RimWorld Best Base Layout (1.6.4633) | Live Planner Tool
RimWorld Best Base Layout
The best base is the one your pawns can cross fast, defend fast, and clean fast. Use the live planner below to choose a compact hub, open compound, mountain spine, or hybrid core, then get a room order, hallway width, defense buffer, and copyable blueprint tuned for your colony stage.
Quick Answer
If you want one layout that survives most storytellers, build a compact hub: dining and recreation in the middle, freezer and kitchen on one side, storage and workshop on another, hospital and prison on a short branch, then keep a panic hall or defense lane close enough that rescuers do not drag pawns across the whole map.
Start compact. Expand by work chains, not by empty “future-proof” hallways.
Farm / freezer / kitchen-dining
This is the colony’s most repeated daily loop. If these rooms are far apart, every meal taxes your whole day.
Storage / workshop / loading edge
Bills and hauling use touch and interaction pathing, so short ingredient and product routes beat pretty but isolated wings.
Defense / hospital / prison
Rescue time, tending quality, prisoner stabilization, and surgery all improve when medical rooms stay close to combat lanes but out of dirty traffic.
Build a Blueprint Before You Lay the First Wall
Pick your shell, colony phase, threat bias, and food model. The planner will update the hub map, hallway rule, expansion order, and the code-backed warnings you should respect before building.
Recommended shell
Compact hub for fast logistics Keep dining and recreation central, attach food, work, and medical arms, and hold defense on a short lane rather than inside every room.Big risk to avoid
Turning the freezer into public traffic If cooks, haulers, and defenders all cross the same cold room, you waste labor and leak temperature every day.Planner Map
Expansion order
Adjacency checklist
Defense and traffic
Code-backed warnings
Planning color legend
These swatches mirror the local 1.6 planning palette from ColorDefs.xml, so the blueprint reads like an in-game plan instead of a generic website diagram.
Why These Layout Rules Hold Up
The page is tuned against the local RimWorld 1.6.4633 rev1266 game files. These are the mechanics that make room adjacency more important than screenshot symmetry.
Keep butchering out of the clean cooking room
Kitchen only tracks cleanliness in the room-role defs. The room food-poison curve still applies below -2 cleanliness, and butchering also spills blood filth. Put the butcher room beside the freezer, not inside the kitchen.
Clean hospital lanes beat giant decorative wards
Hospital rooms care about beauty, cleanliness, and space. The local surgery cleanliness curve runs from 0.6 at -5 to 1.10 at 1, so short rescue routes matter, but so does keeping the ward off dirty traffic. Add a vitals monitor only where you will actually use hospital beds.
Every unnecessary door taxes repeated jobs
The door defs explicitly state that simple doors slow people down and powered autodoors do not. Bill jobs gather ingredients using ClosestTouch and bench interaction cells, so high-traffic chains should cross as few doors as possible.
Store beside work, not inside the main lane
Shelves hold three times the density of ground storage and ignore stored item beauty, which is excellent for workshops. They are still pass-through objects with extra path cost, so use them on bench flanks rather than as hallway furniture.
Paste works best as a contained side system
The nutrient paste dispenser wants hoppers directly adjacent to it and feeds from a defined interaction side. If you use paste for prisons or large colonies, make that wing self-contained instead of dragging raw food through the main base.
Concrete for traffic, sterile for medicine and labs
Concrete is cheap and quicker to clean than default rough floors, which makes it a fine main-lane material. Sterile tile is much slower to build, but it improves cleanliness and cleans faster, so reserve it for hospital and lab work zones.
Mountain, Open, or Hybrid?
No shape is “best” on every map. What changes is which tax you want to pay: infestation recovery, wall length, internal breach handling, or future expansion mess.
| Shell | Best at | Main tax | Use it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compact hub | Shortest daily traffic and easiest early expansion | Can feel cramped if you keep adding rooms without splitting storage and defense | You want the safest default and do not trust the map yet. |
| Open compound | Clean sight lines, pens, farms, landing space, easy modular growth | More perimeter wall and more exterior door management | You have flat land and want fewer mountain complications. |
| Mountain spine | Weather control, low wall count, tight heat and cold management | Harder breach recovery and higher punishment if dirty industries share one tunnel system | You have strong rock cover and a plan for internal fallback halls. |
| Hybrid core | Balanced logistics with safer utility wings and outdoor growth room | Planning discipline matters or it turns into an awkward half-maze | You want bedrooms and social rooms compact, with utility and defense split by terrain. |
Universal rules that outlast the shell choice
Scale Without Turning the Colony Into a Walk Simulator
Build the colony in layers. Every time the base doubles in footprint, you need a reason for each new step a pawn has to walk.
Day 1-5
Get the smallest useful loop online.
- Dining-rec box
- Sleeping spots or starter beds
- Freezer stub and kitchen
- Temporary stock near work
Day 5-15
Stabilize food, crafting, and emergency care.
- Real storage cluster
- Workshop wing
- Basic hospital branch
- First prison cell
Midgame
Split crowded chains before they become permanent.
- Bedrooms off the core, not across the map
- Second storage or fabrication pocket
- Dedicated defense lane
- Cleaner hospital or lab floors
Late game
Add comfort after logistics stop fighting you.
- Luxury rooms and beauty investments
- Triage split if rescue routes got long
- Paste prison wing or secondary freezer
- Landing and launch space if the run needs it
Fast Answers
These cover the layout questions players usually search right before rebuilding half the colony.
What is the best base layout in RimWorld?
For most colonies, it is a compact hub with a central social core and short room chains for food, work, and medicine. The exact walls can change. The short loops cannot.
How wide should hallways be?
Main spines should go 3-wide once you expect regular hauling, rescue traffic, or interior melee blocks. Side corridors can stay 2-wide where traffic is light.
Should the hospital be near the killbox?
Near the defense route, yes. On the literal outer wall, no. Keep the rescue path short without turning the ward into a breach hallway.
Should prison be near the hospital?
Usually yes. If you recruit often, a prison-medical pair saves hauling, feeding, tending, and surgery time.
Do shelves belong in the main corridor?
No. Shelves are great next to benches, not as corridor furniture. Their path cost makes them bad hallway filler.
Is mountain base automatically best?
No. It trades weather safety and compact walls for harder recovery when internal problems start in the wrong place.