single rooms or dorms, which is better?

[Abomination]

i have allways built soviet styled 5x5 rooms for each colonist, slave, and prisoner, and ive never made a dorm with multible beds, are dorms worth making, can a colony made only with dormetories for colonist, hospitals and prisoners work end game?

[Crim]

Of course its possible to make it work end game

Bedrooms are +3~8 Mood
Barracks are at best like +0~3

Which is awesome, but also... You can easily get other mood modifiers or rely on bedrooms for your mood modifier.

Tho certain stuff need good bedrooms.

[whatamidoing]

Bedrooms give better mood bonuses. You can make a very nice barracks work, but it won't be as good for mood.

[Locklave]

Barracks is non viable long term. Disturbed in sleep and having to share my room debuffs are much greater then any barracks bonus possible. You can't afford barracks late game because your colony expectations will be too high and you need all the buffer you can get unless you are a Masochist ideo, in which case you will be swimming in excess.

Using a dorm late game is risking breaks on all major negative events.

Dorms are for slaves so you can focus suppression items without wasting resources. Dorms allow you to maximise slaves most important mechanic. Hospitals are also great for dorms. So you are correct about their usage.

I wish barracks were better for normal colonists. It's just too many downsides.

[gimmethegepgun]

Barracks are, unsurprisingly, superior for space usage and how long it takes to set them up.

[Cat®]

"Better" is contextual. Bedrooms have a lot of advantages but are also space inefficient and expensive to make. I use both in my colonies, but I see no reason why you wouldn't abandon bedrooms entirely.

[Sebslocker]

Depending on my playthrough and ideo but I usually I start with barrack for about 6. Then when other important things have been taken care off I build smaller bedrooms for 1 or 2 pawns however I usually keep my less important pawns in rooms for 3 or 4 it all depends on traits, space and building supplies.

[Kittenpox]

Both have their perks.
Your pawns will get mood bonuses for sleeping in a spacious room, and with fewer sculptures etc required to cover the entire space (because it's all the one same room), don't be surprised if your pawns favour the barracks (your dormitory) rather than using individual rooms.

If you have Royalty, and you decide to rank up some titled psycasters (as opposed to tribal psycasters), then 6x5 bedrooms will be useful.

What I would do is use a barracks room to start with, build individual bedrooms, and use those bedrooms for recruiting prisoners - then switch them to regular bedrooms as recruits join you, and see where people go for sleep.
Eventually you'll also want more storage area, and the barracks area can be repurposed.

[Kittenpox]

A couple of mods which might help here:

Room Sense will give you a colour-coded visual representation of how appealing a room is. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1355637255

Automatic Bed Reassignment will allow your pawns to dynamically choose their own sleeping areas, picking the beds they feel is best. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2404555784

[Jaggid Edje]

My approach to this has varied from game to game. In my previous two games I gave everyone a private bedroom (eventually), but in my current game the only private bedrooms I have given are for those who are "couples" where they need a little privacy, if you know what I mean.
This mixed approach has worked great, imo.

The bonus of barracks is that it uses a lot less space and slightly lower wealth increase.
i.e. You can make a "extremely impressive" barracks (which basically nullifies the penalty for a shared bedroom) that sleeps like 10-15 pawns in the same amount of space as what would be only 2 private bedrooms and using the exact same amount of furniture and decor (other than more beds)

The main benefit for private bedrooms is higher mood bonuses. In addition to getting the bonus for sleeping in an impressive bedroom, pawns who are coupled up will get the bonus for "Got Some lovin'" far more frequently in private rooms (or at least it sure seems that way to me). It's a pretty significant bonus, so for couples I like to give them private rooms.

Titled pawns (royalty DLC) and pawns with the "jealous trait" also need to have a private bedroom to prevent significant mood penalties. I, personally, hate the jealous trait but when I do get a pawn who has it who I want to keep I just give them a title too and bring them up to the top rank where I'd need to give them the best bedroom despite the trait. LOL

[Païtiti]

If wealth is important for the playthrough barracks all the way to endgame. No discussion here as there is no way one can create singlerooms for everybody with the same wealth gain as barracks. They are not only barracks then but dining, living, research etc. rooms as well.
If royality is involved or I get a pawn that needs an extra room (which I usually never take) I go for some single rooms but the majority still sleeps in barracks.

[Raymond]

dorm are cheaper to build. But they are only worth only when you commit to low wealth colony, otherwise high expectation will ruin your colony before Randy even lift a finger.

[Security Cam #7]

Originally posted by Locklave:

You can't afford barracks late game because your colony expectations will be too high and you need all the buffer you can get unless you are a Masochist ideo, in which case you will be swimming in excess.

