Build a RimWorld Lab That Actually Works (1.6) | Room Role + Research Speed Tool

How to make a laboratory in RimWorld

A Laboratory is a room role, same family as Bedroom or Kitchen. The game scores every role for every enclosed room and names the winner. Lab benches vote for Laboratory, so a closed room with a research bench and nothing louder in it becomes one.

1. Enclose a small room: walls, a roof and a door. Spaces that touch the map edge or have no walls aren't rooms at all. About 6×6 to 8×8 inside fits two benches, a multi-analyzer and a bookcase. Keep it off main walkways so less dirt gets tracked in.
2. Place a research bench. The simple research bench needs no research. After Microelectronics, build the hi-tech bench and connect power.
3. Keep louder furniture out. No beds, no sleeping spots, no medical beds. No more than two workshop benches, or two stoves or butcher tables, for each lab bench.
4. Check the role. Click the room stats button at the bottom right and hover the room. It should read Laboratory. Select the bench too: if its inspect pane shows Research speed factor: 80% (not in laboratory), something outvoted it.
5. Make it fast. Floor it, keep a heater or cooler so you stay inside 9–35°C, add a lamp, a chair for comfort, a bookcase, and later a multi-analyzer. Each of those has its own section below.

A chair doesn't change research speed. It gives the researcher comfort while they work, which helps mood on long shifts. Without one, pawns research standing.

Simple vs. hi-tech research bench

The hi-tech bench is a third faster, and 29 base-game projects require it, including the multi-analyzer itself. Build it where it will stay, with space beside it for a 2×2 analyzer. Simple benches work fine as overflow seats; researchers leave them for a hi-tech bench when the project needs one.

Several researchers can work the same project at once, one per bench, and the points add up. Night-shift researchers can share a bench with the day crew.

Why my room isn't a laboratory

The room takes whichever role scores highest. Scores:

Animal beds and animal sleeping spots score for Barn (+7.6 each), not Bedroom. Ties go to the role higher in the game's list, so five dining tables already beat one bench. Sterile tile, a tool cabinet, chairs, lamps, bookcases and the multi-analyzer don't vote for anything.

The common cases

• Research bench in the workshop. One bench beats two workshop benches; the third flips the room. Put a wall and door between them and both rooms run at full speed.
• A bed in the lab. One colonist bed makes it a bedroom. Several beds make it a barracks, unless they all belong to one couple or family, which keeps it a bedroom. A medical bed makes it a hospital, a prisoner bed a prison cell. No number of benches wins against that. Keep beds out, including the researcher's own.
• Kitchen next to the lab. A stove and a butcher table together (56) still lose to one bench (60). A third food bench takes the room. The butcher table also has −15 cleanliness of its own, so it drags research speed even with a clean floor.
• No role shows at all. A missing wall tile, or a gap that connects the space to the map edge, means it isn't a room. Close every gap with walls or doors and check again.

Hospital and lab next door, not together

Medical beds and research benches both like a clean room, so sharing one sterile wing looks tidy. The medical bed still takes the role and every bench drops to 80%. Build the hospital beside the lab, and route traffic away so blood stays out of the research room.

Why research is still slow

Once the room reads Laboratory, the bench's research speed factor is the bench base, plus the analyzer, times the factors below. Select the bench and you'll see the same lines in its inspect pane.

The bench factor can't fall below 25%. The researcher's own speed multiplies on top of that:

• Intellectual skill: 8% at skill 0, plus 11.5% per level. That is 100% at 8, 123% at 10, 238% at 20. Research speed never drops below 10%, so a skill-0 pawn still researches at 10%. Passion doesn't change speed, only how fast the skill grows.
• Light: in darkness a pawn works at 80%, rising to 100% at 30% light. A standing lamp covers night shifts. Blind pawns and pawns who prefer darkness ignore this.
• Sight and manipulation: injured eyes or hands slow research down.

Outdoors costs more than the label says

Workbenches outdoors take ×0.8 since 1.6, but research benches use their own stat. A research bench outdoors takes ×0.75. On open ground with no surrounding walls it also picks up the ×0.75 no-room cleanliness value, so you land at ×0.56 total. There's no room-role penalty outdoors, because there's no room to have a role. A walled room missing more than a quarter of its roof still has a role, so it can take both hits. A few missing roof tiles don't matter if the bench's center tile is roofed.

Power and temperature

• Hi-tech bench without power: researchers can't use it at all. Put the lab on a reliable circuit, and add a battery if you run solar or wind.
• Temperature cutoffs are strict. 9°C is fine and 8.9°C is not. One heater or cooler keeps a small lab inside the band. In a heat wave, 35°C is easy to cross.

Floors, filth and sterile tile

Room cleanliness is a sum divided by the room's size. It adds up the floor under every tile, every bit of filth, and the cleanliness of the buildings, items and plants in the room. The research factor follows that number. Research benches, the multi-analyzer, bookcases, chairs, lamps and heaters are all 0. Several workshop buildings are not:

• Butcher table −15
• Stonecutter's table and art bench −5
• Smithies −3
• Machining table −2, and the Anomaly serum lab −2

Another reason to keep workshop benches out of the lab.

