How to Make a Nutrient Paste Dispenser in RimWorld | Layout + Paste Planner
A nutrient paste dispenser turns raw food into meals without a cook, and with most raw food it uses 40% less than simple meals. It only needs power, a few hoppers and a front tile your colonists can reach. Most "broken" dispensers fail on one of those three.
RimWorld 1.6Core game values. Royalty, Ideology and Anomaly notes are marked.
125 steel, 3 components, 200 W
0.3 raw nutrition per meal
Meal worth 0.9 nutrition
Research, cost and where to put it
Research Electricity first, then Nutrient paste (400 points). The dispenser shows up under Production.
- Build it into a wall. The dispenser blocks air like a wall segment, so it can be part of the wall between your freezer and your dining room. Point the front (the spout side) at the dining room.
- Keep the front tile clear. Pawns stand on the single tile in front of the spout to get a meal. No furniture, no wall, no other building's interaction spot.
- Add hoppers on the freezer side. Each hopper costs 15 steel and must touch one of the dispenser's sides. Two to four works for most colonies.
- Power it and allow paste. Hook it to the grid and check that each colonist's food policy allows nutrient paste meals.
A freezer at 0 °C or colder stops raw food from rotting, and that includes the food sitting in the hoppers. Between 0 and 10 °C it rots more slowly; above 10 °C it rots at full speed. If you still need a freezer, this freezer build covers coolers and airlocks.
Hoppers: what goes in and how to avoid leftover jams
A hopper holds one stack. Routine filling is a Hauling job, not a Cooking job, so keep someone on Hauling. A hungry pawn can also top up a reachable hopper on the way to a meal, but you can't count on that. Hoppers start at Important storage priority, which pulls food in ahead of normal stockpiles.
Accepted
Raw food that people can eat: meat, crops like rice, corn and potatoes, berries, raw fungus, milk, eggs and similar.
Not accepted
Hay and other animal-only plant food, cooked meals and kibble. Human meat and insect meat are off by default (twisted meat too, with Anomaly); you can tick them on in the hopper's storage settings.
The leftover-stack jam
Each paste meal needs 0.3 nutrition. Most raw food is 0.05 per unit, so that's 6 units. A hopper left with 2 pieces of meat holds only 0.1. Haulers will top it up only with the same kind of food, and if you have none, that hopper sits there blocking the slot. With a single hopper, the dispenser is stuck.
The fix is more hoppers. The dispenser adds food up across all of its hoppers, so 2 meat in one plus corn in the next is enough for a meal. To use the leftover up first, give it the earlier hopper slot (see the order below).
Which hopper empties first
The dispenser checks the tiles around it in a fixed order and takes from the first hopper that has food: along the south side from west to east, up the east side, back along the north side, then down the west side. The order follows the map, not the way the dispenser faces. Put the food you want used first, like meat that spoils fast, in the earliest slot.
Nutrient paste dispenser not working? Check in this order
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Nobody uses it, no power icon | No power, or it's switched off | Connect it and check it draws 200 W. |
| It worked, then stopped | It broke down | A colonist with Construction repairs it with 1 component. |
| Hoppers have food, still nothing | Less than 0.3 nutrition of raw food in total | Add hoppers or more raw food. |
| Hoppers stay empty | No one on Hauling, or the hopper filter allows no food you have | Enable Hauling on someone, check the hopper filter. |
| Pawns walk past it | Front tile blocked, forbidden, outside their allowed area or unreachable | Clear the tile and let them reach it. |
| Dispenser looks orange | Its front tile is inside a prison cell | Colonists won't use it. See prisoners. |
| Only some colonists skip it | Food policy forbids paste, or a Royalty title wants better meals | Allow paste in that policy. Nobles whose title demands better meals skip paste unless starving; Ascetics don't mind. |
| They eat other meals instead | Better meals are within reach | Working as intended. Paste is the lowest meal tier. |
Quick check
Feeding prisoners with a dispenser
Prisoners can feed themselves from a dispenser if its front tile is inside their cell. Build it into the prison wall with the spout facing the cell and the hoppers on your side. The dispenser turns orange, the same tint as prisoner beds, and from then on your colonists won't eat from it.
- A colony dispenser also works for prisoners: wardens fetch paste from it and carry it to the cell.
- Put the hoppers on your side of the wall, where your haulers can reach them.
- A dispenser is self-serve for prisoners or for colonists, never both. If you want both, build two. For cell doors and escape behavior, see prisoners and doors.
How much food paste saves, and what it costs in mood
| Raw nutrition in | Meal nutrition | Labor | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nutrient paste meal | 0.3 | 0.9 | None, made on demand |
| Simple meal | 0.5 | 0.9 | A cook at a stove |
With food worth 0.05 per unit, that's 40% less raw food per meal. The cost is a −4 mood "ate nutrient paste meal" thought that lasts one day. Ascetic colonists don't mind it, and with Ideology an ideoligion can carry a precept that removes the penalty.
A paste meal left out above 10 °C spoils in 0.75 days, which is why it's made only when someone asks for one.
Each dispense takes whole pieces of food, so items worth more than 0.05 can overshoot. A chicken egg is 0.25, so a meal uses two eggs (0.5). The planner below accounts for that.
Paste batch planner
Power margin: keep the 200 W alive at night
No power, no meals. Solar panels make nothing at night and wind turbines rise and fall with the wind, so check what's left after dark. A battery holds 600 Wd and loses 5 W on its own, and it stores only half of what you put in.
Power margin tool
Solar is counted at its 1700 W maximum and wind at its 3450 W maximum in strong, unblocked wind; real output is usually lower.
Planning the whole kitchen block? The base layout tool helps you place the freezer, dining room and dispenser wall together.