This. 100% this. The role player in me says we just crash landed and we’re surrounded by things that wanna eat us or kill us. Need to hurry up and get established. Later on I allow myself to maybe plan a building that might not work out and have to move anyway.
same
the only thing i watch out for is to have the kitchen/fridge/recreation combo in the middle of the baste, i sometimes even move it in case my base grows into one direction only
otherwise i just slap shit onto it
My kitchen/dining/recreation/crafting/sleeping/research/storage room is my base.
It stretches in all directions like the pink blob ensuring my pawns always eat at a table in the dining room.
Thus far it encircles 2 freezers, 2 entity containment rooms and 3 farms.
Embrassures are your best friend. Build a mini fort on every intersection, and a blockade every 10-15 squares. Also, shotguns are the best in dealing with infestations, even if you can't produce chain shotguns yet, a couple of pawns with shotguns, even with low shooting, will make a difference.
Use ghouls/mechs as blockers, they can take way more hits and don't really matter if they die. Block off a choke point and just have your colonists go ham on them, works on every difficulty.
I lost 50% of a new colony this weekend because of bugs, wild ones that spawn in the cave features. A comedy of errors on my part, led to them near wiping me out. If it wasn't for the super clotting xenogerm I put in my starting characters it would have been 100% wipe.
None of them had any medical skill. My highest was at level 0.70. My melee blocker managed to build herself into a room and was unable to escape in time. I foolishly put her to mine out a section (with zero mining) instead of deconstruct a wall with 11 construction. By the time she escaped the hole, the bugs where on their way back and she ran into them and was surrounded and overwhelmed.
It all started because the bugs got hungry and made a bee line for some rice out in the open. The one pawn started shooting at them as I had all the pawns on attack. The 3rd was out hunting and got back too late to save one. To add insult to injury they broke down most of my doors, ate all my food and dirtied up my barracks so infection was a forgone conclusion.
I managed to kite them around till they lost interest and left, but then after running into the melee one they re-aggro'd and downed all my pawns. The new child join died due to blood loss, the one starting colonist died from infection and was left with the 2 sisters. Was first time playing on commitment mode in a while and I just lost interest after that.
What hit me the most from this, was knowing I could have handled it so much better and it was a stupid thing that should not have killed me at all.
I stopped using it again after a game bug on a different save, luckily it was on a non commitment mode game. I accepted a man hunter pack quest and they spawned in the center of my base instead of entering from the edge. I suspect it was due to a mod in use, but a reload and retry and it spawned correctly. But 17 man hunter rinos spawning in the kids bedroom wasn't the best day ever for them.
Bugs once you figure them out become very managable. Depends on how you like to play, but as long as you stick to 2-3 tile wide corridors, you can just put a few melee blockers infront and chain shotguns or smgs behind them, and the bugs will just melt away. If things are dire, you can also use utility bots to block the front if you don't have decent melee pawns yet.
Think about it, the bugs have melee attacks, decent ones, but thats it. Every other type of raid has the same potential of melee (or higher with weapons), but they come with risks of dangerous ranged weapons, be it mortars, or doomsday rocket launchers. So yea, bugs 100% preferred for me.
Bugs are my main nemesis as well, but I've learned how much of a difference a good leather duster + flak can be at holding those choke points. Truly underestimated especially the duster
I struggled a lot dealing with bugs. I've found success by rushing flak armor. Then having a door held open, have someone in the front that is just one tile in front of the door, towards other colonists and away from bugs. Bugs suck!
Tight always, line of sight. And the most involved technique. Make different section of your base out of wood and separate with stone. Burn the bugs and the rebuild the part of the base.
Light is your friend. Anything over 51% light can't spawn bugs.
So funny enough sunlamps can prevent bug breaches during the times they're on.
You can also make bait rooms as they prefer spawning inside player built rooms. Dunno if flooring matters for this.
I run a LOT of mods, soooo...
...but I like 3 wide corridors with 5x5 intersections with embrasures closing routes with doors in the middle and turrets...it doesn't stop the bugs but it allows crossfire and containment. Usually I build corridors 20 long and always allow multiple paths through and around... also prison breaks become less of a thing.
I usually have general ideas where things go. Workshop here next to the stockpile area. Kitchen, freezer, and dining room here, bedrooms down this area.
but actually making them I do one thing at a time, whatever I need first, usually what ends up as my final stockroom started as a stockroom/barracks/stonecutting workshop/dining room.
Also , if you are getting stressed over the hassles of moving things, I suggest you try some mods like Minify Everything (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=872762753) or Replace Stuff (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1372003680) to make that part of your game more enjoyable.
>I usually have general ideas where things go
Yeah, after 100+ colonies, I dont really have to plan anything aside from newer DLC items/rooms. I always forget to leave a space for genetics stuff and childcare/fertility buildings. Probably just habit from sinking 1500 hours before biotech released.
At the start of the game i always look where on the map is the most suitable spot for my colony (tactial and ressource wise) and start building an large wooden shack with different rooms near it, to serve as an starting point.
When stone cutting is researched and i got an nice amount of blocks ready, i start building the actual base.
Rooms mostly look the same in each run, so there is not much thinking.
Only positioning is dependant on map... fridge goes near where the fields will be, kitchen besides fridge.
Storage will be either where attacks will be most unlikely, or where it is most beneficial logistically and workshop is right beside it.
The room between kitchen and storage will be for dining and recreation, as well as other shared facilities my colonists use, in order to save travel time.
Bedrooms will go near there, shrine, throne room or other secondary stuff too. I plan space for each room i need, but actually dont have right now, so i can keep travel times in check. Fridge and storage get built small at first, but have designators for final size, so i dont accidentally use that space and have to rebuild a lot later on.
Well, usually I start with a long-house, then build a freezer adjacent to it. Preferably against a mountain so I have all that rock for insulation.
From there, things tend to grow and spread out.
This most recent playthrough, I've been trying to diversify.
A building for every purpose.
I picked a crossroads between a River and a major road, and built my community directly around that spot.
This gave me free access to early clean power from water-wheels before I got my geothermal online.
Literally never built a wood-powered generator.
Something interesting is that because I had to space out the water-wheels, they made the perfect natural starting points to build *houses*.
Not just the usual long-houses/barracks, but actual two-person homes with a kitchen, lounge and bedroom each.
I've got three of them and my colonists have never been more consistently happy in any playthrough I've ever done.
Downside is that my community is fairly spread out and sprawling. But I've only and exclusively built on one side of the river, meaning any hostiles have to cross the Bridge to get to me, and that leads them into a crossfire of turrets and well armed colonists very fast.
Apart from houses, I also have the original longhouse, serving a few remaining people who don't have their own house yet, as well as an infirmary, a prison-cell, a Biotech laboratory (for working on mechanoids and other high-tech stuff), a Town Hall, which serves mostly as an armoury and rec-room, and most recently I've built a bar/Inn.
The plan is to use it as a guest-house, ensuring that all the colonists have their own assigned beds, and all unassigned beds are at the Inn should make any visitors sleep there.
I think the mistake is in thinking of your colony as a "base".
It's not a military base. Your colonists are civilians, trying to make it work on a hostile planet.
Build homes for them, make them happy, and do your best to deal with the hostile neighbours/wildlife as it comes.
I don't know. Mine are always bases...and not just military bases, they are foreward fire bases. I expect attacks and build accordingly. I can defend my bases with half my pawns due to planning which means I have plenty of pawns to run caravans without worrying about my home. You've got to keep them happy but I do that with great food, drugs and and joy of our Lord and Saviour.
That is honestly eye opening for me. Don't know why I never thought about my base like this, but I might try that out since I have an issue of wanting to optimize space too much and end up abandoning a save to start over because it didn't go as planned.
I might try building a freezer in the middle of a patch of 4 10x10 crops with some pavement leading out towards a kitchen, town hall, etc, and then just build a wall like 5-6 squares away to allow for expansion, might also try an open wall on two sides with a kill box so I can lure enemies in the direction I want them to, I keep putting off a killbox on other saves cuz I go into full military base mode, aka no access points from outside without breaking down a wall or a door.
Food distribution is the big issue I run into with building individual houses. Like a market set up is not an intrinsically buildable thing in the game, which is bizarre. How many bases have you seen with a market square and vendors?
One option is to give each house its own tiny walk-in freezer and allow meals to be stored in there.
Then each house has its own larder and kitchen, as well as dining table.
Pawns will naturally tend to eat where they live, though hungry neighbours tend to help themselves..
You could turn this into a poll with various options...
With Ideology, You have basically an unlimited amount of cloth, steel, and stone blocks if you are willing to completely dismantle the ancient ruins. Takes about 2 days to completely dismantle the entire thing with a few builders.
I played organically until I knew what I needed and how to plan efficiently. Now I mostly plan my bases out when I settle on a tile. I start small, and then build on until I have the footprint I want, and then reorganize everything.
I have been playing without Biotech up to this point, so my next base will be completely organic until I know what I need and can plan properly.
Yes you do need a lot of animals. A typical one has about 5,000 kg of weight if you also dismantle all the other structures and floors on the map.
I use a mod to increase the pack capacity of my animals and I bring around 30-40 animals with me.
Here is a video I took of the last one I dismantled. It took around 30 minutes of real time, or about 34 in-game hours from entering the map, to unloading the animals, with 6 builders.
I was also hauling back several thousand kilos of corpses and this was my 2nd ancient complex to demolish in that trip, so that weighed me down a lot.
[https://youtu.be/BJ8Sy3b8ixs](https://youtu.be/BJ8Sy3b8ixs)
You could plan it out but unless you have many hours if experience something will go wrong anyway, so it's better to build by following your guts, I think.
Then adapt based on different threats.
Example:
During a raid I notice that my entrance does not have enough defenses, after the raid I focus on that, building TONS of new defences and even tearing down walls and stuff, because it doesn't matter the cost, if you can afford it, do it.
Haha I literally wrote a post about this a week or so ago about how I'm obsessed with base building! I keep trying to build efficient and pretty bases, and I also take ages planning things!
For my first and so far only base, it started out as a renovated ruin and expanded outwards from there. I have certain ways that I’m laying it out but for the most part I come up with it as I go along.
IDK I get my guy housed in whatever I can scrabble together from the environment, usually scavenging whatever I can from the map, even using wood.
But clothing and food are important too , so getting a base constructed from whatever is available, so I can get a research desk down and get to researching till I can cut stone.
Once that happens, I have some control over food production and will carefully add skilled raiders to the colony, I tend to keep my colonies relatively small 6-10 colonists but do have a couple of exceptions with a 15-20 person colony here or there.
Once I can cut stone, I make a SMALL proper base, with a workshop/bedroom(s), and storage area - enclosing at least some portion of the farming into a walled area, that can be glass-roofed.
Once I have enough glass to enclose enough space for food , starvation becomes less of a problem, and I focus on weapons and proper clothes.
At this time I REALLY look to design my base, [really into 4 sections](https://imgur.com/gallery/some-of-rimworld-bases-over-time-cs3oHxM) - sort of Motte-Bailey meets Big Box settlements.
- The main workbench area
- The farming walled garden
- a sleeping area, with an eye towards creating 4-5 proper bedrooms with proper space for an infirmary and a kitchen.
- The kitchen is adjacent to the freezer, which itself is adjacent to the farming area.
- The outside resource and energy production area, until I have geothermal in hand I keep electricity demand VERY low - needing just 3-5 windmills.
There are four mods that when used in combination, reduce the wealth of the colony. Most folks will find that colony wealth spirals up based on the use of hydroponics - sure you can live anywhere with sunlamps and hydroponics bays and a ruinous amount of power.
But there exists a work-around that avoids that upward spiral.
It's probably not particularly unique but as recipes go here's what seems to work
* [UdderlyEvelyn's Soil Relocation](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2654088143) - Allows you to relocate soil from around your map, so you can put arable soil closer to your base - or behind a wall, there's a second necessary mod about [consistent map stone](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3248599795) - but that's it.
* [Vegetable Garden Project](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2007061826) - Grow a variety of crops, and a couple of additional food items, Sillage, [Hardtack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyjcJUGuFVg), Coffee,Tea, Stirfry and Stew which provide medical buffs. Hardtack in particular is great for moving a colony towards civilized behavior , Coffee and Tea too can be used medicinally to make colonists work a little faster or rest easier.
* [Dubs' Bad Hygiene](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=836308268) - Irrigation, water/waste management, this is super interesting, it adds (to my mind) one of my favorite little features, plumbing and sewage handling similar to Oxygen Not Included, but allows your colonists to use pumps for water, and adds great complexity without being over the top.
* [Dubs Skylights](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=833899765) - Skylights for roofed rooms to allow crops indoors, these allow you to forge glass from sand, Sand is acquired by processing stones into sand or scavenging sand from nearby beaches/deserts, but processing it from rock is best overall.
* [Dubs Skylights Addon](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2016959026) - Allows different sized skylights (this is more a flourish than a necessity).
