Best Base Building Tips For RimWorld

Key Takeaways

• Improving base defenses can deter raiders and increase food output, crucial for survival.
• Key to morale is combining a recreational room with a dining room for impressive bonuses.
• Experimenting with base layouts and designs is essential to progress and adapt to the planet.

A player’s base is everything in RimWorld since it acts as a home for colonists and stores items. Improving a base will allow gamers to survive longer on the unforgiving planet where they have crash-landed.

Making a few tweaks to a base will allow it to function better and improve its defenses, deterring pesky raiders. Some improvements to a player’s base will also increase food output and allow gamers to house more colonists. These tips are great for people seeking to improve their base-building skills in RimWorld to progress further in the game.

Updated December 4, 2024 by Aly Azmy: This list has been updated to add new base tips that might not seem important at first but will become a must-do once tried. The list aims to provide tips from the early to late game. Figuring out these tips will slowly allow RimWorld players to improve in the game and build larger colonies that are efficient and stable. One of the tips also touches up on base defenses to keep a colony prepared for endless invasions from enemy raiders.

1 Base Location

Base Tip: Scout Base Location

Before choosing where to place a base, there are a few things to consider, such as building close to fertile soil and avoiding map corners. Rich soil allows crops to grow 40% faster, giving players a significant advantage in their early game farms. Raiders will spawn in map corners, and keeping a base away from the edges will provide ample time to plan against an enemy attack.

While this last bit of advice is optional, playing in a large hills world will provide a base with natural defenses to play around. Building out in the open will leave any base exposed on all sides.

2 Freezer Room

Base Tip: Preserve Temperatures For Longer Periods

The freezer is the most valuable aspect of a base, as storing the colony’s food is essential. Maintaining the temperature in the freezer room is necessary due to power outages and occasional solar flares. The best way to preserve the temperature in the freezer room is to double-wall it, allowing the area to stay cooler for longer once the power cuts out. Building an airlock leading to a freezer will also help maintain temperatures inside a room.

Players should place the freezer as close as possible to the kitchen to reduce how much the colonist chef needs to move during cooking, and players can also use auto doors to cut down more time.

3 Recreational And Dining Room

Base Tip: Increase Morale

The moods of colonists are arguably the most important resource after food, as keeping them happy is vital for survival. Combining a recreational room with a dining room allows players to get more use out of each room. Once a colonist uses either room, they will receive an impressive dining or rec room bonus.

The best way to improve a room is to add a sculpture made by a talented artist and use a colonist with a high level of construction to build all chairs, tables, and recreational objects.

4 Dedicated Workshop

Base Tip: Better Organization

Creating a large workshop area has several benefits compared to having them spread out. An essential tip for having a fast workshop is keeping a warehouse close to it, allowing colonists to get the necessary resources for their work with less delay.

Having one large room allows players to save space and forces colonists to socialize more frequently. To take it a step further, players should add some decoration into a workshop to make the environment look better for colonists, providing them with a mood buff.

5 Stone Blocks

Base Tip: Fire Proof

Wood walls and floors will only take players so far in RimWorld since fire is too risky to avoid. Using stone has many advantages compared to wood, such as having an increased beauty factor. Marble blocks have the highest beauty factor, followed by slate blocks.

Using marble flooring is a great investment to increase the beauty factor throughout a base while keeping players safe from fire. Players should make sure to assign a colonist to maintain the cleanliness of the beautiful new stone floors so that players can profit from them.

6 Walls And Killbox

Base Tip: Improved Defenses

Once a base is large enough, investing resources to wall up areas surrounding the base will increase defenses. Keeping one side accessible will cause most raid attempts to pick this path, allowing players to profit off turrets and sandbags and have a reliable defense system. To ward off Mechanoids, fans have created kill box designs that funnel raiders into a neat line.

