Why Your RimWorld Kitchen Gets Dirty, Slow, or Warm

Why clean, fast and cold fight each other

The game has no building named kitchen. It has a Kitchen room role, a butcher table that is filthy even when it is empty, and a cooler that only freezes the room its blue face points into. Stuff them into one box and each fix breaks something else.

• Make it huge and sterile, keep the butcher inside. The table is still −15 cleanliness, averaged over every cell. Blood from a corpse ignores straw matting. The cook walks a long way. The freezer door stays open while they do.
• Park the stove on the freezer door so the cook never walks. Every meal holds that door open. The stove pushes 3 heat/s electric (4 fueled) when it is heating, plus about 3 more while a pawn is cooking. That leaks into the cold room. Food sits at 2 °C and still rots, just slower.
• Seal a tiny freezer and put the dining table on the far side of it. Colonists path through the cold to eat. The autodoor cycles all day. The cook is fast and the room is clean, and dinner still thaws.

The default that holds all three is boring: four rooms in a line, butcher and kitchen both touching the freezer, dining on the kitchen's far side. The kitchen planner will size that for your pawn count. This page is the rules that make any size work.

Butcher, freezer, stove, table

Your meals are poisoned: dirty room or bad cook?

When a meal finishes, the game rolls twice. The room roll uses the cook room's hidden food-poison chance, which is a curve off cleanliness. If that roll fails, the meal is marked filthy-kitchen. If it passes, a second roll uses the cook's Cooking skill. Eating the meal is a third chance: poison percent times the storyteller's food-poison factor (1.0 on Strive to Survive, 0.3 Peaceful, 1.2 Losing is Fun).

The −2 cleanliness cutoff

Cleanliness is a per-cell average: every building, item, filth pile and floor tile in the room, divided by the number of cells. The dirty-kitchen curve is 5% at −5, 2.5% at −3.5, and 0% at −2. Outdoors or in a roomless space it is a flat 2%. Past −2 the curve stays at zero, so a "sterile" room (≥ 0.4) buys you nothing extra in the kitchen. It is a hospital thing.

The cook-skill roll that survives a sterile floor

A perfectly clean kitchen still poisons meals if the cook is unskilled. The skill table is 5% at Cooking 0, then 4, 3, 2, 1.5, 1, 0.5, 0.25, 0.15, and 0.1% from 9 through 20. Fine meals also need Cooking 6. If everyone is sick and the room inspect pane says clean, look at who is on the stove.

Food poisoning itself lasts about a day (severity 1, −1 per day), with vomiting and cuts to consciousness, moving and eating. It is miserable. Rotten ingredients and some raw foods have their own poison chances too, but no layout fixes those.

The stove is slow: room role, campfire, walking

Electric and fueled stoves both declare their room role as Kitchen and take a 0.8 work-speed factor when they are indoors in any other room role (the penalty does not apply outdoors). A campfire is already 0.5× and has no Kitchen bonus; it also pushes heat toward 28 °C, so it must never share air with frozen food. Cooking skill stacks on top of that (roughly 40% speed at 0, 100% at 10, 160% at 20 before table factors, for a healthy pawn).

Research bench vs stove

Room role is a score. Highest score wins.

• Each production building that can make human-edible food scores +28 Kitchen. That includes the stove and the butcher table, because the butcher can make kibble.
• Each laboratory bench scores +60 Laboratory.
• Workshop benches score +27 each.

One hi-tech research bench (60) beats one stove (28). The inspect pane will say Laboratory, the stove will sit at 80%, and the cook will look lazy. Move the bench. Mixing a butcher into the cook room does add Kitchen score, but it also dumps −15 cleanliness into the average, which is the worse trade.

Walking is the other half of "slow". A shelf holds three stacks per cell and items on it do not deteriorate. Put one next to the cook's interaction cell so rice, meat and vegetables are a step away. Ingredient radius in the bill still has to cover the freezer; do not make the cook path through the frozen room for every meal. The shelving page covers the extra path cost of walking over a shelf.

Get the butcher out of the cook room

The butcher table's cleanliness stat is −15. That number is in the building, not in the mess it makes. A spotless table in a 5-cell room is −3.0 from the table alone, which is already about a 1.7% dirty-kitchen roll before anyone bleeds. Dilute it in a bigger room and you still have blood.

Blood filth is −10 cleanliness and sets ignore filth multiplier, so straw matting's 0.05 dirt multiplier does not apply. Straw is a barn floor. Bugblood is worse (−15). Ordinary dirt is −5 and straw does eat that. The butcher placement page is the long version; the short version is: own room, touching the freezer, not the cook room.