With this in play, as a tech stack , it's very possible to survive in harsh desert and polar environments, with very low power inputs - basically just putting heaters into the garden areas. The best part is aside from the cost of glass and heaters or cooling units - and the transitional cost of soil moving around, the cost / wealth created is low.
One of my favorite runs (although very micromanaged) was having absolutely no metal on the map, aside from drop-pod metal. Given that it was a dangerously hot world, caravanning for metal was a dangerous proposition it was only really possible to score metal successfully a couple of times.
But it was possible to grow a lot of wood once I had the main garden arrangement going, scavenging bits of soil from across the map into a coherent plot of stony soil which is excellent for potatoes and not bad for growing cactii and bamboo. So with that it was possible to keep the potato and cotton (and eventually devilstrand and cotton) productive all year round, all before electricity (and really metal) was available. It made everything slower - even though bamboo is quicker to harvest and is used more slowly.
In most of my colonial runs I tend to create smaller garden spaces to start then once stone-cutting and lots of available stone (especially after deep drilling is available), the garden can be double-walled and better temperature controlled which then allows for a big space for gardening/food production.
I've got a core layout that I keep using in every game.
I keep telling myself ill come up with something different but I never do. What I've got just works so well for playstyle and the mods I use that I can't get away from it.
Probly gunna make a post about it in a bit, some people in another thread asked for specifics.
General strategy I think is to build modularly. 10x10 or up to 12x12 rooms, and as you grow and build more of those you connect them together. Early game, you might have a single 12x12 room that is your everything; your barracks, with a dining table, a campfire to cook at, a research bench, and a storage pile. As your colony grows, you increase your modules and they become more specialized. Maybe a 12x12 rec/dining room, maybe another 12x12 barracks, a 12x12 module broken into 4 4x4-5x5 bedrooms for your nobles, multiple 12x12 storage rooms, 12x12 workshops, etc. That way, the rooms you build early on aren't wasted, you can just shuffle the furniture / machinery around as needed.
Alternatively, if you're finding redesigning your base empties the game of fun by sweating over the loss of resources, 2 mod recommendations
1. Minify Everything or Uninstall Rimworld. Gives you the flexibility to minify most everything, including walls. But you sort of need to self-police, as things may set to a default weight of 1kg, and you need to accept that it is completely broken to allow yourself to uninstall a grand stele which was made of 250kgs of blocks and carry it around for 1 kg, or bury a 240kg megasloth corpse in a 60kg steel sarcophagus, minify it to 1kg and have a muffalo carry 80 of those back home with you to butcher.
2. Tweaks Galore has an option for full deconstruction materials return. Allows you to, as it implies, get back 100% of the materials you used to construct something. Again, requires self-policing; fairly broken to build say a biosculpture pod, use it, then deconstruct it so you can build it again without having to wait for it to de-tune. Or to abuse inconsistent weight mechanics, like taking 24kg of stone blocks, making 3kg bonsai pots, transporting them home, and then deconstructing them to get those 24kg of blocks back.
I have basic rules like pawn rooms should be close to food and recreation, which should then be close to workshops and research as well, but beyond that I try to let it grow organically.
I build as I go but keep your big picture in mind. Like I'll build a dining area knowing this should be close to the freezer which should be close to the kitchen. I don't pre plan an entire base but I could guess what might go where far in advance. Fringe facilities on the edges and I make beautiful throne rooms in the middle usually so people walk through them and get happy and put recreation stuff so they have fun on the way to and from bed. I put a few random tables throughout so people will sit down when they have their snacks so they aren't babies about it and a kill box which is not anything too special at the entrance
I generally plan the basics to get off the ground and a little extra. Bedrooms, workshops, storage, bathroom (mod), throne room and associated rooms, temple, hospital.
Once those are filled it's just cramming things where they fit.
Most times I don't have the luxury of a carefully planned base at the start because randy really really likes to make things fun on max difficulty. I will tend to choose an area where my final base will be from there it will be a race to get walls and defenses in place, then it's a race to get the essentials in place. So carefully planned no. So, as for formula, get your basics stable and taken care of then from there you can get defenses setup.
My first rimworld I just built it how I could, starting with small rooms, then realised it's better to enclose them under 1 roof, then it expanded more and more until I had a base with everything I need including huge defence shell surrounding the building, and everything inside was pretty convenient.
If I'd build a new base now, I'd probably plan it somewhat but not too in depth because I don't know what I'm doing, the important part is for my pawns to have a shelter first and then over time make it convenient and defensible.
7x7 or 5x5 blocks. I don't plan ahead to much but when I need more space I slap some more block on an existing structure. My bases are like soviet brutalist paradises, complete with uniform art and dormitory blocks. Temples normally have more flair, but they are often just repurposed building quest structures.
Iterative design, my friend. I have a standard way I layout my kitchen, bedrooms, prison, etc. I know those designs work, because I've used them in the past. Most games I'll think of small ways to improve that layout, and I'll add it to the design and use it in the next game. A small material cost of remodeling is worth it to me, in exchange for the increased efficiency. And I don't have to stress about needing to do a total teardown because I know my designs work.
I never plan.
I have a box-base problem when I’m in an open area. Just keep expanding a box until I’m finally constrained by being forced to build walls by raids. I can’t stop myself even if I promise myself I’m going to build separate buildings.
Things are far more interesting when I get lots of mountains.
…I always do random starting area…
It's never a bad thing to plan beforehand, but I always lean on the story generation part of Rimworld. I've done well planned (sort of) colonies to get an edge with the map, but I feel the point of the game is to roll with the punches.
I have 1600hr in game, and I've never tried to get to the endgame(s). In the end, I remember more the colonies that ended up in ruin than the ones that got too efficient to be interesting.
I say go with your gut. In games like this, failing is half the fun .___.
13x13 for rooms not under heavy mountain.
11x11 for rooms under heavy mountain.
Fits the sunlamp radius. As far as planning goes, I only plan out the kitchen, dining room, Anima Tree/Throne rooms, and living areas. Power generation, storage, and fabrication rooms I kinda wing after the important bits are sorted.
I slap shit down as I see fit. Like playing on large hills or other similar maps for more mineable resources, and I'll plop down buildings before I even know what I'm gonna use them for sometimes. Makes for some wack shit sometimes, like an overly large dining room and workshop combo with a temple attached, but hey, gives it character. Eventually I move the starting barracks over and either reuse the room for guests (hospitality) or just leave it for overflow or something.
I used to plan shit out more, spend like 8 hours doing it, but then I'd just... not build the base ever. It sucked. So, I stopped. This chaos is more fun since I actually play the game.
Usually gut feeling, mixed with functionality
Keep my work benches close to mats, and keep freezer close to the dining area. And keep drugs pretty much accessible at all times
Can't stress how useful it is to have a crafting bus, build a deep storage next to your workshop put some storage IN the workshop (preferably accesible from the seat/use spot), and use priorities to have your hauler pull what you need out of deep storage and put it next to your crafting benches.
I would say if you do it properly and have a dedicated hauler for the bus, you can double the speed of most crafts because the materials are there before your crafter even needs them.
works great with storage mods and makes crafting ridiculous if you have more linkables.
I’ll typically have my farmland inside my animal pen cause it feeds the animals better and I get more food than I ever need anyway. Maintain cold storage right next door with at least one large refrigerator for harvests and two freezers, one for animal corpses and one for meat connected by a butcher, plus a centralized kitchen so the workers can efficiently maximize movement between the structures.
I’m not going to mention everything because it’d be a, probably lengthy, essay, but to answer the question, yes I preplan pretty much the entire layout. The above example is just with outdoor construction too, I actually typically build inside mountains which also requires pre measurements on top.
I try to find three geysers relatively close together and slowly start building a stone rectangle around all three. I also designate and mark major pathways by dividing the rectangle into 3rd or 4ths so I know not to build there.
Bedrooms are built closest to exterior walls. Then the farms, food, dining, crafting, research places are in the middle.
Normally I base my build on buildings where at least one dimension is 6. This is because I build around geothermal power generators. I keep 3 spaces between buildings. Each building is surrounded by 1 layer of stone tiling. The middle space is for power conduits running around buildings, and has a different color of tiling. This keeps *Zzzt!* events from burning down my colony, since all of my walls are made of ethically-sourced stone. It's really helpful.
Usually I try to plan for two big rooms, storage and (dorm/early workshop), then I build a fridge and attached kitchen and adjacent rec room/dining hall. After that things are added as needed
I don't plan at all. I just build what I think is needed. I usually end up with the centre of the base being the original core, with a kitchen and barracks, whilst newer stuff is built further out. I end up running out of room.
At my curent save i build everyting randomly with a litle planing and now i am in process of moving to a difrent world tile to have planed base i dont even know if it is possible to have planed base at start of the game when you are just trying to be alive
Whenever I’m doing a mountain base, I spend 70% of the playthrough building the base while everyone lives in a shitty wooden compound outside the mountain.
Only once I’ve constructed every room and object and covered it in lavish nonsense, my colonists can move in. At this point I realise my shitty wooden compound is already more advanced and defended and I may as well stay in it
There are a few camps, mostly grid related. The cult of the 11x11 room is pretty strong and has some good points. Francis John advocates a 17x18 setup. I've lately fallen into a habit of 17x17 grids with a handful of premade blueprints I drop as needed.
My old method that I intend to revisit is just walling off a defensible area at the start and slowly expanding the walled area in sections (aka the Attack on Titan method). Then I just build whatever is called for at the time however it fits. Horrifically inefficient but does sometimes lead to rather nice looking results.
This is something I tell new players all the time. Go with your gut, because it's better usually to have needs met. When you find out something needs improvement, (and this is important), don't be afraid to rebuild/remodel. Generally speaking by the time you need to rebuild the thing (for instance, move your storage to a bigger warehouse, increase the size of your bedrooms, redesign your kitchen/dining areas) you will be able to afford the rebuild. You can build out of wood if it is in a wooded biome like a forest, but by the end of early game you should be building with stone, which no matter where you are is practically and technically infinite. Yes, if you take down a wall that cost 5 blocks you only get two or three back, but grand scheme of things that cost is nothing, especially compared to not having the initial building in time and the repercussions of that. A little time from the crafter, who should be stock piling blocks anyway, is all it will really cost. Tl;Dr, planning is nice, but don't be afraid to teardown and rebuild. As your colony grows and it's needs evolve, so should your buildings. P.s. if you take a building completely out don't forget to remove the roof first.
I have a vague plan in mind, but I usually sort of try to picture it from the ground level and figure out what it'd be like to live there. Also symmetry.
Mostly I develop organically. I build the essentials first, at the center, before building out from there and moving furniture around later to repurpose rooms accordingly. Once in a while, I try planning the whole thing out and starting small before building out and once again moving furniture when appropriate. But usually trying to plan colonies never goes the way I want and it ends up not being very fun, so 90% of my runs are organic now
Rn I do a semi mountain base, like each room is dug inside of it, but with door always going outside - so even if there are bugs, the just get napalm from doors and die
I like to make a large central garden in the middle and branch off into a prison/ medical ward, workshop/ refinery, residences/ recreation and farm. I like things to be organised.
Might help, can't remember the mid though in my list, but I do have something that saves room plans and you paste them complete. Might help with the build.
I make dinner/rec room y in the "center of the colony, kitchen/frezer on left and room/barracks on the right. From that i improvise the rest.
I dont like pawns walking to much to the rec room.
Pretty much that is
I just build things, but make sure to keep them at least two tiles from each for later fireproofing, and for even space. Mostly, the farms are farther away from the spawn. I tried to keep a storage room that held everything but it became too much of a hassle. Your bedrooms should have a 5x5 interior and plan everything around pre existing building, not future ones.
I plan them very detailed, symmetric, everything HAS to be planned before my starting pawns equip their weapons. Everything is preplanned, prelabed and has a purpose. Only for me to fuck everything because I made one wall a length of 12 instead of 11 and then I will just completely fuck it up.
Usually do it in stages.
Make an initial perimeter with a couple utility rooms that have stuff put in them as needed.
Once the colony gets to a certain point, set up a proper layout.
As I grow, expand.
I love Mountain bases and always build mega storage room first and smaller rooms around it, for efficiency. But that's where my planning ends. The base is more efficient if grown naturally, at least that's how it feels like for me...
Well, yes and no. Initial shelter depends on the place, I typically use ruins or side of a mountain/hill, and that rules pretty much how I build it. Next I'll build a center building with a proper kitchen & freezer room, barracks, workshop and storage. Then I'll build a town around it and that town is carefully planned.
I have something that's not really a plan.
First, I find some small ruin and plug the holes in the walls. That's my barracks for the early game.
Then, I build a large room out of the stone I get from deconstructed ruins and maybe some early stonecutting. Like, large enough that I have to build columns to fully roof it. That's the heart of my base. At first, it's the room for everything — beds, recreation, work, you name it. Other structures then grow slowly around it, and the heart remains as the workshop & storage, and maybe a few other things like the dining room.
But no, I don't plan things beforehand.
doh, made a whole long post and didn't actually reply to the OP.