Creating a kill box requires players to restrict base access to only one point of entry and create a long hallway to force raiders to attack one at a time. After the hallway, place the colonists as far as possible, giving them cover while they put out firepower. Adding turrets will improve damage output and provide help to colonists. Players should also be sure to give better guns to colonists that have beneficial colonist traits.

7 Hydroponics

Base Tip: Indoor Farming

While rich soil is helpful for early game farming, hydroponics is better later in the world. While they are expensive to build, they allow crops to grow twice as fast as they would on rich soil. Not all crops will benefit from the extra growth speed; potatoes do not utilize the full growth speed, but rice does.

Building hydroponics in a circle design surrounding a sunlamp will allow players to take advantage of the area, leaving only four empty spots for heaters. One crucial requirement for relying on hydroponics is creating backup batteries for power outages; this prevents the risk of crops dying.

8 Animal Pen

Base Tip: Alternate Food Sources

Farms provide players with a consistent source of food, but gamers will require animal products to create higher-quality meals for their colonists. Setting up a barn for animals to graze in is easy and requires limited effort. Most animals are herbivores or omnivores, and players will have little trouble providing them with consistent food sources. Cows are among the best animals to enclose in a barn due to their milk production and high meat quantity.

Players should look for an area full of grass to build the barn on. Build a large fenced area and place a fence gate on one side. After the fence is complete, click on one of the fences to build a fence pen marker. Place the pen marker inside to mark the animal pen. Solid blocks, such as a wall, can be used to add an animal pen inside a base. Players can begin raising animals after completing an animal pen.

9 Prisoner Management

Base Tip: Prisoner Lockdown

Prisoners are a great way to increase future colonist populations or make good money. Building a prison will allow players to keep numerous prisoners at all times. There are two main prison designs: separate rooms or a joint cell. A joint cell has the downside of having all prisoners break out at once, which could be devastating if they escape at a bad time.

Separate cells are preferred as they are better at preventing a large prison outbreak. A good prisoner cell design has a bed, a light source, and a place to eat. Expanding cell space and adding statues will improve prisoners’ moods, allowing for faster recruitment and lowered escape chances. Building cells within a larger area is essential as prisoners will have to break out of another structure before they are free. This buys players some time to deal with an outbreak.

10 Hospital

Base Tip: Sanitary Room

Taking proper care of injured colonists is crucial to ensure their survival. Using bedrooms as hospitals will increase infection risk and will not accommodate a large number of colonists after defending against raiders. Setting up a hospital is expensive but will pay off in the long term as it will vastly improve survival rates for sick or injured colonists.

Players should dedicate an entire room for the hospital that will accommodate between 4 and 6 hospital beds. Normal beds will do until hospital beds are researched. Use sterile tiles for the floor as doing so will provide a cleanliness buff and lowers the risk of infection. Add vital monitors close to the beds, and be sure to dedicate all beds as medical beds. Lastly, create a nearby room for storing medicine and keep the room cold to preserve the medicine.

11 Temperature

Base Tip: Stabilizing Temperatures

Depending on where a colony is built, setting up ACs or heaters will be mandatory to survive a hot summer or freezing winter. Colonists will get a mood debuff if they are in unfavorable temperatures, and managing colonists’ needs will keep their moods high. When placing ACs, players should be sure to keep the red arrow pointing outdoors, as it will expel heat.

Vents will allow players to equalize temperatures throughout their base and save on electricity. Larger bases will require more ACs and heaters, but keeping the entire base connected by vents is mandatory. Players can close vents during cold snaps and preserve heating in vital rooms such as bedrooms.

12 Limit Room Size

Base Tip: Unnecessary Space

Limiting room size saves resources and construction time but can bring mood debuffs if a room is too small. Having a larger interior provides a mood buff and requires 41 or more accessible tiles for that room. Having larger interiors increases travel time for pawns and can waste precious time.

Room size matters most for bedrooms as they have a direct effect on each individual pawn. Giving pawns bigger bedrooms offers a mood buff, but a smaller room will suffice during the early parts of a game.

