do you need to separate your kitchen and dining rooms?

[Jet]

into separate rooms to get the dining room mood bonus?

[Chip56]

no. But usually its better to have a dedicated kitchen to ensure your pawns dont get it dirty. A shared recreation/dining room will give you both mood boni so its often better to have those combined.

[The Blind One]

Best to build or place your kitchen in such a way that no other pawns except the chef actually walks into the room to avoid the place getting dirty. This will save you a lot of food poisoning incidents. Other than that I personally always build the dining room next to the kitchen keeping this simple rule in mind. This does make it a bit tricky to build a proper freezer at times and not have your pawns walk into or through the kitchen the whole time. The best method I've found is to either separate the kitchen entirely OR make sure that the ideal travel path for hauling doesn't go through the kitchen, with this last option being the most efficient one.

[Jet]

Originally posted by The Blind One:

Best to build or place your kitchen in such a way that no other pawns except the chef actually walks into the room to avoid the place getting dirty. This will save you a lot of food poisoning incidents. Other than that I personally always build the dining room next to the kitchen keeping this simple rule in mind. This does make it a bit tricky to build a proper freezer at times and not have your pawns walk into or through the kitchen the whole time. The best method I've found is to either separate the kitchen entirely OR make sure that the ideal travel path for hauling doesn't go through the kitchen, with this last option being the most efficient one.

that does seem a bit tough. usually i try to make the freezer a one stop place only one door going in and out but to do it for a kitchen as well will be difficult.

[glass zebra]

You can just throw basically everything into one giant room. I've played a lot of colonies like that in the past. Food poisoning only raises from the dirtiness stat if the room gets really high (I think it was -2?) and having a big room can help to not let that happen more than a small kitchen for some people.

How dirty a room is is averaged across the tiles and if you do clean that room from time to time some temporary dirt won't get you into food poisoning territory. If you start adding other workbenches in there too, keep in mind that the chip and hack ones are inherently dirty.

The room overlay might only display one room type, but everyone that has the required buildings in them is active at the same time. It can be barracks/personal bedroom + dining room + recreation room at the same time and all mood buffs and debuffs will apply. There is just some special stuff like throne rooms that can't overlap with certain things.

[Astasia]

Ya it's a lot easier to prevent food poisoning by putting your stove in a large rec/dining room than it is by trying to hide it in some small clean room. If you have like a 12x12 room it's very difficult for it to get dirty enough to start increasing food poisoning, and basically impossible for it to get to the point where it has a serious effect on food poisoning unless you simply never ever clean it.

The other advantage is you generally have some sculptures in your rec/dining room after a point and by positioning them in range of your stove you can keep your chef a lot happier while they cook.

In some games I "RP" and make a dedicated kitchen, it's not very practical but you can make it work. Most games I have a ~11x11 rec/dining/kitchen room attached to a large freezer/butchery room.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Astasia:

The other advantage is you generally have some sculptures in your rec/dining room after a point and by positioning them in range of your stove you can keep your chef a lot happier while they cook.

Can also make your colony a lot happier because people are able to form and keep relationships instead of being a locked away cook. I used to use 2 cooks in the past when I didn't know how to play and those 2 often formed a relationship. Having someone alone in a kitchen makes it hard to keep relationships unless you help surgically or don't cook that much.

[xicewindex]

I build my kitchen in the freezerspace so the cook need to pass trough the freezer to get to the kitchen. This way nobody else will go there except a cleaner occasionally. Giving the kitchen its own temperaturecontol, I keep it at -2 so its stil comforteble to work in, but a shelf with veggies on one side and meat/animal products on the other won't spoil. Set up the kitchenarea as stockpîle for meals only with low prio and your bill 'dropping on floor' You'll never seen your cook cooking so fast with a setup like this :) And if you give your cook prio 1 for cook and clean he'll clean up his own mess after hes done cooking.

[glass zebra]

Temperatures under 10°C will lower working speed though. Does not matter much for the butcher table, but for the stove.

[xicewindex]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Temperatures under 10°C will lower working speed though. Does not matter much for the butcher table, but for the stove.

True, but the time you safe by having the veggies/meat at hand's reach to keep cooking without moving even will stil be faster than a cook who moves around to get the ingredients to the stove and carry the meal to the freezer. Ofc in a big colony with lots of pawns that is not a problem anymore because the stacks in the shelfs wil be used up before they can spoil so can up the temperature at that point without a danger for the meat to rot away.

[glass zebra]

You can make small stockpiles / shelves with meat + veggies next to the stove. Having a stove next to a shelf even makes the cooks just reach for it instead of moving onto that tile, reducing movement between bills to 0. I start doing this with ~8 pawns and just 1 stack of meat and it does not spoil away. When I start using shelves with meat, it still very rarely rots. Less than once a year I'd say. If you go away from meat and into milk, that goes away entirely.

[xicewindex]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

You can make small stockpiles / shelves with meat + veggies next to the stove. Having a stove next to a shelf even makes the cooks just reach for it instead of moving onto that tile, reducing movement between bills to 0.

Wasn't that the point i was making? Maybe I worded it wrong since english is not my native language :)

[glass zebra]

I meant really just the 1x2 or 1x2 size for the start but otherwise keeping a workroom kitchen. With the way you described temperature and spoiling it sounded like you do that but in a freezer. What I meant to say was that with the shelf in a normal room, you don't need to worry about spoiling even with low colonist count. The cook will usually use it up faster than it spoils. I put the 0 movement speed there because I misread something you wrote and when I noticed I let it stand there for clarity of other readers.

What you described sounded like you cook in a freezer, but combo that with shelves to counter the work speed. You can just have normal temperature workspeed and the shelves without spoiling. At start start you might just want to throw 1 stack of meat on the floor to cycle it faster, but once you have a dozen colonists you can also put that on a shelf close to the veggie shelf.

[Monokuma]

Dedicated kitchen with separated butcher table will lower your food poisoning chances considerably as the cleanliness is much easier to manage when you aren't tracking dirt in or cleaning up blood.