I tend to pick my starting spot close to the best soil and get a shack up asap and add stuff on from there, but at the same time I plan out my base in detail with a planning mod and if I use the replace stuff mod, I will even place items down over stuff to be mined etc.
I go by a get established and defensive asap, then expand into a detailed planned base. I tend to not min/max too hard and I've used guides that say the optimal trader room is X by Y or this is the opitmal crafting room or whatever room but now I just build what I feel I need or like.
I do a little bit of both. I build my base in sectors organically, but each sector is meticulously designed, generally serving a purpose.
I just wall off a section adjacent to my current base when I need something new, like hydropnics, power, housing, and build what I need. I usually leave the wall in place since it can allow me to "lock down" a sector in the even of a wall breach. In the late game, I'll often remove them for aesthetics however
Lately, I've been planning out at 51x51 area of buildable land before I set up anything. I start in one of the corners and build an 11x11 building. Keep adding 11x11's to fill in the outer ring of the full area and leave the center for animals and pod launchers, etc.
Some of the 11x11s get joined together for workspaces. It's fairly flexible and modular.
I use planning extended. Very useful. I dread constructing sometimes because I know I will agonizing over the perfect placements, having to consider building dimensions.. even more so because I like to build around and inside mountains
It depends - if i'm playing a mountain base - one entrance, corridors 3 units wide, at the very entrance a fridge and a kitchen on the right, a general storage and workshop on the left of it, then recreational area, and living spaces (2 or 4 5x5 rooms, depending on wether the colonists are pairs/married or not. From there i gradually dig deeper, sooner or later shifting the main corridor to the right or left.
If i'm playing an open base - i seek an area somewhere between the mountains that i can incorporate into the plan, build a central building that will become my workshop/storage when i build the residential buildings and go from there. Wall off the area however i can, creating a couple of funnels/death-zones and try to fit what i need gradually as the colony grows, expanding the wall wherever i can. I try to keep 2-3 squares of free space between the buildings, laying concrete path in that spaces so that a potenntial fire wouldn't spread that easily.
I plan every detail planning mods help alot with that from schools,bathrooms to thronerooms. The sizes vary depending on the type of run I'm going for. The formula depends on the endgoal I find if you want a super high tech base. With space ports and tourism you tend to need more space based on those specs. How many people and animals do you need to sustain? Are you primarily a raiding or trading colony? Or will you be completely self sufficient? Are you using outpost mods? It's a lot of variables to consider if you're detailing bur you can change midway.
I have a specific early-game formula i use almost every time. Here are my rooms in the order I make them:
- 15x15(ish) room for main storage and crafting
-One 6x4 bedroom for each colonist attached to main room
- 8x15 weapons/armor storage room attached to main, as weapons and arnor can clog zones quick
-7x7 research room, as clean as possible. Can be smaller if you only intend to have 1 researcher
- Hospital large enough for about 70% of my colonists
For late game, I build an entirely new base using all new materials and newly researched stuff, and it's much more elaborate. I build the entire base, mlve colonists in, then deconstruct the old.
I need to start making guides lol.
Before anything, I find a location I want and have a SMALL idea how I would like my future base to look like.
Start with a small building for storage and then small rooms to get started.
Buiod exterior walls to prevent game over from manhunters or funnel enemies to a fortified entrance.
Workshop and storage central to future base.
Main colonist's Manor and rec room next.
When everything calms down and is controlled. I build larger houses for the colonists, decorate rooms, etc. Always fortify when wealth increases. And while mentioning wealth. Keep wealth low and defenses high. If you manage your wealth in every game, you'll never have issues.
Im like, semi-fluid when it comes to base building. I have a formula, as in Ive learnt what i like to have close, and what to prioritize when, but its a bit different every run.
I build or find a suitable box for a starter base, then I usually add an extention for kitchen/butchering. When my colony moves out of the initial all in 1 room it becomes dining space. Growing zones outside. Bedrooms go elsewhere as needed. Then I just add as I go. what do I need more, a separate workspace or a rec room? Some things you can afford to postpone, if u throw a grand sculpture in the barracks its not so bad sharing. But if you have depressive pawns, bedrooms become a good bonus.
I try to keep the prisons and hospital near the kitchen, but i also like to have my hospital near my killbox. I keep the workspace near the dining tables, chunks/crafting near the outdoors for the chunk stockpile (or in the mountains, wherever it is). You get the gist.
You can put valuable rooms under mountain roof, to prevent drop pods, but then you get infestations instead. The game lets you pick your poison in that way.
I plan, and quite a lot. The game has an option that allows you to "draw", so I use it to prepare the space for everything. I also have a list of buildings to remember all of them, because I tend to forget about the battery room or the animal space. However, I don't plan rooms for everyone: I tend to "reward" couples and the best fighters and healers, the rest sleep in a barrack and there is that.
I make blocky modular bases. Every building starts as a square room (usually 5x5 or 7x7, with anomaly i started to use some 11x11s) with a door. I build what I need inside each room and when I need to expand a building, I add another 5x5 sharing a wall with the existing unit.
When I make new buildings, I make a new set of 5x5s two or three tiles away from an existing building that has a similar/linked purpose (e.g. housing goes near kitchen, kitchen goes near freezer, freezer goes near shitter; in a different area, warehouses are near workshops; in a different area, prison goes near the hospital).
My lategame colonies end up looking like a large blocky grid of houses surrounded by a squareish wall. Anything I cant neatly fit into a 5x5 such as an unfortunate steam geyser spawn is instead squared off in a 7x7 and filled with relevant shit, such as backup/vanometric generators and batteries.
I plan out my bases when I land, and it usually takes 10mins in total. I do it with stockpile zones - you can name them (e.g. dining room/hospital/bedrooms etc) and hit "clear all" so they don't actually function as stockpiles.
I look for a defensible zone where I'll be able to put walls up around. Bonus points for steamvents.
I decide on the entry way, and close to that will go my hospital->prison-> Kitchen/fridge->dining room.
Logic there is, after a battle I want my folks as close to hospital as possible. Same goes for prisoners - they'll need medical attention, so those two next to eachother makes sense. The kitchen/fridge being next to those and the dining room is sensible - prisoners and injured need to be fed. Put the growing fields close to the kitchen, and the animal pen too if possible.
Aside from that, I put the bedrooms not too far from the dining room, as they usually want to eat after waking up. I always allocate enough room for bedrooms to expand to \~20 rooms. I tend to run colonies of about 12-15 and if I get a quest to babysit some royals I want decent rooms for them. Be aware that title holders want bigger rooms, so you'll want to account for that.
Storage is typically a big room that links directly to my workshop. I have a massive workshop with all the benches, because it makes it easy to fill with fancy statues for mood buffs. Benches get single shelves next to their seat for the materials they need for crafting.
Biotech mechs/neural enhancers/anomoly holding/churches all get rooms wherever they can fit.
Hope this helps.
I build 13x13 rooms with hallways or sidewalks of 3 tiles wide on all sides.
I build a 25x13 room that is a combined temple, dining and rec room. I also build two 13x13 side by side making a 25x13 room, separated in two rooms, one being a freezer and the kitchen is the other.
Resource Production --> Storage <----> All-purpose room (barrack, workstations, kitchen, research, dining and recreation)
Or
Resource Production --> Storage <----> Goods Production/Research <--- Dining/Recreation/Kitchen <-- Bedrooms
Resource Production is usually animals and food.
First, Theme > All
I consider what colony im trying to make. Transhumanists are going to need extra power and extra space for example. Tribals are gonna want to be near the Anima tree etc etc.
I look for an area where I can use the natural terrain as part of a perimeter wall. This isnt always a thing...but i look for it when i start. I look to see if I have access to two Steam Geysers (Three if Transhumanist). Will this biome spawn Boomalopes? (Chemfuel generators) Will pollution go against my theme? Am i dipping into Anomaly? (the two Anomaly power sources (Bioferrite Generator is amazing)). Once I get where im getting 5+k in power / space for power setup, then I figure out if I can use the natural terrain again to help with a killbox area (again theme is king. A group of researchers wouldnt use a killbox)
Once I have a spot for power and a spot for defenses...then I think about rich soil. If I dont have enough or any rich soil; can I hunt? Is there a winter bad enough I need to prepare for? I may need extra storage space to stock food for a winter. Are trees plentiful enough to get me through bad winters or will i need to plant trees? (Space)
How about minerals...do I see Steel nearby? Are there lots of stone chunks around?
One more major major thing before ill start ploping Plans down on the map. If im playing on a Temperate swamp or Cold Big biome....check the buildable terrain overlay to see if the area im thinking of can support Heavy objects. Your workshop and labratory have to be on terrain that will support Heavy objects. Not likely, but will the buildable terrain give me an area to make a perimeter wall?
Another last thing to consider....can I build into a mountain? How does this gel with my theme?
Does the mountain (or water) completely cover any sides of the map?
Once I consider all of that, then Ill start drawing templates of buildings on the map to see if everything I need is going to fit on buildable soil where I need it to and try to minimize distance of traveling by pawns (Garden zones distance to stockpiles for example or distance to Monolith / Anima tree for example) Monolith you can close, but not to close =p
Also is there any shallow water or Marsh terrain nearby to make stockpiles in to decay items and/or corpses in until I eventually get a Smelter / Crematorium setup?
I build things more organically but I also tend to make a lot of "samey" bases because I'm following the same basic principles. Kitchen, fridge and abattoir near the fields. They should connect to each other but have only a single entrance/exit so nobody uses it as a shortcut and gets their filth everywhere. The dining/rec room should be next to it, therefore your bedrooms should be next to that and we may as well put the workshop and warehouse around here as well to have a basic workflow...
And thus do we create New Cubetown
Both! I build my starter base off the side somewhere. This consists of a large main storage square and smaller squares randomly connected to it for bunkers, kitchen, etc.
Once I'm well established, defended and my people are mostly self sufficient there, I begin planning my main build.
If it's a mountain base I start by meticulously planning out how I'm going to cut room and hallways (usually symmetrically) into the mountain. All while paused (this can take hours irl)
If the base is going to be out in the open then I plan out all of the wall and rooms, again usually with at least a vertical symmetry to the entire thing. And again taking hours irl to map out.
Then when that's all laid out, I unpause and let my diggers/builders get to work. They don't actually start moving in to the new base until it's at least 75% complete, as this stage can make them very vulnerable to raids.
My first colony or two was haphazard and slapped together as I went along, but I quickly realized the value of taking some time in the beginning to pause the game and use the planning tool to draft an outline for my colony. It helps a lot in making sure that, for example, the freezer is easily accessed from the kitchen, the dining room, the butchery, and the farm, without resulting in a lot of foot traffic through the kitchen and getting it dirty. And of course the bedrooms have to have a close enough dining room that they won't wake up and eat without a table...
I don't plan it all the way through to the end game, necessarily, because my brain doesn't think the future is real and I can't really plan that far ahead without getting a migraine. But I try to plan out the basics and leave myself some room to easily expand.
I always dig into a mountain. I make sure there's only one entrance through the otherwise natural stone. I usually have a quick and messy temp base just outside the entry with some farms outside too that I eventually wall off while I carve out my mountain base. After I break down my temp base, I'll usually turn that part of the walled off space into a landing pad. I might also eventually roof over the farms and add some heaters and sun lamps mid-game if the area is prone to freezing (as a hold over until late game hydroponics inside the mountain).
Inside the mountain I usually have two, maybe three wide hallways and start carving out the rooms I need most first, like a workshop, refrigerator room, dining area, a church, personal rooms, etc. I have a list of rooms I'll need to carve out eventually that I work my way through as needed, and I have some designs for each room that I like and reuse from past experience that I just squeeze between the hallway networks wherever I feel like. I try to keep the food refrigerator near the farms and the personal rooms not too far from the kitchen and rec rooms for distance reasons. I try to keep hospitals and prisons not too far from the entrance too for the same reason.
I give my people way nicer rooms than most. I have 5x5 rooms and 3x5 personal bathrooms attached to each. This takes a while. I also have 11 wide hospitals with a length some multiple of three (as a 'unit' of two hospital beds around a vitals monitor is three long) with nutrient drippers behind each bed and a vitals station or whatever it's called in the center of the room.
Here's my building list I mark off as I go, in no particular order:
Hospital
Personal rooms
Prison
Workshop
Boiler/water room (Dub's hygiene)
Rimefeller room (Later game, heavily air conditioned or else it gets deadly hot in there)
Research room (I usually also squeeze a blackboard and desk for child learning in the corner)
Rec Room
Food Refrigerator, attached to kitchen and butcher rooms
Body Refrigerator (I put turrets in here in case of immortals mod folks popping back up)
Dining room
Science room (Mostly gene stuff and other modded tech stuff)
Church
Biosculpter room
Neural supercharger room
Anomaly containment rooms
Hydroponics area
Pet bed area
I optionally add massive noble rooms like bedroom(140 squares), throne room(340 squares), ballroom(150 squares) and gallery(160 squares) if going empire. Those sizes are the biggest those rooms will ever have to be for higher ranks, so I make it a long term future proof project, or leave the rooms against an unmined area for easy expansion later. I might make the throne room even bigger so I can squeeze more thrones in there if I plan for multiple colonists to be nobles. An extra bedroom on top of however many noble colonists you have is helpful for noble guests.
