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[Swordmouse]

One of the most hands-off methods is to build a hay barn right next to your hay field, then simply move your pen marker into the barn for the winter and let them munch away. Either way, you generally don't want to travel too far for ingredients, so if you're doing kibble, consider creating a hay stockpile next to a secondary butcher table, along with a small zone for animal corpses, so you can simply drop the kibble as you make it right there.

For caravan animals, ask yourself if you plan to do any traveling during the winter, and if not, consider butchering all but 2-3 of any given species to lighten consumption, also keeping in mind immature animals eat less, and will be grown by spring so they're ideal.

Random tip, but something I see people get wrong fairly often: when planting "grazing" fields, dandelions are vastly superior to haygrass.

In an emergency, you can feed meat meals to herbivores. Doesn't make sense, but there it is. Bonus points if it's a nutrient paste dispenser so you can stretch the ingredients further and not tie down your cook in the process of feeding your animals.

You should be swimming in meat as well, since an exterior shelf full of hay/veggies/even meals means you will have every single herbivore on the map coming to you once they get hungry.

[boytype]

If you are in a always-snow biome, your going to have a very hard time with animals for sure, unless you have hydroponic hay farms and a heated barn. Food is generally so scarce in "always snow" biomes that you have to kill every wild animal foolish enough to wander into your map just to survive.

If you are in a Boreal forest and it just happens to be winter now, you can get one massive harvest of hay a year that can hold you out for the whole winter generally. You will be focusing on food production during the spring-summer anyway for your colonists, so one other big field to tend wont hurt much. Animals can definitely be worth it in Boreal forest.

[Sad Cat]

Animals have always been a pain in the ass for me and I never seem to be able to grow enough food for them. But that is mostly a me problem. For stockpile issues you're going to need a dedicated hauler. If you aren't opposed to mods, get the "Pick Up and Haul" mod. It makes it so they will instead carry as much weight as their capacity rather than just one item or stack of items at a time. This combined with another mod, "Allow Tool" gives the Haul Urgently task which can be assigned in the work tab. This can cause colonists to drop everything their doing and immediately haul the selected objects if set up properly.

As for how to grow crops in cold biomes, the typical way is using green houses.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885573275

This is an example of one I've set up. Everything is roofed and the heater is keeping everything nice and toasty inside. Make sure the greenhouse area is double walled to provide maximum insulation from the cold. You can forego using a heater if you incorporate a steam geyser, but in my case I didn't have one near by and as luck would have it, this spot was the only rich soil patch on the map, so I had to use a heater in this instance. The green house is attached to a storage stockpile so the colonists don't have to travel far to move harvested crops. The idea is the closer the stock pile, the faster the pawns can move stuff around. You can plant anything you want since its ground, including devilstrand, but in this image I'm growing cotton and some potatos.

Regarding the power set up, you want to keep the heater on a separate power source from the sun lamp. In my experience, theres a small overlap of the sun going down just long enough for the sun lamp to drain the battery before it switches off into sleep mode at night. This may have changed at some point so the sun lamp turns off closer to when the sun goes down but I'm too lazy to test that, so I've just been working off old habits. The highlighted objects in the screenshot are where I have my power lines. As you can see they're not all one circuit and the heater is on a separate circuit. Might look a little confusing, but in reality you only need two solar panels to power a single sun lamp. The reason for the third in my case is because I have a mod that gives a wall sun lamp which needs the extra panel to power. A single solar panel is also all you need to power a heater, on a separate circuit, along with a battery for keeping it alive at night. A single battery is fine and will be more than enough power to keep the heater working when the sun isn't up. No battery for the sun lamp. Its not needed anyway since sun lamps turn themselves off at night.

[Sad Cat]

Originally posted by Dungeon Master:

Those are interesting ideas that seem pretty good. I just wanted to have some caravan animals but I'm thinking it's just easier for me to rush my ship pods to launch instead or use my ships once I research them (mod I use). Seems like the hassle of grow this, farm that, go here, go there just isn't worth it. Then I'm always focusing on them and not getting my defenses set up. Then my wealth rises up too quickly and I start struggling with back to back raids and little to no defenses. I did better before I had animals. >.<

This has been my experience, yeah. Animals can be useful, but they do tend to have draw backs if you focus on them too early. I did manage to successfully have an animal tamer pawn in one play through with high animal skill. Had him tame a pair of wolves and bred them. Ended up with like 6 fully trained wolves after a while, and he and his wolves were an absolute terror on the battle field. But that really was only something I could toy with in late game once I had everything else set up and functioning.

That said, green houses aren't actually all that difficult to manage, and once set up, they're basically automated as long as you have a pawn with plant skill set to sow/harvest. They are invaluable and even required on some cold biomes. The screenshot I posted was built in the first year of that colony. I rush researched solar power, batteries, and fuses (a mod that prevents "Zzzt" events from causing fires in exchange for tripping the fuse box) and had this up and running in the first 20 days of that colony. Of course that comes at the expense of delaying getting turrets, but the early raids really aren't that bad. If you don't have the fuse mod you can just skip that and all you really need is solar power and batteries to start a green house.

