Beds!!!

[Peni4]

So my question is actually pretty basic - what are the best beds to use? I've gotten to a certain point in the game and found that beds take up too much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ space!
Sure, luxury beds have x2 stamina and healing bonuses, but bunk beds let you cut the space you use in half so you can use it to build more services so your rats don't have to run as far.
On the one hand, the downside of bunk beds can be mitigated with bat potions and baths, but luxury beds just let them be more productive, but they waste space.

So, faced with this now, I'm really considering burning my run and starting over, because if I change anything now, I'll have to rebuild 80% of the city.
I would be very grateful for your opinion on this matter - luxury or functionality?

[glass zebra]

Depends on the kind of base you want to build. If you want a smaller colony or have some very important workers, you can use luxury beds and if you want to build a big one, you can use bunk beds. You also do not have to put the beds inside the main infrastructure of your base, where it would collide with e.g. service structures. You can put them on the far lateral parts or make a floor just for those (also good if you want to play with Umbra).

There are also the Umbra beds which are basically better luxury beds and Purgon provides you with the option to make unclaimed beds that everyone can use. You can put those more into the general infrastructure to let any passerby use them and if you already use bat potions and the baths/salons (and maybe massage and honey), you need less of them too. You can also use your bed placement to get Ratizens to fullfil some other needs while they are there, like building a toilet floor nearby to also remove those from the main parts.

I personally usually use bunk beds, but have also made bases with luxury beds. If very much depends on how much space means for your in your specific base plan and how important specific worker efficiency is. If you stack stamina drain mitigation enough, you can frankly also almost skip beds entirely (good sprinkled with the new Purgon beds).

[Peni4]

Well, my layout, which I'm using now, is a dormitory building right above the launch site. It looks something like this: an elevator shaft, two floors with beds on the left and right, a floor above with services, like baths, a school, a circus, etc., another two floors above with beds, and another floor with entertainment. Two more elevators on the sides, going up and down.
All production is located below ground, where the elevators reach.
In principle, it seems to me that this is a normal layout, but, as I said, the luxury beds take up too much space, and I could replace them, carving out even more space for services.

[glass zebra]

Well if that works for you so far that is good. It is not like you need to min/max in this game to progress. My bases definitely look very different with the service buildings inside the general work infrastructure and only a single elevator, but I also rarely play with above ~50-60 Ratizens and ~3-4 joy service buildings if I don't play on custom difficulty. The sleep space is usually the only thing that is just one type of building repeated.

I definitely want to try tout stuff like entertainment floors too at some point though, since you can make pretty interesting bases like that which look less chaotic. Things like a kitchen+eating hall, a market place and an entertainment district, but I usually run into the same issue of having to rebuild 80% of my city to make that. It usually ends up with production chains working together over ~2 floors over an elevator shaft and Ratizens just eating from the chest near the grill/bakery.

Are things going really badly or why are you considering starting a new run to build it differently? I think bunk beds are the most no-brainer thing to build, since you need much less planing for space with them, so just replacing the luxury beds with bunk beds could already do a lot and ease further planing.

[Peni4]

Mainly because the game is starting to choke me. I'm a bit of a newbie, so I'm mostly just blindly poking around. I'm at about 72 villagers now, and I'm starting to noticeably sag in resources. Also, because I was using single beds, it's noticeably increasing the travel time around the base, and I think I could have left more passages.
So, it's mostly a layout issue, and I feel like I'm getting frustrated with the "advanced" beds - the bonuses are nice, but again, there's a lot of space requirement.
Also, building electricity is scary to me, so I'm going to have to redo most of it anyway, because I didn't consider that need in the first place.
Then again, religions caught me off guard, and they also require space. Ugh!
Do Umbrals have good beds? I don't know, I went with Purites, because the Umbrals' apparent tendency to increase crime scared me off.

[glass zebra]

If you really have a dormitory above the start with an elevator shaft, walking time should not be too relevant unless the work spaces themselves are spread out pretty far. Elevator rides are pretty fast. Your bed placement might not be the issue of resource scarcity.

You don't have to dig into any of the "advanced" stuff to make a successful base and especially as a new player you might want to tunnel vision a bit until you feel more comfortable with the basics. Religion and electricity are both luxuries and have quite a bit of requirement to be able to harvest their boni well (though for electricity and high tier Umbra, they are more one-time requirements and can later run automatically without any more dedicated work input).

The Umbra beds are mostly normal beds that give extra rest when a soul is harvested (something dies on the map). If you have a lot of killing happening, their bonus can be quite good. You can also ignore them though. The Purgon beds might be interesting to you too, but imo it can be hard to use them well, since they might as well cause people to sleep on the floor if you have collision. On the other hand they don't make floor sleepers unhappy (but that is pretty irrelevant).

What resources are going down atm? You might have just spread out too much. You don't need to build every single thing to progress, though of course trying out more is pretty interesting and you might want to have a look at everything at some point to find out what you like the most. Maybe later on that will make you want to start a new run though and plan a bit ahead for those things, but you can ignore them until things run smoothly. You need very little to survive and grow.

Edit: also crime is also more of a thematic drop. If you play with that many Ratizens, you can probably spare a single police building "close" (can be on max range) to a high traffic area and you should never really care about that happening. Police takes care of that automatically.

