandstone walls are the quickest stone wall to build, which can save a lot of time for large bases.

Metal

Steel isn't as durable as stone, but is much quicker to make. Steel may be a necessity in wood-scare biomes like the ice sheet. Steel walls are also flammable, unlike concrete and the actual steel item. Overall, it's useful as a quick installation when creating defensive fortifications.

Plasteel and Uranium are even bulkier than stone, but these materials shouldn't be wasted except on the most important of wall sections, like the entrance of a killbox.

Gold and Jade walls are more beautiful than regular walls, but are inferior to sculptures when increasing room stats.

Stats table

Wall	Beauty	Work to Build	HP	Flammability	Market Value
Material	Beauty	Work to Build	HP	Flammability	Market Value
Bioferrite	0	000,338 ticks (5.63 secs)	600	75%	4.95
Gold	20	000,122 ticks (2.03 secs)	180	40%	500
Granite blocks	0	000,950 ticks (15.83 secs)	510	0%	7.9
Limestone blocks	0	000,950 ticks (15.83 secs)	465	0%	7.9
Marble blocks	1	000,883 ticks (14.72 secs)	360	0%	7.7
Plasteel	0	000,297 ticks (4.95 secs)	840	0%	46
Sandstone blocks	0	000,815 ticks (13.58 secs)	420	0%	7.4
Silver	6	000,135 ticks (2.25 secs)	210	40%	51
Slate blocks	0	000,950 ticks (15.83 secs)	390	0%	7.9
Steel	0	000,135 ticks (2.25 secs)	300	40%	10
Jade	10	000,675 ticks (11.25 secs)	150	0%	27
Uranium	0	000,257 ticks (4.28 secs)	750	0%	31
Wood	0	000,095 ticks (1.58 secs)	195	100%	6.3

Version history

0.7.581 - Wood wall and metal wall merged into wall with the introduction of the stuff system.
1.1.0 - Terrain requirements now depends on what they’re built from. This means stone walls can’t be built on bridges any more.
1.1.2654 - Increase psyfocus gain of wall from 11 to 22.
1.3.3200 - thump damage multiplier versus walls reduced from 4x to 2x.

Architect

Structure: Animal flap • Autodoor • Bridge • Column • Door • Fence • Fence gate • Ornate door • Wall • Security door
Related: Roof