A butcher spot is 70% meat and leather and has no cleanliness stat, which is why tribals survive it. The table is 100% yield and 450 work for a flesh corpse. Tool cabinets (+0.06 work speed each, max two) link to the butcher, not the stove. See the tool cabinet page if you have been parking them on the cook.

Keep the food frozen without freezing the cook

Which way the cooler faces

Cold air comes out of the cooler's south side, rotated with the building. Exhaust comes out the north side, rotated the same way. In the placement ghost that is blue into the freezer, red out. A cooler on the freezer's north wall, cooling the room south of it, uses the north-facing texture (red on top, blue into the room). If you placed it by the pawn's facing or the power plug, turn it until the overlay matches. The cooler is 200 W, −21 energy per second, 90 steel and 3 components, and it needs Air conditioning. Idle draw is 20 W. Exhaust heat is 1.25× the cooling energy, so the hot side of a working cooler is a small heater.

0 °C vs "a bit cold"

At 0 °C and below the rot rate is 0 and the item is frozen. From 0 to 10 °C the rate is temperature/10, so 5 °C still rots at half speed. At 10 °C and above it is full spoil. "Refrigerated" in the inspect pane is not frozen. A passive cooler stops at 17 °C and cannot refrigerate food. An unroofed hole tracks outdoor temperature, which only helps on ice sheet.

Doors and stove heat

An open door equalizes the two rooms much faster than a closed one. A 3-wide hall of colonists eating through the freezer is a heater. Powered steel autodoors help; stone autodoors can still slow pawns. The airlock page is the door fix. The freezer page is the watt and roof fix. Do not put the stove in the freezer. Do not put a campfire in the freezer. Mountain freezers below −17 °C also reject infestation hive cells, Nice, but you still want the airlock.

A layout that holds all three

A temperate or boreal default that holds all three:

1. Butcher in its own room, one door into the freezer, one door to the yard for corpses. Concrete or steel tile. Straw does not save you from blood.
2. Freezer in the middle, cooler in a wall with blue into this room. Roofed. Powered autodoor on the two food doors if you can spare the components. Food on the floor or on shelves; shelves skip beauty and deterioration.
3. Kitchen on the other side of the freezer. Stove against a wall, interaction cell free, shelf on that cell's neighbour. Floor good enough for −2 once the butcher is gone. No research bench. Inspect pane must say Kitchen.
4. Dining on the kitchen's far side, never through the freezer. Tables here, not in the cook room (they add cells of dirt to clean without helping the stove).

That is the same triangle the compact hub uses, laid out as a strip. Nutrient paste skips the stove and the cook-skill roll; it has its own dispenser page. Paste meals can still be rotten. Ideology meal precepts change what you cook, not these cleanliness numbers.

Dirty, slow, or warm?

• Meals say food poisoning, room looks fine. Open the cook room inspect pane. If cleanliness is worse than −2, the dirty-kitchen roll is live. If it is better, check the cook's Cooking skill and whether ingredients were already rotten.
• Stove feels slow. Inspect the room. If it does not say Kitchen, find the research bench (or the missing stove). If it does, the cook is walking: shelves, bill radius, path through the freezer.
• Food says refrigerated, not frozen. Thermometer in the freezer. If it is above 0 °C, the cooler is backwards, unpowered, unroofed, or losing a fight with a door or a stove. Passive coolers cannot get you there.
• Blood on straw, still filthy. Straw does not eat blood. Move the table.
• Animals in the kitchen. They drop filth and the average falls. Zone them out; cleaning is on the floors page.

Floors that are actually worth it

Sterile materials, stonecutting, smithing and air conditioning are the research gates. Sterile tile is slow to build (1,600 work). Put the silver in the hospital before you tile the cook room with it.

Heat waves, mountains, gravships, Ideology

Biotech adds baby-food bills on the same stoves; the Strong stomach gene zeros food-poison ingest. The Core bionic stomach halves ingest chance. Anomaly mutants with illness immunity skip it. None of that changes −2, 0.8×, or 0 °C. Mods such as RimFridge and Dubs Hygiene replace these buildings; the numbers on this page move if you use them.

Planner, freezer math, airlock

Plug room cleanliness, cook skill and freezer size into the kitchen planner. Size coolers on the freezer page. Fix doors on the airlock page. For the rest of the colony, the compact hub and layout notes put this strip in a base. Skip the stove with nutrient paste if that is the colony you want.