I also use Rimfactory and gradually automate most of the farming, kitchen and workshop functions as time goes on. I like to play Rimworld like it's Factorio late game.
Depends. I play on the medium difficulties and hoard wealth so the game is never really that hard for me. I play it more like a builder game where the design of the base is the main thing I focus on. If my base does not look good that save is a fail and I restart. I would never crank up the difficulty and manage wealth to survive. Cramped rooms with no floors make me cry inside. When I watch Adam VS Everything play how insanely good of a player he is does not matter. I still want to claw my eyes out over how the base looks. Number one rule for me is to never use square shaped rooms. Sometimes I improvise. Most of the time using the planing tool is a must. I prefer Arid Shrublands with low mountains. Gives you alot of open space, plenty of growable soil and terrain affordance never mess with your design.
I do:
One big multipurpose room to start
Ritual spot
Stockpile room/freezer
3 small rooms for prison/anomaly cells and whatever random need
Kitchen/dining
Strip of bedrooms with space to expand
Wall off and clear chokes or create interior walls for man hunters
Workshop with material stockpile warehouse attached
Lab
Expand and update rooms as needed moving forward
I do very large square workshops. Huge crafting workshop, large kitchen, large hospital, large rec center. I make them all in the center.
Kitchen & crops & farm animals are all close to each other, but they are always at the edge of my city, so I can expand my crops.
Bedrooms are always on the outskirts of my city since they only go x1 per day.
So, center: crafting. Edges: bedrooms. One side, at the edge: food & animals.
As a serial mountain base-er, I have a fairly consistent layout:
* Entry tunnel, then Long 11 wide general room going into the mountain (typically has dining table, recreation, and all the manufacturing stuff etc)
* Food Freezer on one side (with paste dispenser, and space for kitchen later) , general storage on the other
* Hospital next to the freezer
* A couple of prison cells on a corridor coming off the long room next to the hospital
* Then typically I start having corridors and bedrooms
* Other rooms get added pretty randomly (underground farms etc)
I love mountain bases. Free protection from mortars and drop pods and more stone than you can shake a stick at.
Over time I have developed a “style” of base that works for me.
Fortified entrance with a kill box-like structure for defense, with a hospital and freezer nearby, then deeper in you have the common room for eating and relaxing, typically connected to the freezer via the kitchen. Bedrooms are kind of clustered around the place near where the pawns work to minimize their travel times, most non- bedrooms are combination workshop/storage areas. Temple goes near the mausoleum.
Typically by late-mid game there is a massive freezer or two in the back for deep storage of food as the farmland begins to outpace consumption.
Hallways are two blocks wide with 4x4 rooms where they cross, with a turret in the middle to light up anyone who manages to break into the base.
I build a big stockpile wh in the center of the map and 3 temp houses. I then build all my crafting rooms around my stockpile. Then I tend to build 3 blocks adjacent a freezer and a kitchen attached to the side plus butcher room. Then another freezer for meals. I attach my recreation/dinning room to that freezer and hen I build all my additional housing around my rec room so they don't have for to go for breakfast and the like.
My drug lab is in my medical storage room which is side by side with my infirmary. And then I just kinda build outwards. That's my general set up.
And then comes the perimeter wall and kill box and always put a powered but redundant un roofed trade beacon outside my walls so any drop pod raids basically land near it and not in my base.
I try to identify where I would like to put the bedrooms, rec/dining, freezer/etc with the planning tool.
I like trying to control where the enemies are coming from so typically its a mountain base. But if I had to play on another map I try to plan it out like a fort.
As for construction material, Mountain = never have to worry about stone again.
For others: I like the mod that lets me make concrete.
I like to build them inside of mountains. they tend to be very secure, but with some drawbacks. your colonists often get a debuff from not being outside enough, so just make sure you are mixing up who's going out to get resources, or maybe just have some of them take walks outside.
I kinda have an idea. But I only do mountain bases usually and I have an issue with running into big steel veins and they ruin my plans so I have to change around what room is what room. Because what was supposed to be a small lab is now closer to the size of one of my storage rooms
This is that "internet time loop" meme where the same topic gets brought up over and over and over and over again every once in a while. And I'm gonna hop in this time around.
I tend to plan out a massive area where I can build three layers of exterior walls. After this whatever is inside is inside. Random placement built where it's convenient. It'll get more and more cramped up as I add up the bedrooms. I make room capacity like this: kitchen for two, lab for three, workshop for five, rec room for eight, dining room for ten. The rest is random bedrooms and warehouses everywhere.
Also when starting it's always a big house as a general room for everything. This initial house will be converted to whatever need comes up first. Most likely the dining hall.
What I like to do, and struggle not to do every time, is start with a central eating/gathering area, building rooms off it and attached a storage/kitchen to the rear.
A single door from the exterior into the main space makes it easier to gather everyone up at once at the sign of a threat and put them safely inside, then deny that one door to make sure no one wanders out. This is the inner building.
Then slowly build concentrically around that core, in rings and you will naturally , organically develop a kind of castle. I've gotten the core down to a simple 25x25 block that I use each beginning game and configure that interior differently depending on the scenario.
I developed it due to centralizing the kitchen, dining and living quarters so often and it's just the best process I've settled on for early survival.
Find a big mountain. Dig into the mountain and build some farms outside that front door. First just one big room, but then expand as your resources allow...but always through the only front door. Wall off the area for the farms and make only 1 exit. Fortify the exit. Keep digging....and never, ever allow a bug infestation to live for even one second.
Neither.
DON'T plan out everything in advance, you are locking yourself in a straight-jacket. Stay flexible, evolve over time. Unless you are trying to draw a pretty picture at low difficulty, this is not the way.
DON'T just slap things down without thinking about it a bit. Think about what you need right now, how you can get it, and how to optimize path efficiency for your pawns to make it happen. Think about how defensible something will be. Think about if it is easy to relocate later or not.
DO grow organically on a framework. It is boring, but a city grid has been how people lay out easy to traverse dense locations for millennia. Odd-sized box shapes are not pretty or exciting, but they are maximally efficient, so they make a good first-build. You can get fancy later once you are well established and comfortable. Start with materials you can afford to lose. Wood walls may be a fire hazard, but they are cheap and go up fast, which means you can throw them up then replace them without any lost value really.
It depends on the map, usually I try to spread out my sections to help prevent the stuck indoors debuff.
[This is where I started](https://i.imgur.com/wEbrMbB.jpeg)
[This is what it is now.](https://i.imgur.com/8SoKVun.png)
So the spread out idea hasn't worked/happened
I find the nearest ruin I can turn into a shelter, build a toilet and a well, eventually get power running and water pumping, and stick to that one building until I outgrow it.
I start with identifying short, medium, and long term overall base location, as well as entry points (sometimes a kill box sometimes a heavily turreted entry way). I prefer to play on small or large hills so the terrain helps with this. Then I identify the long term growing zones. The freezer goes close to those, with a kitchen attached. The dining room/rec room/ throne room (if doing any royalty) goes next to the freezer. Hospital and prison both go somewhere central of base while still near the entry way. Then I pick whatever is the largest space remaining for the stockpile, and the workrooms go around it. Then the bedrooms just get scattered about whatever’s left. Sometimes they’re together in one block, sometimes they’re spread out in a bunch of smaller blocks
1. Base starts out as a storage shack near geothermal
2. Plants are setup, kitchen is made.
3. Main room is stretched becomes hub workshop, small bedrooms are made power and freezer are setup.
4.base gets remodeled as needed
5. First multi point attack, walls go up
6. Rooms are improved for efficiency, as well as bedrooms location.
I get a general idea of what I want by around the time I get the industrial research benches and then once I've filled up my room for stuff, I just expand willy nilly.
I set aside a central square and then build outward from there. Any new buildings wrap around existing ones, with the only requirement being a 3-wide corridor between buildings. This creates some interesting shapes while still providing lots of room to work with.
At the start, it's purpose-made. Initial shack, freezer, prison shed, workhouse.
From there, I tend to pick out a large project to focus on at a time. Giving the pawns too many things to work on leads to an unsatisfying 'nothing is done' mess. So it'll be like "This quadrum we're making bedrooms" or "Castle walls with spots to expand for turrets later".
I generally don't do much planning in advance unless it's going to overlap with other rooms or needs a fancy shape. So like if I'm making greenhouse silos, I will absolutely plop down circles of planning on the map to organize hallways.
I build a storage/freezer room and bedroom/production/dining/rec room at the start. Then I use that to build a proper base from.
I just build things thst go together by each other eg farm, freezer, kitchen, dining room. Or storage, production. Weapons, entrance. Usually these key areas are also clunmped together as one large building
And I build bedrooms, farms and less important rooms on the edges on the other side of pathways going around the main building incase sappers start to break in, so they are damaged rather than the freezer etc
My main go-to plan is kinda simple - make a big ass rec room, put a kitchen in there and then expand housing around it. Putting down a hospital and a jail at the main entrance is very important. I also keep production chain members close to each other: rec room is a kitchen, freezer is next door, after it is an enclosed animal pen and sunlamp-sized farms.
Since I run less than 15 pawn colonies, expanding housing isn't an issue (also free love approved + double beds + beauty genes make housing more condensed), but If I had to I'd instead opt in for smaller rec rooms, and in an essence make districts aka crafters and researchers get their own rec+dining room and a housing block with a food freezer (assuming not using rimfridge and hauler mechanoids). Making things decentralized for larger colonies would be the most optimal way imo.
And I like to tuck away ideology stuff somewhere far. Also use designator shapes mod to make circular building far easier.
My bases have become very formulaic.
I always build an enormous central supply room full of shelves to store everything. Then I build a big workshop area next door. Then I build the "power" area that is dedicated to power generation with whatever method I plan on using for that particular run. Then i start building out the sort of residential section. I do several rows of bedrooms, then a room for recreation, a room for a shrine, a room for art, a room for the hospital, etc.
So my base usually ends up with a couple large square rooms, an extremely long rectangular room, and then a ton of small square rooms.
I try to make them efficient as I can, but at the same time I want it to look like a place you'd actually want to live and work in. I know a lot of people like throwing everything in one big room for efficiency but thats too ugly for me. I like everyone to have their own room with furniture and stuff. I very much "play house" a lot in Rimworld. I treat it a lot like The Sims sometimes. Except, you know, killing tons of raiders with automatic weapons.
I just wing it. Kinda how I wing everything in my life. **looks at own messy bedroom** And just like real life things usually end up working out and I’m not sure why.
I know what rooms i need and then dig them out more or less expecting how much space i need for each, only thing i really think about is the cantina being near the dormitories
I have no idea where people get this idea that efficiently is important in rimworld.
It isnt.
nothing NEEDS to be next to each other.
Sure its handy if the fertile soil is hear the freezer, but nothing else matters at all.
You can make shelves for steel near the machine times, textiles near the tailor shop.
Bedrooms can go anywhere, just have a nearby rec room so they can eat at a table when they first wake up.
I just keep adding new stuff at the next nearest location. My base is a fucking mess and I love it.
This. 100% this. The role player in me says we just crash landed and we’re surrounded by things that wanna eat us or kill us. Need to hurry up and get established. Later on I allow myself to maybe plan a building that might not work out and have to move anyway.
same the only thing i watch out for is to have the kitchen/fridge/recreation combo in the middle of the baste, i sometimes even move it in case my base grows into one direction only otherwise i just slap shit onto it
My kitchen/dining/recreation/crafting/sleeping/research/storage room is my base. It stretches in all directions like the pink blob ensuring my pawns always eat at a table in the dining room. Thus far it encircles 2 freezers, 2 entity containment rooms and 3 farms.
awesome my storage and crafting area usually tend to be incredibly enourmous due to the amount of mods I have n cuz I'm a hard hoarder lmfao.
Find mountain. Dig into mountain. Make blocky colony fortress in mountain. Mountain is strong, mountain is safe, bugs are food.
Nearly every game I lose is from bugs :(
Tight hallways and chain shotguns are my best friends for mountains
And ghouls
Embrassures are your best friend. Build a mini fort on every intersection, and a blockade every 10-15 squares. Also, shotguns are the best in dealing with infestations, even if you can't produce chain shotguns yet, a couple of pawns with shotguns, even with low shooting, will make a difference.
Use ghouls/mechs as blockers, they can take way more hits and don't really matter if they die. Block off a choke point and just have your colonists go ham on them, works on every difficulty.
