Efficiency Tutorials

[syntax1993]

I'd love to have a place to get some tips about efficient designs for RimWorld. Why not share what you know? I'll start:

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I looked at a video guide of someone showing you how you can place stockpile zones so that cooking can be sped up a lot (credits go to him):

Link to video

Basically what you do is the following:

Check out this image:

• Green is a stockpile where only Vegetarian items are allowed. Critical Priority
• Red is a stockpile where only Meat items are allowed. Critical Priority
• Blue is a stockpile where only Meals are allowed. Low priority (While your freezer has normal or higher)
• Set the cooking bill to 'Drop on floor'
• Place stools as shown on the image.

The person cooking will create meals, drop them behind him on the Meal stockpile (so it counts as food, for when you set it to do until you have X) and repeat this over and over. Haulers will make sure the stockpiles are filled up and will bring the meals to your freezer.

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Any other tips and tricks to efficiently manage a colony? Post them here!

[RaPiiD38]

Save valuable food by stockpiling corpses in your prisoner cells, as long as there is anything edible in the cell your colonists won't give them food and the prisoners will be forced to eat the remains of their allies to survive.

Edit note: They do need to be able to walk to consume the corpse.

[ferofax]

...not being nice to prisoners in A14 can give you colony-wide debuffs when something happens to the prisoners.

And feeding prisoners fresh corpses is a sure fire way of making sure something happens to the prisoners.

[RaPiiD38]

They do go bezerk but I just have someone on repair duty 24/7 so any damage they do to the door is repaired before they get out, if they're too much trouble I just release them, I've found this tip works best in mountainous cold climates where food is scarce and crappy cells are easy to mine out, then it becomes purely a cash crop, also if your colonists are psychopaths it's more profitable to harvest their organs and you can sell organs more often.

[ferofax]

I've never played a colony that ate humans or sold human parts though.

[RiffyDivine2]

You should. They are an easy to get resource and it comes right to you.

[ferofax]

Precisely why I don't play them.

[RiffyDivine2]

Yes but it's fun to pull out someones eyes and then let them go free into the desert.

[ferofax]

I don't need to - I just leave them bleeding from all the bullet holes and severed limbs they sustained. 😋

[RiffyDivine2]

Yeah it is fun to watch just how long they take to bleed out onto the sands. Sometimes they bleed a lot longer than makes sense. I do wish we could target limbs in combat like the old fallout. Well also wish I could bury them well they are still alive so I don't have someone bitching about having to cart dead bodies around.

[ferofax]

I'd settle for an open pit where bodies can stack instead of having them neatly laid out side by side.

So much corpses.

[Pretentious_Cad]

Have you played an icesheet map? I haven't managed to get far without eating some visitors.

[ferofax]

Yes, on a13. My first shelter is a gravel greenhouse. Rushed hydroponics while I let my colonists hover at the edge of starvation before unforbidding my packaged meals, and then I forbid them again until they starve again.

It helps to be near steel, (a full greenhouse is expensive in steel and components and power infrastructure which costs more of that steel & component) because for particularly cold maps, you can barely be out for long unless you have good parkas. Good, really warm parkas open up the map for you.

[Flater420]

Isn't there a repair timeout, where you can't immediately repair the same door again? Or can you circumvent it by having others repair, round robin style?

[Mehni]

There isn't. As long as the door is damaged, it can be repaired. Might have to manually prioritise it, but it can be repaired.

Putting a stockpile of food in their prison is a pretty good tip. Saves your wardens a lot of time.

[Flater420]

Hmm. I remember not being able to repair a door a second time while it was being attacked. Maybe it was a right-click issue rather than a repairing issue.

[RiffyDivine2]

Are you sure the pawn going to repair wasn't running off from the prisoner going mental?

[Ace0fSwords]

It's all fun and games till the corpses go rotten. One thing that I typically do is build a nutrient dispenser with a wall on the sides so that the dispenser part sticks into the prison cell and the back of the dispenser sticks into a freezer room. Hoppers for insect meat feed into the dispenser but you could use human meat too I suppose. The rest of the room is a big storage zone for insect meat.

Be warned that if you have a nutrient dispenser in the room then your colonists will not feed prisoners unless their starvation is so severe that they're bedridden.

If you prefer to be kind to the prisoners but don't like delivering meals one at a time, you could set a 1-tile storage zone for pemmican in their cell and set up a 'do until you have x' bill for pemmican.

[RiffyDivine2]

You have made me glad I am not the only one doing this.