[Peni4]

Basically, I started losing food and the resources needed to produce it. Well, it was my fault for getting too many villagers in a short time. Although I still had a cushion of solid supplies, it was still a bit annoying.

But back to the topic of saving space. I had an idea: can basic services be replaced with advanced ones? For example, toilets give 20 hygiene and are used by 1 villager at a time. While baths give 30 hygiene, are used by 2 villagers at a time, plus with the bonus of stamina recovery, and as an icing on the cake, they take up 1 less tile than 2 toilets. So, will this be a viable option? I'm still figuring out this needs system, so I'm not sure what can be acceptable and what is strictly necessary.

[glass zebra]

Afaik a lot of people swap to bathhouses over toilets, but they do not really take less space than toilets. Bathhouses are 5x3 and toilets are 2x2, so 1 bathhouse vs 2 toilets takes 1 more horizontal tile and almost twice as much tiles total. You can also spread those 2 toilets around where most needed, while the bathhouse will have its 2 spots together. I think bathhouse use time is 60 minutes and toilet use time 50 minutes (better per hygiene though).

Swapping to "advanced" services is usually more costly, but does give benefits. Bathhouses cost more and more advanced resources (though it is a one-time investment). You also need to make a law for Ratizens to be able to use them and might need to tweak your welfare a bit, since their fee is 6 times as high (4 times per hygiene), but that means less taxing work though. You do get higher hygiene efficiency and that extra stamina bonus.

It is totally a viable option, but will likely not make or break a colony. Toilets are really all you need and while their bonus is not great, they take care of hygiene completely and are super easy to plop down anywhere you want. You can again put them at the outside border of your colony with little to no space loss. You can see baths has an upgrade to toilets, but they do come with some more considerations.

I'd say take care of food for now and then money might start to be an issue (maybe?) instead of trying to min max details like this. You really do not have to overthink most parts of the game and the very basic things are usually fine. If you have toilets spread out and a few circi spread out (I think you need like 5 with 72 Ratizens? if they have decent agility), you should be mostly done with those needs and should take care of the more severe things like hunger (which you've noticed can much easier backfire and takes longer to fix), money and military.

Slowing down growth is generally a good idea to make sure things don't spiral out of control and that planing can be easier. If your base is not too big horizontally (maybe ~1 screen when fully zoomed out) and every floor can be reached by elevator, you should be mostly fine. Putting down a few smaller storages to cut down travel time for crafters that use similar resources is another thing to consider, but if you have 3 or so close to the elevator shaft somewhere, it should also be mostly fine.

You really might just have not enough food production or are spread out too much in focus or are focusing on small things that distract you. The bigger the city gets, the harder it is definitely to make it run efficiently, but it sounds like you've already got a good idea. You might also just share a screenshot to check if there is some big error, but it is probably just missing food production. Not sure what your food source is, but e.g. 3 farms should be able to feed 72 Ratizens just fine if they are trained/buffed.

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You might also take a look at Ratizen run hygiene buildings at some point, since they can be a lot more efficient (got a massage table in my current run with +50 hygiene (with 40 minutes usetime)), but I'd say ignore them for now, since them using Ratizens to work means it is easy to have them work very poorly depending on placement. They also cost constant input, but usually have great buffs.

[Haiyoooo]

Honestly I use them all depending on where they are aesthetically most pleasing xD I’m a newbie on easy mode so I figured I can afford inefficiencies hahaha

When my colony starves because I’ve been doing silly aesthetic things I just spend money to import food

[ObliviousMischief]

The soft bed is generally the best. The rats rest faster so they work more frequently and the heals are more than enough for when it matters; like for hunters and cactus gatherers.

The basic and the bunk beds are good enough even. It doesn't really affect the rats in any major way; like happiness or whatnot. It's cheap and it does its job well.

A good combo would be giving your gatherers soft beds and your production rats basic beds. This controls the pace and hopefully gives you surplus goods to sell. The production rats will level up and become faster over time, but then again, so will your gatherers.

The medical beds are kind of impractical. You might as well use the basic/bunk beds. But its handy to have one nearby a hunting or combat zone that's unassigned in case of emergencies vs having to carry them, then you try to remember where their bed is, then you give up and just place them in any nearby bed to get it over with. It's also better than having a doctor ironically. (setting aside possible disease happening. Let's assume hygiene is under control.)

The umbran beds, I can't really assess with certainty. It is better than the basic/bunk beds for sure, but I never bothered to do the math nor observe if it's better than a soft bed. It uses souls which I feel is better used on other facilities that use the same resource. If you have a lot of hunting and/or fishing zones, and even a well designed combat zone, this bed could possibly be better than the soft bed. But it might not be so good on a bigger population at late game.

The purgon bed, I personally hardly use. It is pretty if anything with how the rats sleep on it. But giving a rat a bed is technically giving them a home. You monitor this in the housing tab for crying out loud. Feels bad to not give them a home. In theory, it's kinda handy for when you have a huge project in the lava section for example or anywhere far and getting to their beds is hard to do. But they just faint, man. They don't even think about looking for a bed at all in times like that.

[Adam]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.