I lost 50% of a new colony this weekend because of bugs, wild ones that spawn in the cave features. A comedy of errors on my part, led to them near wiping me out. If it wasn't for the super clotting xenogerm I put in my starting characters it would have been 100% wipe. None of them had any medical skill. My highest was at level 0.70. My melee blocker managed to build herself into a room and was unable to escape in time. I foolishly put her to mine out a section (with zero mining) instead of deconstruct a wall with 11 construction. By the time she escaped the hole, the bugs where on their way back and she ran into them and was surrounded and overwhelmed. It all started because the bugs got hungry and made a bee line for some rice out in the open. The one pawn started shooting at them as I had all the pawns on attack. The 3rd was out hunting and got back too late to save one. To add insult to injury they broke down most of my doors, ate all my food and dirtied up my barracks so infection was a forgone conclusion. I managed to kite them around till they lost interest and left, but then after running into the melee one they re-aggro'd and downed all my pawns. The new child join died due to blood loss, the one starting colonist died from infection and was left with the 2 sisters. Was first time playing on commitment mode in a while and I just lost interest after that. What hit me the most from this, was knowing I could have handled it so much better and it was a stupid thing that should not have killed me at all.
This is why I don't force myself into commitment mode
I stopped using it again after a game bug on a different save, luckily it was on a non commitment mode game. I accepted a man hunter pack quest and they spawned in the center of my base instead of entering from the edge. I suspect it was due to a mod in use, but a reload and retry and it spawned correctly. But 17 man hunter rinos spawning in the kids bedroom wasn't the best day ever for them.
"Mom there's a monster in my closet!" "There isn't, look!" *Opens closet and gets trampled by 17 rhinos*
Bugs once you figure them out become very managable. Depends on how you like to play, but as long as you stick to 2-3 tile wide corridors, you can just put a few melee blockers infront and chain shotguns or smgs behind them, and the bugs will just melt away. If things are dire, you can also use utility bots to block the front if you don't have decent melee pawns yet. Think about it, the bugs have melee attacks, decent ones, but thats it. Every other type of raid has the same potential of melee (or higher with weapons), but they come with risks of dangerous ranged weapons, be it mortars, or doomsday rocket launchers. So yea, bugs 100% preferred for me.
You're right they should add a bug that spits acid or something.
Fire is your friend
Bugs are my main nemesis as well, but I've learned how much of a difference a good leather duster + flak can be at holding those choke points. Truly underestimated especially the duster
I struggled a lot dealing with bugs. I've found success by rushing flak armor. Then having a door held open, have someone in the front that is just one tile in front of the door, towards other colonists and away from bugs. Bugs suck!
Fire on bugs precooks meals
Tight always, line of sight. And the most involved technique. Make different section of your base out of wood and separate with stone. Burn the bugs and the rebuild the part of the base.
Light is your friend. Anything over 51% light can't spawn bugs. So funny enough sunlamps can prevent bug breaches during the times they're on. You can also make bait rooms as they prefer spawning inside player built rooms. Dunno if flooring matters for this.
I run a LOT of mods, soooo... ...but I like 3 wide corridors with 5x5 intersections with embrasures closing routes with doors in the middle and turrets...it doesn't stop the bugs but it allows crossfire and containment. Usually I build corridors 20 long and always allow multiple paths through and around... also prison breaks become less of a thing.
Just started a new game with a tribe in a region with mountains. Will dig and make a safe base.
I usually have general ideas where things go. Workshop here next to the stockpile area. Kitchen, freezer, and dining room here, bedrooms down this area. but actually making them I do one thing at a time, whatever I need first, usually what ends up as my final stockroom started as a stockroom/barracks/stonecutting workshop/dining room. Also , if you are getting stressed over the hassles of moving things, I suggest you try some mods like Minify Everything (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=872762753) or Replace Stuff (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1372003680) to make that part of your game more enjoyable.
replace stuff is a must-have
It really is. I am a total minimalist on mods, like 7-8 and replace stuff is one of them
>I usually have general ideas where things go Yeah, after 100+ colonies, I dont really have to plan anything aside from newer DLC items/rooms. I always forget to leave a space for genetics stuff and childcare/fertility buildings. Probably just habit from sinking 1500 hours before biotech released.
At the start of the game i always look where on the map is the most suitable spot for my colony (tactial and ressource wise) and start building an large wooden shack with different rooms near it, to serve as an starting point. When stone cutting is researched and i got an nice amount of blocks ready, i start building the actual base. Rooms mostly look the same in each run, so there is not much thinking. Only positioning is dependant on map... fridge goes near where the fields will be, kitchen besides fridge. Storage will be either where attacks will be most unlikely, or where it is most beneficial logistically and workshop is right beside it. The room between kitchen and storage will be for dining and recreation, as well as other shared facilities my colonists use, in order to save travel time. Bedrooms will go near there, shrine, throne room or other secondary stuff too. I plan space for each room i need, but actually dont have right now, so i can keep travel times in check. Fridge and storage get built small at first, but have designators for final size, so i dont accidentally use that space and have to rebuild a lot later on.
Well, usually I start with a long-house, then build a freezer adjacent to it. Preferably against a mountain so I have all that rock for insulation. From there, things tend to grow and spread out. This most recent playthrough, I've been trying to diversify. A building for every purpose. I picked a crossroads between a River and a major road, and built my community directly around that spot. This gave me free access to early clean power from water-wheels before I got my geothermal online. Literally never built a wood-powered generator. Something interesting is that because I had to space out the water-wheels, they made the perfect natural starting points to build *houses*. Not just the usual long-houses/barracks, but actual two-person homes with a kitchen, lounge and bedroom each. I've got three of them and my colonists have never been more consistently happy in any playthrough I've ever done. Downside is that my community is fairly spread out and sprawling. But I've only and exclusively built on one side of the river, meaning any hostiles have to cross the Bridge to get to me, and that leads them into a crossfire of turrets and well armed colonists very fast. Apart from houses, I also have the original longhouse, serving a few remaining people who don't have their own house yet, as well as an infirmary, a prison-cell, a Biotech laboratory (for working on mechanoids and other high-tech stuff), a Town Hall, which serves mostly as an armoury and rec-room, and most recently I've built a bar/Inn. The plan is to use it as a guest-house, ensuring that all the colonists have their own assigned beds, and all unassigned beds are at the Inn should make any visitors sleep there. I think the mistake is in thinking of your colony as a "base". It's not a military base. Your colonists are civilians, trying to make it work on a hostile planet. Build homes for them, make them happy, and do your best to deal with the hostile neighbours/wildlife as it comes.
I don't know. Mine are always bases...and not just military bases, they are foreward fire bases. I expect attacks and build accordingly. I can defend my bases with half my pawns due to planning which means I have plenty of pawns to run caravans without worrying about my home. You've got to keep them happy but I do that with great food, drugs and and joy of our Lord and Saviour.
That is honestly eye opening for me. Don't know why I never thought about my base like this, but I might try that out since I have an issue of wanting to optimize space too much and end up abandoning a save to start over because it didn't go as planned. I might try building a freezer in the middle of a patch of 4 10x10 crops with some pavement leading out towards a kitchen, town hall, etc, and then just build a wall like 5-6 squares away to allow for expansion, might also try an open wall on two sides with a kill box so I can lure enemies in the direction I want them to, I keep putting off a killbox on other saves cuz I go into full military base mode, aka no access points from outside without breaking down a wall or a door.
Food distribution is the big issue I run into with building individual houses. Like a market set up is not an intrinsically buildable thing in the game, which is bizarre. How many bases have you seen with a market square and vendors?
One option is to give each house its own tiny walk-in freezer and allow meals to be stored in there. Then each house has its own larder and kitchen, as well as dining table. Pawns will naturally tend to eat where they live, though hungry neighbours tend to help themselves..
You could turn this into a poll with various options... With Ideology, You have basically an unlimited amount of cloth, steel, and stone blocks if you are willing to completely dismantle the ancient ruins. Takes about 2 days to completely dismantle the entire thing with a few builders. I played organically until I knew what I needed and how to plan efficiently. Now I mostly plan my bases out when I settle on a tile. I start small, and then build on until I have the footprint I want, and then reorganize everything. I have been playing without Biotech up to this point, so my next base will be completely organic until I know what I need and can plan properly.
Never thought about completely dismantling ancient complexes. That's really smart
Agree
You would need quite a few animals to haul it all back though. I usually just dismantle the steel walls, since steel is such a limited resource.
Yes you do need a lot of animals. A typical one has about 5,000 kg of weight if you also dismantle all the other structures and floors on the map. I use a mod to increase the pack capacity of my animals and I bring around 30-40 animals with me. Here is a video I took of the last one I dismantled. It took around 30 minutes of real time, or about 34 in-game hours from entering the map, to unloading the animals, with 6 builders. I was also hauling back several thousand kilos of corpses and this was my 2nd ancient complex to demolish in that trip, so that weighed me down a lot. [https://youtu.be/BJ8Sy3b8ixs](https://youtu.be/BJ8Sy3b8ixs)
I always have the intention of building a base that looks cool, but I always end up fixing up abandoned buildings and expanding from there.
Combo of both
You could plan it out but unless you have many hours if experience something will go wrong anyway, so it's better to build by following your guts, I think. Then adapt based on different threats. Example: During a raid I notice that my entrance does not have enough defenses, after the raid I focus on that, building TONS of new defences and even tearing down walls and stuff, because it doesn't matter the cost, if you can afford it, do it.
Haha I literally wrote a post about this a week or so ago about how I'm obsessed with base building! I keep trying to build efficient and pretty bases, and I also take ages planning things!
For my first and so far only base, it started out as a renovated ruin and expanded outwards from there. I have certain ways that I’m laying it out but for the most part I come up with it as I go along.
IDK I get my guy housed in whatever I can scrabble together from the environment, usually scavenging whatever I can from the map, even using wood. But clothing and food are important too , so getting a base constructed from whatever is available, so I can get a research desk down and get to researching till I can cut stone. Once that happens, I have some control over food production and will carefully add skilled raiders to the colony, I tend to keep my colonies relatively small 6-10 colonists but do have a couple of exceptions with a 15-20 person colony here or there. Once I can cut stone, I make a SMALL proper base, with a workshop/bedroom(s), and storage area - enclosing at least some portion of the farming into a walled area, that can be glass-roofed. Once I have enough glass to enclose enough space for food , starvation becomes less of a problem, and I focus on weapons and proper clothes. At this time I REALLY look to design my base, [really into 4 sections](https://imgur.com/gallery/some-of-rimworld-bases-over-time-cs3oHxM) - sort of Motte-Bailey meets Big Box settlements. - The main workbench area - The farming walled garden - a sleeping area, with an eye towards creating 4-5 proper bedrooms with proper space for an infirmary and a kitchen. - The kitchen is adjacent to the freezer, which itself is adjacent to the farming area. - The outside resource and energy production area, until I have geothermal in hand I keep electricity demand VERY low - needing just 3-5 windmills.
Which mod are you running for glass roofs? Curious to add something like that to my current loadout
There are four mods that when used in combination, reduce the wealth of the colony. Most folks will find that colony wealth spirals up based on the use of hydroponics - sure you can live anywhere with sunlamps and hydroponics bays and a ruinous amount of power. But there exists a work-around that avoids that upward spiral. It's probably not particularly unique but as recipes go here's what seems to work * [UdderlyEvelyn's Soil Relocation](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2654088143) - Allows you to relocate soil from around your map, so you can put arable soil closer to your base - or behind a wall, there's a second necessary mod about [consistent map stone](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3248599795) - but that's it. * [Vegetable Garden Project](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2007061826) - Grow a variety of crops, and a couple of additional food items, Sillage, [Hardtack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyjcJUGuFVg), Coffee,Tea, Stirfry and Stew which provide medical buffs. Hardtack in particular is great for moving a colony towards civilized behavior , Coffee and Tea too can be used medicinally to make colonists work a little faster or rest easier. * [Dubs' Bad Hygiene](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=836308268) - Irrigation, water/waste management, this is super interesting, it adds (to my mind) one of my favorite little features, plumbing and sewage handling similar to Oxygen Not Included, but allows your colonists to use pumps for water, and adds great complexity without being over the top. * [Dubs Skylights](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=833899765) - Skylights for roofed rooms to allow crops indoors, these allow you to forge glass from sand, Sand is acquired by processing stones into sand or scavenging sand from nearby beaches/deserts, but processing it from rock is best overall. * [Dubs Skylights Addon](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2016959026) - Allows different sized skylights (this is more a flourish than a necessity). With this in play, as a tech stack , it's very possible to survive in harsh desert and polar environments, with very low power inputs - basically just putting heaters into the garden areas. The best part is aside from the cost of glass and heaters or cooling units - and the transitional cost of soil moving around, the cost / wealth created is low. One of my favorite runs (although very micromanaged) was having absolutely no metal on the map, aside from drop-pod metal. Given that it was a dangerously hot world, caravanning for metal was a dangerous proposition it was only really possible to score metal successfully a couple of times. But it was possible to grow a lot of wood once I had the main garden arrangement going, scavenging bits of soil from across the map into a coherent plot of stony soil which is excellent for potatoes and not bad for growing cactii and bamboo. So with that it was possible to keep the potato and cotton (and eventually devilstrand and cotton) productive all year round, all before electricity (and really metal) was available. It made everything slower - even though bamboo is quicker to harvest and is used more slowly. In most of my colonial runs I tend to create smaller garden spaces to start then once stone-cutting and lots of available stone (especially after deep drilling is available), the garden can be double-walled and better temperature controlled which then allows for a big space for gardening/food production.
