User:Skraps/sandbox

This is a guide I'm currently working on. It's just a series of tips of come up with and compiled from other sources such as the rimworld subreddit.

Base building:

• Place your base close to valuable natural resources such as rich soil for well growing crops or steam geysers for power and heating.
• Use natural barriers to your advantage. Coast line and deep lakes can be used to minimize entry points from raiders. Shallow water and marshes can also slow down raiders movement and prevent them from building there when setting up a siege.
• Building in a mountain has many advantages. It helps minimize entry points from raiders and stone provides strong walls for protection. Also smoothing stone floor is a quick and easy way to get high beauty rooms.
• Wall of areas around your base to funnel raiders to predictable and convenient areas (i.e. make a kill box). This can also be used to protect your crops from hungry animals.
• Avoid having main line power conduits near areas likely to receive explosions such as battlefields, turrets and even batteries. You can also use redundant (multiple) conduits encase one gets damaged and cut off.
• Power switches help save a lot of time, especially in emergencies. Your defensive turrets should always be connected to power switches to quickly allow activation when being raided. Power switches can also be used to quickly turn off non-vital systems for low power situations.
• When destroyed turrets explode in a 3 tile radius. By putting walls between turrets you can place them closer together without having to worry about them all exploding when one is destroyed.
• If you can, build wider hall ways between room (e.g. 3 tile wide) to avoid getting cramped space debuffs through the hall way and drop items slowing movement.
• All built floors (including smooth floors) give a 100% movement speed rating on the tile. Concrete isn't any faster than other floors (NEED TO INVESTIGATE FURTHER).
• Vents don't perfectly equalize temperature between room so try to minimize the number of vents between any room and a heater/cooler.
• Have an additional nice hospital room for those long term patients and an additional nice prison cell for those prisoners you are trying to recruit.
• If you have an additional hospital for prisoners, you can make it separate from the prison so it can toggle it for colonists if you need more hospital beds.
• It's good to keep an indoor farm just encase you need something in the winter or for those long growing crops. If you grow on soil you can remove the roof in growing season and place it again in winter.
• Use stone types intelligently. Different stone types have different values, health and beauty. In general granite is the best. See the stone blocks page for more information.
• You can build ventilation systems (small halls with doors that can be forced open) to manage heat distribution from uncontrollable sources such as geothermal generators. If you want to just get rid of the heat you can vent it to a small room without a roof.
• Have a diverse amount of power sources (wind, solar, geothermal) to reduce variation if energy production. Try to produce enough energy as you need at all times encase a short circuit drains all your batteries.
• You can keep an isolated fully charged backup battery back off your power network encase a short circuit drains it. Then you can just connect it to the network for minimal down time.
• In general, your stockpiles should be placed near the source of what they are storing and near whatever needs to use them. For example have your freezer near where you grow food and your kitchen close to the freezer. More specific information on this will be given below.

Room and item placement:

• Rooms now have a roles which can be inspected with the Room Inspection tool. Have a room dedicated to a specific role will provide certain relevant advantages. Read the room roles page. It's very useful.
• Most rooms and stockpiles should be close to your freezer(s) as possible to minimize travel times.
• The kitchen should be the closest to the main food freezer due to cooking requiring frozen goods the most.
• The brewery is related to the kitchen role and should be where your hops stockpile, usually in a freezer.
• The dining room should close to your main meal stockpile, usually in a freezer.
• The butchers table (which is related to the workshop role NOT the kitchen role) should be close to your animal corpse stockpile, usually in a freezer. It may also be near a human corpse stockpile depending on your cannibalistic tendencies. It should also be close your textiles stockpile.
• Some work tables end up involving less travel time than others due to the amount of work it takes to create its product. For example stonecutting is usually quicker than sculpting, so prioritize building the stonecutting table closer.
• Keep medicine and body parts in your hospital for quick treatment. You may need to put your hospital near a freezer if you use herbal medicine.
• Make sure your silver stockpile is within a beacons reach.
• Have a beacon stockpile with a lower priority and lower quality range than your specialized stockpiles to sell junk you don't want.
• Try to put bedrooms close to the task they perform most of the time (main research near the research bench). Bedrooms close to the main entrance are also good for a quicker response to raids while sleeping.

Freezer:

• Most important part of you base. Build most things as close as you can to this to minimize travel times.
• Insulate freezers with thicker walls and air locks (two doors with a gap between them) to minimize loss of cool air.
• Not all food needs to be frozen. Packaged meals and beer wont expire. Haygrass also lasts about 9 months outside a freezer. Also body parts don't need to be frozen.
• You can segment freezers or build multiple freezers so you can have more freezer space during harvest season but turn them off as they empty, to save power cooling empty space.
• Keep redundant coolers around in case of a heat wave. The same applies to heaters outside a freezer in the case of a cold snap.

Misc:

• Chunks of stone and steel slag can serve as quick cover in place of sandbags in emergency situations such as at the beginning of a colony, when ship crashes, or when assaulting sieges outside the colony. They aren't as good cover as sandbags though.
• Have a nutrient paste dispenser around to save food in emergencies such as harsh winters.
• Cryptosleep caskets for emergency freezing of people you don't want to deal with (treat, terrible mood, feed).
• Turning your hops in to beer and food in to meals frees up space in your freezer.
• Give colonist with the Abrasive personality trait a different joy time from other colonists to avoid them annoying other colonists.
• Selling prisoners is generally more profitable than harvesting their organs and selling them, and gives less of a mood debuff to colonists (NEED TO INVESTIGATE). However it may be more profitable to harvest their organs if you have severe untreatable wounds such as lost limbs.
• A vitals monitor can connect to any hospital bed right next to it. That means it can connect to 4 hospital beds.
• Have an emergency forbidden firewood stockpile to keep light and heat up when you have a solar flair.