I mean, if you are at a point where your colonist have luxurious expectations you already should be swimming in lavish meals and luxurious, clean and beautiful rooms which are more than enough for the disturbed sleep debuff which is ONLY a -1 as well as the reduced mood buff for having a wondrously impressive barrack vs bedroom (only 4 mood points of difference)

There is a ton of ways to raise mood, even more so with the ideology DLC. You can safely throw in even a paste dispenser if you have drugs that keep your pawns happy which are distributed in a way that allows for no addiction chance. Psychite tea is good for this, 12 mood buff for no stat debuffs at all. Can be mass produced very easily, you can even have all pawns on addiction and you won't feel it.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Spooky Fish:

the disturbed sleep debuff which is ONLY a -1

It's -1, but it stacks up to 3 times, which is pretty easily reached a lot of the time.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by TheChefOfDeath:

i have allways built soviet styled 5x5 rooms for each colonist, slave, and prisoner, and ive never made a dorm with multible beds, are dorms worth making, can a colony made only with dormetories for colonist, hospitals and prisoners work end game?

"Can" it work?

Sure, it's not forbidden, so a player could only use one large dormitory-style room if they wanted.

Is it a good idea?

No.

There are threads on this, including some pretty infamous ones... The key takeaway you need to know is that you can not as easily control for all the things you need to control for if you use a Dormitory system. You are also removing the ability to get substantial benefits for some of your colonists and may be forced to accept substantial penalties, too.

In short - It can be done, but it's not the best option. Players who routinely choose this method are largely doing so just out of personal choice, not for any long-term advantages IMO.

For myself, I only use such a system in the early game and quickly move to individual bedrooms as soon as I can. I also always build Double-Beds in every bedroom to remove the need for frequent replacement due to relationship issues and to more properly stage my colony to reflect end-game housing. I do sometimes vary the standard size of bedrooms, here and there, between plays. But, that's just a play choice as I don't like "min/max" play every session.

Cabana/Village living accommodations with separate buildings or duplexes for colonists are possible, too, and can make for some interesting play.

Large-scale populations outside the normal scope of play tend to force the player to make decisions that may not be sensible, otherwise. If you're routinely playing with over 20 pawns, you may need to adjust your play and choices accordingly.


For a hospital, there's really no downside and quite a few upsides to making it a dormitory-style, no private room, area. Medical Monitors are expensive and have a "range" of effect, so multiple beds can be stacked around one and get the same bonuses. The same goes for TV's, of course. Just be sure to control for frequent sleep disturbances by locking doors that could promote travel through the hospital.

(ie: Hospital areas are usually constructed so the injured can quickly be moved to them from the "battlefield." That means its likely they will eventually be situated in such a way to provide quick access to "Outside" and the like, maybe encouraging casual travel through them. To control for that, just manually lock the doors leading to other areas and manually unlock them as needed during/after fights. OR - Simply give them only one entrance, but with a very accessible hallway nearby that leads to other base areas. Self-contained buildings work too.)

For a prison area, there is no reason to create individual cells. It's actually less efficient and more troublesome to deal with individual cells than it is with one Dorm-style holding cell. Prisoners have a very limited suite of AI behavior/mechanics available to them, so managing them is not the same as it is with colonists. Some players do like trying to emulate "Prison Architect," though. There's a selection of mods for that sort of play, too. (Use them if you want individual cells/PA sort of play.)

[Astasia]

The "wealth" aspect of rooms vs barracks isn't really a thing. The value of buildings used for bedrooms/barracks is pretty trivial and building wealth specifically counts at half value compared to item wealth. A couple wood/stone sculptures in a 6x6 or so bedroom with a simple floor will provide much higher mood boost than a barrack for like a few hundred silver extra wealth, which is a tiny fraction of the wealth required to spawn a single extra naked dude with a club. If you start filling all your bedrooms with fine floors and gold sculptures though that could make a small difference, but at that point you likely don't care about an extra raider or two.

The main use of barracks is very early game when you don't have the time to build bedrooms and sculptures for everyone. You can make a very large room, like a dining/storage room, into a barracks and lean heavily on room size for early impressiveness to barely cancel the barracks penalty. You'll still usually end up with disturbed sleep though unless you start making "roomlets" in this big barracks at which point you are dangerously close to just having individual rooms and might as well take that step.

The difference between a bedroom and barracks is like 7-8 mood including disturbed sleep. You can make up that difference if you want, it's not vitally important, but getting mood from bedrooms is such an easy thing to do that it's hard to justify ignoring it and using other sources of mood instead just to save space. Space isn't really an issue on any normal sized map, but I suppose could be a concern on a SOS2 ship or something.