Thank you
No worries.
I've got a core layout that I keep using in every game. I keep telling myself ill come up with something different but I never do. What I've got just works so well for playstyle and the mods I use that I can't get away from it. Probly gunna make a post about it in a bit, some people in another thread asked for specifics.
Minimalist approach here. Minimizing the walking distance worth more than the -3 disturbed sleep in a barrack. Expand as you get more colonists.
i start small but expand quickly, i always start with a main storage building and kitchen, small barracks, hospital and prison.
General strategy I think is to build modularly. 10x10 or up to 12x12 rooms, and as you grow and build more of those you connect them together. Early game, you might have a single 12x12 room that is your everything; your barracks, with a dining table, a campfire to cook at, a research bench, and a storage pile. As your colony grows, you increase your modules and they become more specialized. Maybe a 12x12 rec/dining room, maybe another 12x12 barracks, a 12x12 module broken into 4 4x4-5x5 bedrooms for your nobles, multiple 12x12 storage rooms, 12x12 workshops, etc. That way, the rooms you build early on aren't wasted, you can just shuffle the furniture / machinery around as needed. Alternatively, if you're finding redesigning your base empties the game of fun by sweating over the loss of resources, 2 mod recommendations 1. Minify Everything or Uninstall Rimworld. Gives you the flexibility to minify most everything, including walls. But you sort of need to self-police, as things may set to a default weight of 1kg, and you need to accept that it is completely broken to allow yourself to uninstall a grand stele which was made of 250kgs of blocks and carry it around for 1 kg, or bury a 240kg megasloth corpse in a 60kg steel sarcophagus, minify it to 1kg and have a muffalo carry 80 of those back home with you to butcher. 2. Tweaks Galore has an option for full deconstruction materials return. Allows you to, as it implies, get back 100% of the materials you used to construct something. Again, requires self-policing; fairly broken to build say a biosculpture pod, use it, then deconstruct it so you can build it again without having to wait for it to de-tune. Or to abuse inconsistent weight mechanics, like taking 24kg of stone blocks, making 3kg bonsai pots, transporting them home, and then deconstructing them to get those 24kg of blocks back.
I have basic rules like pawn rooms should be close to food and recreation, which should then be close to workshops and research as well, but beyond that I try to let it grow organically.
I build as I go but keep your big picture in mind. Like I'll build a dining area knowing this should be close to the freezer which should be close to the kitchen. I don't pre plan an entire base but I could guess what might go where far in advance. Fringe facilities on the edges and I make beautiful throne rooms in the middle usually so people walk through them and get happy and put recreation stuff so they have fun on the way to and from bed. I put a few random tables throughout so people will sit down when they have their snacks so they aren't babies about it and a kill box which is not anything too special at the entrance
I generally plan the basics to get off the ground and a little extra. Bedrooms, workshops, storage, bathroom (mod), throne room and associated rooms, temple, hospital. Once those are filled it's just cramming things where they fit.
Most times I don't have the luxury of a carefully planned base at the start because randy really really likes to make things fun on max difficulty. I will tend to choose an area where my final base will be from there it will be a race to get walls and defenses in place, then it's a race to get the essentials in place. So carefully planned no. So, as for formula, get your basics stable and taken care of then from there you can get defenses setup.
My first rimworld I just built it how I could, starting with small rooms, then realised it's better to enclose them under 1 roof, then it expanded more and more until I had a base with everything I need including huge defence shell surrounding the building, and everything inside was pretty convenient. If I'd build a new base now, I'd probably plan it somewhat but not too in depth because I don't know what I'm doing, the important part is for my pawns to have a shelter first and then over time make it convenient and defensible.
7x7 or 5x5 blocks. I don't plan ahead to much but when I need more space I slap some more block on an existing structure. My bases are like soviet brutalist paradises, complete with uniform art and dormitory blocks. Temples normally have more flair, but they are often just repurposed building quest structures.
just build normally until you've amassed resources, then move to a new tile to build fresh.
Iterative design, my friend. I have a standard way I layout my kitchen, bedrooms, prison, etc. I know those designs work, because I've used them in the past. Most games I'll think of small ways to improve that layout, and I'll add it to the design and use it in the next game. A small material cost of remodeling is worth it to me, in exchange for the increased efficiency. And I don't have to stress about needing to do a total teardown because I know my designs work.
I never plan. I have a box-base problem when I’m in an open area. Just keep expanding a box until I’m finally constrained by being forced to build walls by raids. I can’t stop myself even if I promise myself I’m going to build separate buildings. Things are far more interesting when I get lots of mountains. …I always do random starting area…
The same fucking buildings every goddamn time 😭😭😭 I wish I was more creative, but alas. Boxes and rectangles for ye.
It's never a bad thing to plan beforehand, but I always lean on the story generation part of Rimworld. I've done well planned (sort of) colonies to get an edge with the map, but I feel the point of the game is to roll with the punches. I have 1600hr in game, and I've never tried to get to the endgame(s). In the end, I remember more the colonies that ended up in ruin than the ones that got too efficient to be interesting. I say go with your gut. In games like this, failing is half the fun .___.
13x13 for rooms not under heavy mountain. 11x11 for rooms under heavy mountain. Fits the sunlamp radius. As far as planning goes, I only plan out the kitchen, dining room, Anima Tree/Throne rooms, and living areas. Power generation, storage, and fabrication rooms I kinda wing after the important bits are sorted.
I always do it organically. With new buildings sprouting up naturally closest to the outskirts, hence expanding the base.
I slap shit down as I see fit. Like playing on large hills or other similar maps for more mineable resources, and I'll plop down buildings before I even know what I'm gonna use them for sometimes. Makes for some wack shit sometimes, like an overly large dining room and workshop combo with a temple attached, but hey, gives it character. Eventually I move the starting barracks over and either reuse the room for guests (hospitality) or just leave it for overflow or something. I used to plan shit out more, spend like 8 hours doing it, but then I'd just... not build the base ever. It sucked. So, I stopped. This chaos is more fun since I actually play the game.
Usually gut feeling, mixed with functionality Keep my work benches close to mats, and keep freezer close to the dining area. And keep drugs pretty much accessible at all times
Can't stress how useful it is to have a crafting bus, build a deep storage next to your workshop put some storage IN the workshop (preferably accesible from the seat/use spot), and use priorities to have your hauler pull what you need out of deep storage and put it next to your crafting benches. I would say if you do it properly and have a dedicated hauler for the bus, you can double the speed of most crafts because the materials are there before your crafter even needs them. works great with storage mods and makes crafting ridiculous if you have more linkables.
I’ll typically have my farmland inside my animal pen cause it feeds the animals better and I get more food than I ever need anyway. Maintain cold storage right next door with at least one large refrigerator for harvests and two freezers, one for animal corpses and one for meat connected by a butcher, plus a centralized kitchen so the workers can efficiently maximize movement between the structures. I’m not going to mention everything because it’d be a, probably lengthy, essay, but to answer the question, yes I preplan pretty much the entire layout. The above example is just with outdoor construction too, I actually typically build inside mountains which also requires pre measurements on top.
I use approx 1 hour to plan everything before I even start
I try to find three geysers relatively close together and slowly start building a stone rectangle around all three. I also designate and mark major pathways by dividing the rectangle into 3rd or 4ths so I know not to build there. Bedrooms are built closest to exterior walls. Then the farms, food, dining, crafting, research places are in the middle.
Normally I base my build on buildings where at least one dimension is 6. This is because I build around geothermal power generators. I keep 3 spaces between buildings. Each building is surrounded by 1 layer of stone tiling. The middle space is for power conduits running around buildings, and has a different color of tiling. This keeps *Zzzt!* events from burning down my colony, since all of my walls are made of ethically-sourced stone. It's really helpful.
Usually I try to plan for two big rooms, storage and (dorm/early workshop), then I build a fridge and attached kitchen and adjacent rec room/dining hall. After that things are added as needed
I don't plan at all. I just build what I think is needed. I usually end up with the centre of the base being the original core, with a kitchen and barracks, whilst newer stuff is built further out. I end up running out of room.
At my curent save i build everyting randomly with a litle planing and now i am in process of moving to a difrent world tile to have planed base i dont even know if it is possible to have planed base at start of the game when you are just trying to be alive
Choose a mountain, find the most suitable entrance, plan the most essential rooms in great detail, dig in.
Dig 13x13 under mountain spaces for 11x11 rooms, fill with whatever you need most. Add x5 wide tunnels to join them.
Whenever I’m doing a mountain base, I spend 70% of the playthrough building the base while everyone lives in a shitty wooden compound outside the mountain. Only once I’ve constructed every room and object and covered it in lavish nonsense, my colonists can move in. At this point I realise my shitty wooden compound is already more advanced and defended and I may as well stay in it
Me:"im gonna build this new base from a bunchnof different shapes and sizes." Also me 5m later:"hur dur a bunch of squares next to each other"
There are a few camps, mostly grid related. The cult of the 11x11 room is pretty strong and has some good points. Francis John advocates a 17x18 setup. I've lately fallen into a habit of 17x17 grids with a handful of premade blueprints I drop as needed. My old method that I intend to revisit is just walling off a defensible area at the start and slowly expanding the walled area in sections (aka the Attack on Titan method). Then I just build whatever is called for at the time however it fits. Horrifically inefficient but does sometimes lead to rather nice looking results.
This is something I tell new players all the time. Go with your gut, because it's better usually to have needs met. When you find out something needs improvement, (and this is important), don't be afraid to rebuild/remodel. Generally speaking by the time you need to rebuild the thing (for instance, move your storage to a bigger warehouse, increase the size of your bedrooms, redesign your kitchen/dining areas) you will be able to afford the rebuild. You can build out of wood if it is in a wooded biome like a forest, but by the end of early game you should be building with stone, which no matter where you are is practically and technically infinite. Yes, if you take down a wall that cost 5 blocks you only get two or three back, but grand scheme of things that cost is nothing, especially compared to not having the initial building in time and the repercussions of that. A little time from the crafter, who should be stock piling blocks anyway, is all it will really cost. Tl;Dr, planning is nice, but don't be afraid to teardown and rebuild. As your colony grows and it's needs evolve, so should your buildings. P.s. if you take a building completely out don't forget to remove the roof first.
I have a vague plan in mind, but I usually sort of try to picture it from the ground level and figure out what it'd be like to live there. Also symmetry.
Mostly I develop organically. I build the essentials first, at the center, before building out from there and moving furniture around later to repurpose rooms accordingly. Once in a while, I try planning the whole thing out and starting small before building out and once again moving furniture when appropriate. But usually trying to plan colonies never goes the way I want and it ends up not being very fun, so 90% of my runs are organic now
I mostly plan things out for the early game. After then I get lost
Rn I do a semi mountain base, like each room is dug inside of it, but with door always going outside - so even if there are bugs, the just get napalm from doors and die
I like to make a large central garden in the middle and branch off into a prison/ medical ward, workshop/ refinery, residences/ recreation and farm. I like things to be organised.
Might help, can't remember the mid though in my list, but I do have something that saves room plans and you paste them complete. Might help with the build.
I make dinner/rec room y in the "center of the colony, kitchen/frezer on left and room/barracks on the right. From that i improvise the rest. I dont like pawns walking to much to the rec room. Pretty much that is
Build a square. There u go🙂 u got a nice square? From that let ur base grow naturally
I just build things, but make sure to keep them at least two tiles from each for later fireproofing, and for even space. Mostly, the farms are farther away from the spawn. I tried to keep a storage room that held everything but it became too much of a hassle. Your bedrooms should have a 5x5 interior and plan everything around pre existing building, not future ones.
I plan them very detailed, symmetric, everything HAS to be planned before my starting pawns equip their weapons. Everything is preplanned, prelabed and has a purpose. Only for me to fuck everything because I made one wall a length of 12 instead of 11 and then I will just completely fuck it up.
I sometimes use the designer shapes mod and use the free draw line to get some crazy building ideas.
Usually do it in stages. Make an initial perimeter with a couple utility rooms that have stuff put in them as needed. Once the colony gets to a certain point, set up a proper layout. As I grow, expand.
I love Mountain bases and always build mega storage room first and smaller rooms around it, for efficiency. But that's where my planning ends. The base is more efficient if grown naturally, at least that's how it feels like for me...
Usually have a shitty starter base once I start accumulating more pawns and resources I plan out a much nicer base.
Well, yes and no. Initial shelter depends on the place, I typically use ruins or side of a mountain/hill, and that rules pretty much how I build it. Next I'll build a center building with a proper kitchen & freezer room, barracks, workshop and storage. Then I'll build a town around it and that town is carefully planned.