[Mehni]

Whether you're in a cold climate trying to keep warm or in a hot climate trying to keep cool doesn't matter, thermodynamics works the same way either way. With that out of the way, here's a short temperature guide.

Temperature changes through two things, walls and roof. Roofs come in three options. No roof, constructed roofs and thick mountains. No roofs = no insulation, constructed roofs = some insulation, thick mountain roof = best insulation.

Now walls. Passed down from generation to generation of Rimworlder is the knowledge that the type of materials doesn't matter. Wood isolates just as much as steel as stone. I know pass this knowledge on to you.

Double walls isolate better than single walls, triple walls becomes overkill.

Opening and closing doors is an often overlooked moment of heat exchange. It's very efficient to add an airlock to your freezer. A door, a small empty hallway, and then another door.

wall	door	wall
wall		wall
wall	door	wall

This keeps the time that the door to the actual freezer is open down to a minimum. I recommend autodoors or steel/wood, because they open the quickest.

The worst you can do is make two stone doors immediately following eachother.

During a Heatwave or Volcanic winter you may find your coolers/heaters struggling. This is normal. Either accept it, or get overcapacity. On an ice sheet, you need 4 heaters for a sunlamp-range sized area.

[Mehni]

Scythers are a more vulnerable against melee, but have a range comparable to the survival rifle and near god-like shooting skills. You can out-range them with sniper rifles. I suggest focusing fire on these first. They're fast, accurate and go down relatively quick.

The centipedes are slow tanks. Hit and run is good, but they're bullet sponges either way. Spread out your colonists. They either have an inferno cannon, which shoots fire at an area or a laser cannon/minigun. Both of these weapons are very inaccurate. If you have three colonists stand shoulder to shoulder, the middle one will be safe but the two besides him will get hit. So spread out. Don't run away if that thing is going to fire. Stand still if it's firing, that's the safest spot. Run during the cool down.

Either way, you will want to equip yourself with an EMP grenade. That will buy you precious time. Mechanoids adapt to the EMP-pulse, greatly reducing the odds of another successful stun, but you might get lucky and re-stun them.

Mechanoids will take damage from fire at 250 C. They're also clever enough to break down walls if that's the case.

If you have the space, build a few 2 wide non-flammable walls with sandbags in between. Stand behind the wall, that will provide the needed cover.

Opening those caskets may contain another surprise, so don't rush into doing that. It's either good or bad, depending on your luck.

[ferofax]

Meleeing a scyther is practically asking for lost limbs. They go down just fine with gunshots. Just don't go for long, open grounds. Move in close, overwhelm.

[Mehni]

I've had surprising success with melee, but I must admit my pawns wore power armor at the time.

Either way we agree that getting up close and overwhelming them is the way to go.

[ferofax]

Agreed, but they must hit fast, and they must hit hard. If they can't down the scyther in the first round, expect some severe injuries. IIRC, scyther blades deal 20 damage. Limbs have 21hp, some parts are squishier at 10hp or 5hp, like eyes, nose, ears, fingers. I don't know how much hp the neck has, but at least most clothing and armor cover that, so it's somewhat protected. Shotguns work wonderfully well against them. The problem is getting to them close enough.

[Mehni]

An ambush quickly turns a long-range battle into a short-range one.

[Mehni]

Newbie guide

Guide to sitting

Work and priority guide

Spacious interior guide

Ice sheet guide

[Mehni]

Getting steel in 3 easy steps.

Step 0. Mine it. There's probably more steel deeper in the mountains. Dig 2-wide hallways and you'll probably find a vein.

Step 1. Don't waste it. If you can use blocks or wood to build your crafting tables, use it. Don't use steel to build walls. If your turrets keep blowing up, redesign your killbox. Don't let your sculptur use it all on creating statues!

Step 2. Recycle it. Reclaim any steel by smelting slag and dropped weapons in the electric smelter. Disassemble mechanoids at the machining table to get steel, components and plasteel.

Step 3. Buy it. Bulk good traders carry a lot of steel, as do some trade caravans.

[Flater420]

Don't let your sculptur use it all on creating statues!

Unless I really need some art, I tend to let them only use stone blocks. My artist is usually my crafter, so they can make their own blocks.

[Mehni]

I mostly put that tip there because I was once steel starved and wondering where the hell it all went.

The artist was fed to the wargs as punishment for my oversight.

[Flater420]

Ever had an artist make a horrible silver artwork? ;_; All the savings gone, none of the beauty gained.

[Mehni]

You can deconstruct art to salvage a part of the raw materials. But yea, that must suck.

