RimWorld Best Base Layout (1.6.4871) | Live Planner Tool

The default winner: a compact hub

Every colonist eats about twice a day and needs recreation every day. Those are the trips you pay for most, so the room that serves them goes in the middle. Everything that feeds it (freezer, kitchen, butcher) sits on one side, and everything that grows over time (bedrooms, workshops, prison) sits on the edges where you can extend it without tearing walls down.

Which shell fits your map

If you go the Odyssey route, the ship is its own layout game: the grav engine supports 500 substructure inside an 18.9-tile radius, and each grav field extender adds 250 more. The gravship build covers that in full; everything below still applies to what you put on the deck.

Food chain: the part of the layout that can make you sick

1. Freezer in the middle. At 0 °C or colder food stops rotting; between 0 and 10 °C it rots slower; above 10 °C it rots at full speed. One cooler (200 W) usually holds a small, insulated freezer in a temperate biome; hot maps and busy doors need a second. See the freezer build for sizes.
2. Butcher in its own room, touching the freezer. The butcher table has −15 cleanliness and butchering leaves blood. Put it in the kitchen and the kitchen gets dirty.
3. Kitchen touching the freezer, floored with tile. The kitchen room only cares about cleanliness, and cleanliness decides food poisoning (table below).
4. Dining one hall away. Cooks drop meals in the freezer or a shelf next to the dining room; everyone else never walks through the cold room.

The room is rolled when the meal is finished. If that roll passes, the cook's skill gets its own roll, so a clean kitchen does not save you from a level-2 cook. A contaminated meal then makes the eater sick at the rate set by your difficulty's food poisoning factor.

Using nutrient paste instead? The dispenser goes in the wall between freezer and dining room. The paste dispenser layout shows the hopper side. For the cook room itself, the kitchen build goes deeper.

Where walking time actually goes

A colonist with normal speed (4.6 tiles per second) needs about 13 ticks to cross a tile. The floor adds its own cost on top, and every closed door makes the pawn stand still until it swings open. On a long day of hauling that is the difference between a fast base and a slow one.

An autodoor with power opens four times as fast, and a door that opens in 20 ticks or less does not slow pawns at all. That covers every powered autodoor except one made of stone blocks (25 ticks). An autodoor costs 40 steel, 2 components and 25 of its material, draws 50 W and needs the Autodoors research. A door set to hold open also costs nothing to walk through, but it lets heat through, so never do that on a freezer.

• Main hall 3 wide. Two pawns pass without blocking, a stretcher-bearer can get by, and in a fight three colonists can hit one melee raider at the door.
• Floor the hall with concrete first. It costs 1 steel per tile and builds fast. Upgrade looks later.
• Autodoors on the freezer, kitchen and hospital first. Those are the doors crossed most often.
• No shelves in the hall. Shelves cost 50 extra ticks to walk over, the same as a workbench.

What a mountain roof buys you, and what it costs

• Light the deep rooms. Darkness is one of the things the game looks for.
• Put the freezer deepest. A room held below −17 °C can't spawn a hive, so the coldest room is the safest one to bury.
• Keep the dug part small. Every overhead-mountain tile near your buildings is a candidate. Dig what you use.
• Hybrid works best on a cliff edge: freezer and storage in the rock, bedrooms and dining outside under a built roof.

For building outside: a built roof stays up within 6.9 tiles of a wall or column, so a room can be about 12 tiles wide inside before you need a column. Hives and how to clear them are in the infestation page; optimal colony layout compares mountain and gravship bases side by side.

Bedrooms on the edge, but make them count

Bedrooms are visited twice a day: going to sleep and waking up. That is why they go on the outside of the hub, not in the middle. Quality still counts here: the morning thought lasts all day.

A dull private bedroom (0) beats a fancy barracks until the barracks reaches "very impressive". Eating without a table costs −3 mood and sleeping outside −4, so the first dining table and the first roof are worth more than any decoration. Each colonist woken by someone else gets −1 (it stacks up to three times), which is another reason to keep bedrooms off the main hall. The bedroom planner and impressiveness explained go room by room.

A short, clean branch for the wounded

The hospital should be one branch off the main hall, close to where fights happen. Keep it clean: the room's cleanliness changes both surgery and infection odds.

Sterile tile adds +0.6 cleanliness per tile and is quicker to clean, which is why it belongs in the hospital and kitchen first. A vitals monitor (80 W) must touch a hospital bed to work. Place the prison next to the hospital if you recruit: wardens, doctors and the prisoner's food all use the same short branch. Details: hospital build, prison doors and escapes.

Sketch your base before the first wall

Pick a shell, colony stage, threat and food setup. The map follows the shell and food choice; hall width, build order, checklist and warnings follow the rest. Copy the text version into your notes or a Discord post.

Build order that never needs a rebuild

Room-by-room builds

• Optimal colony layout
• Kitchen
• Freezer
• Freezer airlock
• Hydroponics
• Hospital
• Killbox
• Defense
• How pawns pick paths
• Gravship