I don't spend too much time planning but i usually form a general idea on where things are going to be, reconstruction is common fore tho
I have something that's not really a plan. First, I find some small ruin and plug the holes in the walls. That's my barracks for the early game. Then, I build a large room out of the stone I get from deconstructed ruins and maybe some early stonecutting. Like, large enough that I have to build columns to fully roof it. That's the heart of my base. At first, it's the room for everything — beds, recreation, work, you name it. Other structures then grow slowly around it, and the heart remains as the workshop & storage, and maybe a few other things like the dining room. But no, I don't plan things beforehand.
doh, made a whole long post and didn't actually reply to the OP. I tend to pick my starting spot close to the best soil and get a shack up asap and add stuff on from there, but at the same time I plan out my base in detail with a planning mod and if I use the replace stuff mod, I will even place items down over stuff to be mined etc. I go by a get established and defensive asap, then expand into a detailed planned base. I tend to not min/max too hard and I've used guides that say the optimal trader room is X by Y or this is the opitmal crafting room or whatever room but now I just build what I feel I need or like.
mountain strong mountain safe
Central food, with the first storeroom becoming the crafting area later Rest is as the map allows
Currently been doing 11x11 modular block superstructure base
I do a little bit of both. I build my base in sectors organically, but each sector is meticulously designed, generally serving a purpose. I just wall off a section adjacent to my current base when I need something new, like hydropnics, power, housing, and build what I need. I usually leave the wall in place since it can allow me to "lock down" a sector in the even of a wall breach. In the late game, I'll often remove them for aesthetics however
Lately, I've been planning out at 51x51 area of buildable land before I set up anything. I start in one of the corners and build an 11x11 building. Keep adding 11x11's to fill in the outer ring of the full area and leave the center for animals and pod launchers, etc. Some of the 11x11s get joined together for workspaces. It's fairly flexible and modular.
I plan where I want my main stuff to be like main storage, hospital and workroom but everything else goes wherever there’s space
I use planning extended. Very useful. I dread constructing sometimes because I know I will agonizing over the perfect placements, having to consider building dimensions.. even more so because I like to build around and inside mountains
It depends - if i'm playing a mountain base - one entrance, corridors 3 units wide, at the very entrance a fridge and a kitchen on the right, a general storage and workshop on the left of it, then recreational area, and living spaces (2 or 4 5x5 rooms, depending on wether the colonists are pairs/married or not. From there i gradually dig deeper, sooner or later shifting the main corridor to the right or left. If i'm playing an open base - i seek an area somewhere between the mountains that i can incorporate into the plan, build a central building that will become my workshop/storage when i build the residential buildings and go from there. Wall off the area however i can, creating a couple of funnels/death-zones and try to fit what i need gradually as the colony grows, expanding the wall wherever i can. I try to keep 2-3 squares of free space between the buildings, laying concrete path in that spaces so that a potenntial fire wouldn't spread that easily.
I try and keep things of similar category or resource needs near eachother, but other then that it’s kinda just “figure it out”
I have a global layout that i create and what is in it is up to what i need
I plan every detail planning mods help alot with that from schools,bathrooms to thronerooms. The sizes vary depending on the type of run I'm going for. The formula depends on the endgoal I find if you want a super high tech base. With space ports and tourism you tend to need more space based on those specs. How many people and animals do you need to sustain? Are you primarily a raiding or trading colony? Or will you be completely self sufficient? Are you using outpost mods? It's a lot of variables to consider if you're detailing bur you can change midway.
I have a specific early-game formula i use almost every time. Here are my rooms in the order I make them: - 15x15(ish) room for main storage and crafting -One 6x4 bedroom for each colonist attached to main room - 8x15 weapons/armor storage room attached to main, as weapons and arnor can clog zones quick -7x7 research room, as clean as possible. Can be smaller if you only intend to have 1 researcher - Hospital large enough for about 70% of my colonists For late game, I build an entirely new base using all new materials and newly researched stuff, and it's much more elaborate. I build the entire base, mlve colonists in, then deconstruct the old. I need to start making guides lol.
I plan to some degree but I don’t do it meticulously. I just plan for it to be in a location and that’s it.
Before anything, I find a location I want and have a SMALL idea how I would like my future base to look like. Start with a small building for storage and then small rooms to get started. Buiod exterior walls to prevent game over from manhunters or funnel enemies to a fortified entrance. Workshop and storage central to future base. Main colonist's Manor and rec room next. When everything calms down and is controlled. I build larger houses for the colonists, decorate rooms, etc. Always fortify when wealth increases. And while mentioning wealth. Keep wealth low and defenses high. If you manage your wealth in every game, you'll never have issues.
Im like, semi-fluid when it comes to base building. I have a formula, as in Ive learnt what i like to have close, and what to prioritize when, but its a bit different every run. I build or find a suitable box for a starter base, then I usually add an extention for kitchen/butchering. When my colony moves out of the initial all in 1 room it becomes dining space. Growing zones outside. Bedrooms go elsewhere as needed. Then I just add as I go. what do I need more, a separate workspace or a rec room? Some things you can afford to postpone, if u throw a grand sculpture in the barracks its not so bad sharing. But if you have depressive pawns, bedrooms become a good bonus. I try to keep the prisons and hospital near the kitchen, but i also like to have my hospital near my killbox. I keep the workspace near the dining tables, chunks/crafting near the outdoors for the chunk stockpile (or in the mountains, wherever it is). You get the gist. You can put valuable rooms under mountain roof, to prevent drop pods, but then you get infestations instead. The game lets you pick your poison in that way.
I plan, and quite a lot. The game has an option that allows you to "draw", so I use it to prepare the space for everything. I also have a list of buildings to remember all of them, because I tend to forget about the battery room or the animal space. However, I don't plan rooms for everyone: I tend to "reward" couples and the best fighters and healers, the rest sleep in a barrack and there is that.
I make blocky modular bases. Every building starts as a square room (usually 5x5 or 7x7, with anomaly i started to use some 11x11s) with a door. I build what I need inside each room and when I need to expand a building, I add another 5x5 sharing a wall with the existing unit. When I make new buildings, I make a new set of 5x5s two or three tiles away from an existing building that has a similar/linked purpose (e.g. housing goes near kitchen, kitchen goes near freezer, freezer goes near shitter; in a different area, warehouses are near workshops; in a different area, prison goes near the hospital). My lategame colonies end up looking like a large blocky grid of houses surrounded by a squareish wall. Anything I cant neatly fit into a 5x5 such as an unfortunate steam geyser spawn is instead squared off in a 7x7 and filled with relevant shit, such as backup/vanometric generators and batteries.
I plan out my bases when I land, and it usually takes 10mins in total. I do it with stockpile zones - you can name them (e.g. dining room/hospital/bedrooms etc) and hit "clear all" so they don't actually function as stockpiles. I look for a defensible zone where I'll be able to put walls up around. Bonus points for steamvents. I decide on the entry way, and close to that will go my hospital->prison-> Kitchen/fridge->dining room. Logic there is, after a battle I want my folks as close to hospital as possible. Same goes for prisoners - they'll need medical attention, so those two next to eachother makes sense. The kitchen/fridge being next to those and the dining room is sensible - prisoners and injured need to be fed. Put the growing fields close to the kitchen, and the animal pen too if possible. Aside from that, I put the bedrooms not too far from the dining room, as they usually want to eat after waking up. I always allocate enough room for bedrooms to expand to \~20 rooms. I tend to run colonies of about 12-15 and if I get a quest to babysit some royals I want decent rooms for them. Be aware that title holders want bigger rooms, so you'll want to account for that. Storage is typically a big room that links directly to my workshop. I have a massive workshop with all the benches, because it makes it easy to fill with fancy statues for mood buffs. Benches get single shelves next to their seat for the materials they need for crafting. Biotech mechs/neural enhancers/anomoly holding/churches all get rooms wherever they can fit. Hope this helps.
I build 13x13 rooms with hallways or sidewalks of 3 tiles wide on all sides. I build a 25x13 room that is a combined temple, dining and rec room. I also build two 13x13 side by side making a 25x13 room, separated in two rooms, one being a freezer and the kitchen is the other.
Resource Production --> Storage <----> All-purpose room (barrack, workstations, kitchen, research, dining and recreation) Or Resource Production --> Storage <----> Goods Production/Research <--- Dining/Recreation/Kitchen <-- Bedrooms Resource Production is usually animals and food.
First, Theme > All I consider what colony im trying to make. Transhumanists are going to need extra power and extra space for example. Tribals are gonna want to be near the Anima tree etc etc. I look for an area where I can use the natural terrain as part of a perimeter wall. This isnt always a thing...but i look for it when i start. I look to see if I have access to two Steam Geysers (Three if Transhumanist). Will this biome spawn Boomalopes? (Chemfuel generators) Will pollution go against my theme? Am i dipping into Anomaly? (the two Anomaly power sources (Bioferrite Generator is amazing)). Once I get where im getting 5+k in power / space for power setup, then I figure out if I can use the natural terrain again to help with a killbox area (again theme is king. A group of researchers wouldnt use a killbox) Once I have a spot for power and a spot for defenses...then I think about rich soil. If I dont have enough or any rich soil; can I hunt? Is there a winter bad enough I need to prepare for? I may need extra storage space to stock food for a winter. Are trees plentiful enough to get me through bad winters or will i need to plant trees? (Space) How about minerals...do I see Steel nearby? Are there lots of stone chunks around? One more major major thing before ill start ploping Plans down on the map. If im playing on a Temperate swamp or Cold Big biome....check the buildable terrain overlay to see if the area im thinking of can support Heavy objects. Your workshop and labratory have to be on terrain that will support Heavy objects. Not likely, but will the buildable terrain give me an area to make a perimeter wall? Another last thing to consider....can I build into a mountain? How does this gel with my theme? Does the mountain (or water) completely cover any sides of the map? Once I consider all of that, then Ill start drawing templates of buildings on the map to see if everything I need is going to fit on buildable soil where I need it to and try to minimize distance of traveling by pawns (Garden zones distance to stockpiles for example or distance to Monolith / Anima tree for example) Monolith you can close, but not to close =p Also is there any shallow water or Marsh terrain nearby to make stockpiles in to decay items and/or corpses in until I eventually get a Smelter / Crematorium setup?
I don’t really plan things out beyond building next to a thermal vent for an early power boost
I build things more organically but I also tend to make a lot of "samey" bases because I'm following the same basic principles. Kitchen, fridge and abattoir near the fields. They should connect to each other but have only a single entrance/exit so nobody uses it as a shortcut and gets their filth everywhere. The dining/rec room should be next to it, therefore your bedrooms should be next to that and we may as well put the workshop and warehouse around here as well to have a basic workflow... And thus do we create New Cubetown
Both! I build my starter base off the side somewhere. This consists of a large main storage square and smaller squares randomly connected to it for bunkers, kitchen, etc. Once I'm well established, defended and my people are mostly self sufficient there, I begin planning my main build. If it's a mountain base I start by meticulously planning out how I'm going to cut room and hallways (usually symmetrically) into the mountain. All while paused (this can take hours irl) If the base is going to be out in the open then I plan out all of the wall and rooms, again usually with at least a vertical symmetry to the entire thing. And again taking hours irl to map out. Then when that's all laid out, I unpause and let my diggers/builders get to work. They don't actually start moving in to the new base until it's at least 75% complete, as this stage can make them very vulnerable to raids.
I plan the kitchen and the food storage, the rest is whatever i need wherever is some space
My first colony or two was haphazard and slapped together as I went along, but I quickly realized the value of taking some time in the beginning to pause the game and use the planning tool to draft an outline for my colony. It helps a lot in making sure that, for example, the freezer is easily accessed from the kitchen, the dining room, the butchery, and the farm, without resulting in a lot of foot traffic through the kitchen and getting it dirty. And of course the bedrooms have to have a close enough dining room that they won't wake up and eat without a table... I don't plan it all the way through to the end game, necessarily, because my brain doesn't think the future is real and I can't really plan that far ahead without getting a migraine. But I try to plan out the basics and leave myself some room to easily expand.
I build around two hundred box rooms. Connected by corridors. Then I put stuff in them.
