Base Building & Crafting
A poorly designed base turns minor emergencies into colony wipes. How you lay out your rooms, manage temperatures, and set up your crafting chains determines how well your colony scales into the late game.
Base Layout Fundamentals
Efficiency is everything. Pawns walk slowly, and every tile they travel between a stockpile and a workbench costs you production time.
The Central Hub
Keep your dining room, recreation room, and food storage in the exact center of your base. Pawns wake up, go to the freezer for a meal, eat in the dining room, and grab some recreation before heading out to work. Keeping these rooms centralized cuts down daily travel time massively.
Stockpile Efficiency
Do not build one massive stockpile for everything. Create specialized zones right next to the relevant workbenches.
- Put a small stockpile holding only steel and components directly next to your machining table.
- Put a stockpile holding only textiles and leather directly next to your tailoring bench.
- Set these specialized stockpiles to a higher priority than your main dump so haulers keep them topped off.
Material Selection
Wood is a trap. It is fast and abundant in many biomes, but fire destroys wooden bases in minutes. Upgrade to stone as soon as you research stonecutting.
| Material | Use Case | Drawbacks |
|---|---|---|
| Wood | Early game shelter, beds, fueled generators. | Flammable, weak against attacks. |
| Granite | Outer defensive walls and killboxes. | Highest hit points, but takes the longest to craft. |
| Marble | Sculptures and interior walls (provides a beauty bonus). | Weakest stone against attacks. |
| Limestone/Sandstone | General purpose building blocks. | Sandstone is the quickest stone to build with. |
| Steel | Machinery, power conduits, mid-game weapons. | Highly flammable in RimWorld (yes, steel burns here), do not use for walls. |
| Plasteel | Late game armor, bionics, ship parts. | Very rare, expensive to buy. |
Temperature Control
You have to manage both heat and cold to keep pawns alive and food fresh.
The Freezer
Build a dedicated room for food storage and install a cooler. Set the target temperature between 15°F and 23°F (-9°C to -5°C). Going all the way to 0°F wastes power. Build a one-tile airlock (two doors separated by a space) at the entrance to prevent heat bleed. Double-wall the freezer to increase insulation. This keeps the cold in during power outages and solar flares. Make sure the hot side of the cooler exhausts outdoors or into an unroofed chimney tile.
Climate Control
In extremely hot or cold biomes, use a central hallway to heat or cool your base.
- Build a wide central hallway connecting all bedrooms.
- Place heaters or coolers in the hallway.
- Install vents in the walls of each bedroom connecting to the hallway. This equalizes the temperature across the entire block of rooms without needing a heater in every single room.
Setting Up Crafting Chains
Do not micromanage your crafting tables. Use the "Do until you have X" billing system.
Instead of telling a pawn to make 10 simple meals every day, set a bill on the stove to "Make Simple Meals", click Details, and change the criteria to "Do until you have X". Set X to three times your colonist count. This automates production. The cook will make meals until the stockpile hits the target, then stop and do other work until the meal count drops again.
Apply this logic to everything: clothes, medicine, and components. Set bills to keep a baseline stock of dusters, flak vests, and industrial medicine, and your colony will run itself.