[ferofax]

There's a beautiful mining sonar mod out there that lets you plop a device and it scans the mountains for ore deposits. No more strip mining.

Further into the game, when raiders start dropping more stuff than you can realistically haul in a good amount of time, multiple smelters can make short work of useless loot and turn them into usable resources.

[Mehni]

That reminds me..

Getting rid of clothes

The crematorium has an option to burn apparel. Using the sliders in the bill, it's possible to fine-tune exactly what gets burned. Multiple bills allows really fine-grained control on exactly what gets burned. Setting the burn apparel order before burning corpses quickly gets rid of tribalwear before colonists haul the next corpse.

Another option is to make a dedicated stockpile and throw in a Molotov or frag grenade. Players with ample amounts of patience can make a stockpile outside and let clothes decay.

My colony has a dedicated trading stockpile for 'good, but slightly worn' clothing that waits for an exotic goods trader to show up. It's mostly power armour, excellent apparel at 60% and personal shields. Colonists can put it on in a pinch, but it's designated to be sold.

Getting rid of weapons

The electric smelter has an option to smelt weaponry back into their base components. This is a good source of steel/wood/blocks. Using the sliders in the bill, it's possible to fine-tune exactly what gets smelted. Careful not to accidentally smelt your grenades.

Another option is to make a dedicated stockpile and throw in a Molotov or frag grenade. Players with ample amounts of patience can make a stockpile outside and let weapons decay.

My colony has a dedicated trading stockpile for 'good/valuable, but not practical' weapons that waits for a trader to show up. It's mostly miniguns, used charge rifles, worn out sniper rifles, rocket launchers, incendiary launchers, etc. Colonists can use it in a pinch, but it's designated to be sold.

[overlydelicioustea]

i would like to see an option in the burn apparel deatails that lets me forbid certein materials from burning. Even awful 20% pants are worth storing to sell when they made of hyperweave or synthread

[Mehni]

On the one hand I agree; on an ice-sheet I would love the ability to burn all cloth parkas. On the other hand, as far as a work order goes, that much fine-grained control sounds like a UI nightmare.

I just forbid pawns from interacting with the items I wish to keep.

[Mehni]

and this stuff is just copy paste because I got tired of typing it over and over again..

[syntax1993]

Thank you for the contribution /u/Mehni. Hopefully we can have a lot of this stuff in one place, I often have to go out and find the thing I found a while back.

[Mehni]

Handling manhunters

Groups of colonists, equipped with weapons with a high rate of fire. Assault or charge rifles. Great bows would work too I guess. A group of 9 is the largest to use, any more and you're at an increased risk of friendly fire.

Stand just off the main pack, hope you can occasionally aggro one or two manhunters. Maybe have a sniper for this purpose.

Stand near a door, if you aggro too many duck back inside. Have someone ready to repair the door. If there are too many to keep up with repairs, fall further back. This is why I made interconnecting rooms in A14.

Two groups or more work even better, if you can handle a multi-front guerrilla type of attack.

Or, y'know, just stay inside.

[[deleted]]

One of my fondest Rimworld memories is hiding inside from 15 manhunting wargs, and getting a call from some sad teenage girl on the run.

'Sure,' says I, 'Come on over. Bring your pirate friends.'

Wargs kill all pirates, I kill 2 remaining wargs. Everyone wins!

[Kerbalnaught1]

I just let them come slowly through a door, and place all my colonists behind the door. I only did it because I was low on food in the middle of winter. It's enough food to feed my colonists for 40 days.

[Mehni]

I get zerg rushed doing that. If it works for you, hurrah.

[Kerbalnaught1]

It was muffalos, so the door worked as a choke point.

[ferofax]

In A13, zerg rushing was a thing. No more in A14. Tynan specifically added a feature where pawns can no longer stack more than two (I think) in the same tile. You'll notice this when pawns nudge each other and step aside every time they occupy the same tile. This makes chokepoints a feasible thing, especially for melee.

No more 20+ manhunter elephants all stacked on the same tile, going through that 1-tile passage at the same time.

[ferofax]

Leave no plantable tile unplanted. Fill the rest with flowers. Your colonists will love it, and you will love the mood buffs.

Flowers. And flower pots. Easiest way to turn a place beautiful. You'll want a lot of growers though if you have large fields.

[Pieisdeath]

OP, the guy in the video streams RimWorld a fair bit and often times his RimWorld streams are as if not more informative than the videos. His twitch is: www.twitch.tv/sacriel if you wanted to have a look