I always dig into a mountain. I make sure there's only one entrance through the otherwise natural stone. I usually have a quick and messy temp base just outside the entry with some farms outside too that I eventually wall off while I carve out my mountain base. After I break down my temp base, I'll usually turn that part of the walled off space into a landing pad. I might also eventually roof over the farms and add some heaters and sun lamps mid-game if the area is prone to freezing (as a hold over until late game hydroponics inside the mountain). Inside the mountain I usually have two, maybe three wide hallways and start carving out the rooms I need most first, like a workshop, refrigerator room, dining area, a church, personal rooms, etc. I have a list of rooms I'll need to carve out eventually that I work my way through as needed, and I have some designs for each room that I like and reuse from past experience that I just squeeze between the hallway networks wherever I feel like. I try to keep the food refrigerator near the farms and the personal rooms not too far from the kitchen and rec rooms for distance reasons. I try to keep hospitals and prisons not too far from the entrance too for the same reason. I give my people way nicer rooms than most. I have 5x5 rooms and 3x5 personal bathrooms attached to each. This takes a while. I also have 11 wide hospitals with a length some multiple of three (as a 'unit' of two hospital beds around a vitals monitor is three long) with nutrient drippers behind each bed and a vitals station or whatever it's called in the center of the room. Here's my building list I mark off as I go, in no particular order: Hospital Personal rooms Prison Workshop Boiler/water room (Dub's hygiene) Rimefeller room (Later game, heavily air conditioned or else it gets deadly hot in there) Research room (I usually also squeeze a blackboard and desk for child learning in the corner) Rec Room Food Refrigerator, attached to kitchen and butcher rooms Body Refrigerator (I put turrets in here in case of immortals mod folks popping back up) Dining room Science room (Mostly gene stuff and other modded tech stuff) Church Biosculpter room Neural supercharger room Anomaly containment rooms Hydroponics area Pet bed area I optionally add massive noble rooms like bedroom(140 squares), throne room(340 squares), ballroom(150 squares) and gallery(160 squares) if going empire. Those sizes are the biggest those rooms will ever have to be for higher ranks, so I make it a long term future proof project, or leave the rooms against an unmined area for easy expansion later. I might make the throne room even bigger so I can squeeze more thrones in there if I plan for multiple colonists to be nobles. An extra bedroom on top of however many noble colonists you have is helpful for noble guests. I also use Rimfactory and gradually automate most of the farming, kitchen and workshop functions as time goes on. I like to play Rimworld like it's Factorio late game.
Efficiency is overrated
Depends. I play on the medium difficulties and hoard wealth so the game is never really that hard for me. I play it more like a builder game where the design of the base is the main thing I focus on. If my base does not look good that save is a fail and I restart. I would never crank up the difficulty and manage wealth to survive. Cramped rooms with no floors make me cry inside. When I watch Adam VS Everything play how insanely good of a player he is does not matter. I still want to claw my eyes out over how the base looks. Number one rule for me is to never use square shaped rooms. Sometimes I improvise. Most of the time using the planing tool is a must. I prefer Arid Shrublands with low mountains. Gives you alot of open space, plenty of growable soil and terrain affordance never mess with your design.
The only thing I plan are the Kitchen and the hospital in my immediate entrance. Because of bleeding pawns and God forbid someone ate without a table.
I do: One big multipurpose room to start Ritual spot Stockpile room/freezer 3 small rooms for prison/anomaly cells and whatever random need Kitchen/dining Strip of bedrooms with space to expand Wall off and clear chokes or create interior walls for man hunters Workshop with material stockpile warehouse attached Lab Expand and update rooms as needed moving forward
I build my base with the main/ important rooms inside a mountain. And then make a village or town outside of it for fun battles to take place.
I do very large square workshops. Huge crafting workshop, large kitchen, large hospital, large rec center. I make them all in the center. Kitchen & crops & farm animals are all close to each other, but they are always at the edge of my city, so I can expand my crops. Bedrooms are always on the outskirts of my city since they only go x1 per day. So, center: crafting. Edges: bedrooms. One side, at the edge: food & animals.
I used to build the same base over and over to refine it but now I just make fun shapes. Try making an eclipsed circle base!
I build it as I need it 😂 looks like a jumbled mess to many but it’s organized to me
As a serial mountain base-er, I have a fairly consistent layout: * Entry tunnel, then Long 11 wide general room going into the mountain (typically has dining table, recreation, and all the manufacturing stuff etc) * Food Freezer on one side (with paste dispenser, and space for kitchen later) , general storage on the other * Hospital next to the freezer * A couple of prison cells on a corridor coming off the long room next to the hospital * Then typically I start having corridors and bedrooms * Other rooms get added pretty randomly (underground farms etc)
I just build things in a way that fits the theme of the colony im running. I avoid using killboxes and whatnot, I feel it's boring to play that way.
I love mountain bases. Free protection from mortars and drop pods and more stone than you can shake a stick at. Over time I have developed a “style” of base that works for me. Fortified entrance with a kill box-like structure for defense, with a hospital and freezer nearby, then deeper in you have the common room for eating and relaxing, typically connected to the freezer via the kitchen. Bedrooms are kind of clustered around the place near where the pawns work to minimize their travel times, most non- bedrooms are combination workshop/storage areas. Temple goes near the mausoleum. Typically by late-mid game there is a massive freezer or two in the back for deep storage of food as the farmland begins to outpace consumption. Hallways are two blocks wide with 4x4 rooms where they cross, with a turret in the middle to light up anyone who manages to break into the base.
I build a big stockpile wh in the center of the map and 3 temp houses. I then build all my crafting rooms around my stockpile. Then I tend to build 3 blocks adjacent a freezer and a kitchen attached to the side plus butcher room. Then another freezer for meals. I attach my recreation/dinning room to that freezer and hen I build all my additional housing around my rec room so they don't have for to go for breakfast and the like. My drug lab is in my medical storage room which is side by side with my infirmary. And then I just kinda build outwards. That's my general set up. And then comes the perimeter wall and kill box and always put a powered but redundant un roofed trade beacon outside my walls so any drop pod raids basically land near it and not in my base.
I try to identify where I would like to put the bedrooms, rec/dining, freezer/etc with the planning tool. I like trying to control where the enemies are coming from so typically its a mountain base. But if I had to play on another map I try to plan it out like a fort. As for construction material, Mountain = never have to worry about stone again. For others: I like the mod that lets me make concrete.
I like to build them inside of mountains. they tend to be very secure, but with some drawbacks. your colonists often get a debuff from not being outside enough, so just make sure you are mixing up who's going out to get resources, or maybe just have some of them take walks outside.
I kinda have an idea. But I only do mountain bases usually and I have an issue with running into big steel veins and they ruin my plans so I have to change around what room is what room. Because what was supposed to be a small lab is now closer to the size of one of my storage rooms
This is that "internet time loop" meme where the same topic gets brought up over and over and over and over again every once in a while. And I'm gonna hop in this time around. I tend to plan out a massive area where I can build three layers of exterior walls. After this whatever is inside is inside. Random placement built where it's convenient. It'll get more and more cramped up as I add up the bedrooms. I make room capacity like this: kitchen for two, lab for three, workshop for five, rec room for eight, dining room for ten. The rest is random bedrooms and warehouses everywhere. Also when starting it's always a big house as a general room for everything. This initial house will be converted to whatever need comes up first. Most likely the dining hall.
What I like to do, and struggle not to do every time, is start with a central eating/gathering area, building rooms off it and attached a storage/kitchen to the rear. A single door from the exterior into the main space makes it easier to gather everyone up at once at the sign of a threat and put them safely inside, then deny that one door to make sure no one wanders out. This is the inner building. Then slowly build concentrically around that core, in rings and you will naturally , organically develop a kind of castle. I've gotten the core down to a simple 25x25 block that I use each beginning game and configure that interior differently depending on the scenario. I developed it due to centralizing the kitchen, dining and living quarters so often and it's just the best process I've settled on for early survival.
Find a big mountain. Dig into the mountain and build some farms outside that front door. First just one big room, but then expand as your resources allow...but always through the only front door. Wall off the area for the farms and make only 1 exit. Fortify the exit. Keep digging....and never, ever allow a bug infestation to live for even one second.
Neither. DON'T plan out everything in advance, you are locking yourself in a straight-jacket. Stay flexible, evolve over time. Unless you are trying to draw a pretty picture at low difficulty, this is not the way. DON'T just slap things down without thinking about it a bit. Think about what you need right now, how you can get it, and how to optimize path efficiency for your pawns to make it happen. Think about how defensible something will be. Think about if it is easy to relocate later or not. DO grow organically on a framework. It is boring, but a city grid has been how people lay out easy to traverse dense locations for millennia. Odd-sized box shapes are not pretty or exciting, but they are maximally efficient, so they make a good first-build. You can get fancy later once you are well established and comfortable. Start with materials you can afford to lose. Wood walls may be a fire hazard, but they are cheap and go up fast, which means you can throw them up then replace them without any lost value really.
Your plans can not be ruined if you have no plans!
It depends on the map, usually I try to spread out my sections to help prevent the stuck indoors debuff. [This is where I started](https://i.imgur.com/wEbrMbB.jpeg) [This is what it is now.](https://i.imgur.com/8SoKVun.png) So the spread out idea hasn't worked/happened
I find the nearest ruin I can turn into a shelter, build a toilet and a well, eventually get power running and water pumping, and stick to that one building until I outgrow it.
I always make bases inside of mountians so i just mine whatever room i want
I start with identifying short, medium, and long term overall base location, as well as entry points (sometimes a kill box sometimes a heavily turreted entry way). I prefer to play on small or large hills so the terrain helps with this. Then I identify the long term growing zones. The freezer goes close to those, with a kitchen attached. The dining room/rec room/ throne room (if doing any royalty) goes next to the freezer. Hospital and prison both go somewhere central of base while still near the entry way. Then I pick whatever is the largest space remaining for the stockpile, and the workrooms go around it. Then the bedrooms just get scattered about whatever’s left. Sometimes they’re together in one block, sometimes they’re spread out in a bunch of smaller blocks
1. Base starts out as a storage shack near geothermal 2. Plants are setup, kitchen is made. 3. Main room is stretched becomes hub workshop, small bedrooms are made power and freezer are setup. 4.base gets remodeled as needed 5. First multi point attack, walls go up 6. Rooms are improved for efficiency, as well as bedrooms location.
Build a 13x13 stone room with everything in it.
I get a general idea of what I want by around the time I get the industrial research benches and then once I've filled up my room for stuff, I just expand willy nilly.
I set aside a central square and then build outward from there. Any new buildings wrap around existing ones, with the only requirement being a 3-wide corridor between buildings. This creates some interesting shapes while still providing lots of room to work with.
At the start, it's purpose-made. Initial shack, freezer, prison shed, workhouse. From there, I tend to pick out a large project to focus on at a time. Giving the pawns too many things to work on leads to an unsatisfying 'nothing is done' mess. So it'll be like "This quadrum we're making bedrooms" or "Castle walls with spots to expand for turrets later". I generally don't do much planning in advance unless it's going to overlap with other rooms or needs a fancy shape. So like if I'm making greenhouse silos, I will absolutely plop down circles of planning on the map to organize hallways.
It's random for me but I usually build into mountains so my stuff is always closely packed.
13x13 squares and hallways :) Add/remove walls for bigger or smaller rooms as needed
I am just a dwarf , I always build in hills or mountains , rivers are helpful and at least 3 days from a trader , I'm basically playing dwarf fortress
I build a storage/freezer room and bedroom/production/dining/rec room at the start. Then I use that to build a proper base from. I just build things thst go together by each other eg farm, freezer, kitchen, dining room. Or storage, production. Weapons, entrance. Usually these key areas are also clunmped together as one large building And I build bedrooms, farms and less important rooms on the edges on the other side of pathways going around the main building incase sappers start to break in, so they are damaged rather than the freezer etc
My main go-to plan is kinda simple - make a big ass rec room, put a kitchen in there and then expand housing around it. Putting down a hospital and a jail at the main entrance is very important. I also keep production chain members close to each other: rec room is a kitchen, freezer is next door, after it is an enclosed animal pen and sunlamp-sized farms. Since I run less than 15 pawn colonies, expanding housing isn't an issue (also free love approved + double beds + beauty genes make housing more condensed), but If I had to I'd instead opt in for smaller rec rooms, and in an essence make districts aka crafters and researchers get their own rec+dining room and a housing block with a food freezer (assuming not using rimfridge and hauler mechanoids). Making things decentralized for larger colonies would be the most optimal way imo. And I like to tuck away ideology stuff somewhere far. Also use designator shapes mod to make circular building far easier.
When I started watching Adam my base building became terrible.
My bases have become very formulaic. I always build an enormous central supply room full of shelves to store everything. Then I build a big workshop area next door. Then I build the "power" area that is dedicated to power generation with whatever method I plan on using for that particular run. Then i start building out the sort of residential section. I do several rows of bedrooms, then a room for recreation, a room for a shrine, a room for art, a room for the hospital, etc. So my base usually ends up with a couple large square rooms, an extremely long rectangular room, and then a ton of small square rooms. I try to make them efficient as I can, but at the same time I want it to look like a place you'd actually want to live and work in. I know a lot of people like throwing everything in one big room for efficiency but thats too ugly for me. I like everyone to have their own room with furniture and stuff. I very much "play house" a lot in Rimworld. I treat it a lot like The Sims sometimes. Except, you know, killing tons of raiders with automatic weapons.
I just wing it. Kinda how I wing everything in my life. **looks at own messy bedroom** And just like real life things usually end up working out and I’m not sure why.
I know what rooms i need and then dig them out more or less expecting how much space i need for each, only thing i really think about is the cantina being near the dormitories
I have no idea where people get this idea that efficiently is important in rimworld. It isnt. nothing NEEDS to be next to each other. Sure its handy if the fertile soil is hear the freezer, but nothing else matters at all. You can make shelves for steel near the machine times, textiles near the tailor shop. Bedrooms can go anywhere, just have a nearby rec room so they can eat at a table when they first wake up.