13 Wider Hallways

Base Tip: Future Expansion

Having a 1×1 wide hallway indoors becomes problematic in the later stages of the game. Having a wider hallway gives room for lighting and other objects while also providing sufficient space to fight off any potential invaders. Pawns will also get slowed down when passing one another in a small hallway.

Many players agree that a 3-block wide hallway is the optimal design choice. Main base hallways can be even bigger, and players can use the extra space to add artwork to increase morale.

14 Second Base

Base Tip: Obtain More Resources

Once players have established their primary base, venturing off to find a good location for a second base can provide lots of benefits. New bases give players access to more resources via mining all resources in the area without using deep drilling.

These bases don’t need to be permanent and are generally used by some players to have a smaller base to look after. The drawback of having two colonies is that players must focus on their favorite colony in the event of a simultaneous raid.

15 Storage Rooms

Base Tip: Making Use Of Space & Location

Almost immediately, all players must dedicate an area for storing all their items. These items exclude foods and other perishable goods. Placing storage rooms near the center of a base gives two advantages. The first advantage is that colonists will waste little time getting to the resource stockpile.

The second advantage lies in placing the stockpile far from potential raiders to boost base defenses from enemies. Using shelves is a must to store more items in a storage room, as they allow more items per tile and are cheap to build.

16 Armory

Base Tip: Keep & Organize Weapons

Having an armory at the start of a save is overkill, but once players accumulate a large selection of weapons, having one is essential. An armory serves many uses, from keeping lethal weapons away from prisoners to aiding in organizing. Having a sturdy door fortifying the vault can be a good idea in case a colonist suffers from an unlucky mental break.

Players will add all essential weapons to the armory and place firearms and equipment for sale within another storage area. Having armor and guns available for quick use will come in handy when attacked in rapid succession.

17 Aesthetic Mods

Base Tip: Add More Color

Mods are an essential part of RimWorld‘s identity. Many popular RimWorld mods have added graphical and cosmetic improvements to the game, and some have been incorporated due to their popularity. Gamers can get rid of the overwhelming brown colors with mods such as GreenRim, as building a base on brown dirt with blocks such as wood can get dull quickly.

With some cosmetic mods, players can add more personal touches to liven up their base and make it prettier. Mods can also retouch a colonist’s appearance and give each one a unique and memorable look.

18 Battery Backups

Base Tip: Uninterrupted Power Supply

Unfortunate events will always occur in any power system, so being prepared for it is a must for larger bases. Back-up power supplies prevent food spoilage and provide no hit to weapon production and indoor crop growth.

Backup power supplies use a small room with a few batteries that are not connected to the main power supply. Once the batteries are charged, they must be disconnected from the power supply. Colonies with more energy requirements will require more backup batteries to ensure no interruptions.

19 Door Positioning

Base Tip: Save Colonist Time

Colonists are slow and some spend most of their day moving across the base. Providing these colonists with convenient door positioning will reduce their total time spent navigating a base, giving them more time to be productive. While most players do not need to worry about this step, gamers playing on harsher difficulties will need every advantage they can get.

Areas with high foot traffic can have the doors kept open for less time waste. Players will have to strike a balance between having convenient doorways and good defenses to keep raiders far from critical storage rooms and hospitals. For the most part, sticking to wood doors offers the fastest interaction time, as other materials will take longer to open.

20 Wood Farms

Base Tip: Finite Wood

Wood will always be in demand at any base and running out of wood entirely in the area will be a hassle. Trees are grown just like other crops and will yield a consistent source of wood, giving gamers a reliable source once they have effectively chopped down all the nearby trees.

Turning off sowing for the tree plot will have colonists harvesting mature trees and berries in that zone. Having wood farms is a necessity in some climates, such as deserts. Planting the trees far from the colony will provide a guaranteed source of wood when required.