Floor	Cleanliness	Research factor	Cost per tile
Bare soil, sand, gravel	−1.0	94%	Free
Mud, marshy soil	−2.0	88%	Free
Concrete, wood floor, stone tile, flagstone, smoothed stone	0	100%	Cheap
Steel, silver or gold tile	+0.2	103%	7 steel, or 70 silver or gold (Smithing)
Sterile tile	+0.6	109%	12 silver + 3 steel (Sterile materials)

Filth hits hard in a small room. Dirt is −5, blood −10, and chemfuel or corpse bile −15 to −20. A single blood splat in a 6×6 sterile lab drops cleanliness from 0.60 to 0.32 and research from 109% to 105%. Keep the lab off the path to the hospital and the freezer, and put cleaning high on one colonist's priorities. Keeping floors clean covers the cleaning side.

Sterile tile pays off in a lab you'll use for the rest of the game. A 6×6 lab needs 36 tiles: 432 silver and 108 steel. If silver is tight, steel tile gets about a third of the gain for steel only.

Where to put the multi-analyzer

The multi-analyzer does two jobs. It adds +10% to every linked hi-tech bench, and it's required for 16 base-game projects, including Fabrication, Advanced fabrication, Bionic replacements, Vitals monitor, Cryptosleep caskets and the whole ship tree. DLCs add 18 more, such as High mechtech and Archogenetics (Biotech) and Advanced gravtech (Odyssey).

• Cost: 40 steel, 50 plasteel, 20 gold, 8 components. 200 W. Construction 8, 10,000 work.
• Research: the Multi-analyzer project, 4,000 points, done at a hi-tech bench. It needs Microelectronics and Machining.
• Link range: 8 tiles or less between the analyzer's center and the bench's center, with a clear line of sight. A wall between them blocks the link even at short range.
• Sharing: one analyzer can link to any number of hi-tech benches. Each bench uses one analyzer at most; a second one adds nothing.
• Power: an unpowered analyzer gives no bonus, and analyzer projects stop.

Two hi-tech benches stacked with their chairs between them, analyzer beside them in the middle, works well. Both benches sit 5 to 7 tiles from it. The analyzer counts as a building in the room, so the room still needs to read Laboratory. The 50 plasteel is usually the hard part; see getting your first plasteel.

Bookcases and the reading bonus

Books stored in a bookcase speed up every research bench in the same room. The bonus counts how full the bookcase cells are, not book quality or type, and books lying on the floor count for nothing.

A bookcase (2×1, 20 wood or other material, Complex furniture) holds 10 books; a small bookcase holds 5. One full bookcase is the best early buy here: 6% for a handful of wood. Bookcases don't vote for any room role in the base game, so they can't flip a lab into something else.

Drug lab, tool cabinet and DLC lab buildings

• Drug lab. Also wants a Laboratory and takes the same ×0.8 elsewhere. It adds 60 to the Laboratory score, so it can share the research room. Cost: 50 metal or wood, 75 steel and 6 components, after Drug production. Unlike research benches, it uses normal workbench rules: ×0.8 outdoors and ×0.7 at bad temperature.
• Tool cabinet. +6% work speed, up to two per bench, for production benches like the drug lab. It doesn't link to research benches. If someone calls it "the laboratory tool", it only helps the drug lab. Tool cabinet placement has the details.
• Biotech. The gene assembler, gene bank, gene extractor, gene processor, growth vat, mech gestators and subcore scanners all add 60 to Laboratory. Only the subcore encoder takes the ×0.8 penalty itself. Gene banks also link to the assembler, so a gene lab and a research lab can be the same room.
• Anomaly. The serum lab wants a Laboratory and takes ×0.8 outside one.

The Biotech school is a Classroom, a separate role. Keep school desks out of the lab.

Worked example: same pawn, two rooms

Take a researcher with Intellectual 10 (123% research speed), on Adventure Story difficulty, researching Geothermal power (3,200 points; either bench can research it). Points per hour are 20.6 × researcher speed × bench factor × difficulty.

On Peaceful and Community Builder research runs at ×1.2, on Blood and Dust ×0.95, on Losing is Fun ×0.9. Tribal starts pay 1.5× the points for medieval projects and 2× for industrial and later ones.

Research speed calculator

Enter what the bench and room look like. The calculator shows the bench factor, the researcher's speed, points per hour and how long a project takes.

Room role check

Count what's in the room, including the bench itself.

The calculator assumes a healthy adult researcher with normal sight and hands, and no traits, genes, implants or drugs that change work speed. Hours are bench time. A colonist who researches 8 hours a day needs three times as many days as the nonstop figure.

Versions, console and mods

• 1.6.4518 (July 12, 2025) added the room-role penalty: research benches and other production buildings work slower outside their preferred room. The same patch set outdoor workbenches to 80%, from 90%, and stopped a medical bed from turning a barracks into a hospital. A medical bed in a lab still makes it a hospital.
• 1.6.4535 stopped buildings on the other side of a wall corner from changing a room's role.
• 1.5.4062 added books and the reading bonus.
• Console: these numbers are for PC 1.6. If your console build predates 1.6.4518, there is no ×0.8 room penalty yet.
• Mods: Vanilla Books Expanded and Medieval Overhaul add a Library role that can claim a room full of bookcases. In the base game, bookcases never change the role.

Older guides list the temperature band as 10–35°C, the outdoors factor for research benches as 90%, the analyzer range as 4 tiles, and the reading cap at 155 books. On 1.6.4871 the band is 9–35°C, research benches take 75% outdoors, the range is 8 tiles center to center, and the cap arrives at 145 books.

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