[Sad Cat]

Keep in mind, you don't have to do it this way. There is no wrong way or "must do it this way" in Rimworld. This is just how I do things. I am in no way telling anyone you can't do things a different way and still be successful. I am also going to write this as a guide so if it seems like I'm covering stuff you're already familiar with, its not because I am assuming you don't know how to play. I am just trying to be thorough.

If you're doing a standard crash landing start with three pawns, the starting skills I always look for is someone with a passion in construction and shooting with at least 6-7 in each (preferably more if you can). Bonus if you can also get mining passion on this pawn. This is my hunter/builder pawn. The second pawn is my grower/cook. Same thing as before, must have passions and decent skill in growing and cooking and preferably shooting.

The third pawn is the most important. While the other two pawns aren't set in stone and can technically be whatever you want realistically, the third pawn is the keystone here. Pawn number three is the doctor/researcher. Has passions in medical and research and if possible, crafting as well so he can make medical kits later on, as well as craft weapons and armor. Getting him/her with shooting is a huge plus, but not as essential.

Regarding the doctor researcher pawn, that is all he does. Absolutely nothing else (and crafting if they have it). His or her only purpose in life is to research and patch up your injured pawns. No hauling, no cleaning, no nothing. JUST research and doctor. In fact if you manage to roll a doctor researcher who is incapable of dumb labor, that's actually not a problem. They will never be doing dumb labor anyway.

So the first thing you want to do the very moment you crash land is make sure the game is paused. You've got a bit of setup to do. First set up pawn priorities. The only person constructing and hunting is the builder/hunter (and mining if you have it). The only person cooking and growing is the planter/cook. The doctor researcher is doing absolutely nothing else except doctoring and research (and crafting if they have it). Turn off hauling and cleaning for the doctor researcher. Everyone has fire fighting and bed rest set to maximum priority no matter what.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885595346

Here is an example of priorities. Ignore Alex. Hes a vampire (hemophage). Alex is a special case. Having him fight fires is a bad idea because fire actually causes vampires to have a mental break down. Fire bad. Also ignore Irma. She is a quest guest. They will never do anything anyway and she isn't actually part of my colony. Also also, ignore "Train Combat" and "Managing". Those are from a mod and aren't relevant here.

Now we need to set the pawns work schedule. This is important because you really want to designate work hours instead of having them do "anything" for most of the time. If they're set to anything, pawns will randomly decide to stop what their doing and screw around when they should be working. Not having "work" in the schedule is the biggest loss of productivity and one of the biggest mistakes I've seen newer players make. Pawns absolutely need to be working rather than screwing around randomly with "anything" work type. Do give them ample recreation time in their schedule, however. Recreation starved pawns get bad mood debuffs. I've found that one hour of "anything" with two hours of recreation is plenty for pawns to satisfy both their meal and recreation needs.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885592158

This is an example of how I set my pawns schedules. 8 hours of sleep, one hour of "anything" for meal time, 12 hours of work time. 1 hour of "anything" for meal time again, and then 2 hours of recreation. If you feel for your pawns, you could technically switch things up and give them 8 hours of work time with 5 hours of "anything", or 10 hours of work time and 3 hours of "anything". The majority of waking hours should be work time over "anything" though. This guarantees they stay on task and don't randomly decide to wander around or play horse shoes when they should be working. Make sure you give them at least 2-3 hours of recreation time before bed. Also ignore Alex in that screenshot. Hes a vampire (Hemophage) and they require way less sleep and don't like being awake during the day. Alex is a special case so their scheduling is going to be very different from everyone elses.

Going to continue in another separate post as I don't know if Steam has a character limit.

[Sad Cat]

Alright, now that you have set up pawn priorities, its time to get to actual work. Before you unpause, unforbid everything on the map so you can actually move things, and then designate a sizable area of trees to be cut down using the chop wood action in the orders menu. The grower/cook should then start chopping down those trees. Next you want to set up construction for your initial stockpile. I like even numbers so my first stockpile is always a 10x10 area set to "normal" priority and I don't deviate from the default items allowed. This first stockpile usually ends up being my over flow stock or gets demolished later when I have my more organized stockpiles set up.

Since the stockpile itself is going to be 10x10, the easiest way to do this is to just plop down a 10x10 size stockpile and then just build wood walls around it. I like having a pair of doors on each side but door placement is really up to the individual player. I personally am all about that symmetry where possible.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885600541

I started a new colony just so I can show you my process. I did all of this before hitting unpause for the first time. Also at some point make sure you arm your colonists with the appropriate starting weapons. You want your hunter to get the bolt action rifle obviously.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885601916

Next, build a torch inside the stockpile for light. Do not attempt to build anything else inside until the torch is finished. Trying to build structures and furniture in darkness will cause higher failure rates and thus wasted resources. Make sure the beds are at least normal quality or higher. Don't let your colonists sleep in low or bad quality beds. This actually causes the comfort bar to go down instead of up, which results in a bad mood debuff. Deconstruct the beds if they don't turn out to be normal or better. Depending on how many trees ended up inside of your stockpile prior to constructing, your colonists may fall asleep any where before the beds are finished. This is okay for at least one day but don't let this be a habit. Drop down a stool in front of the research bench for your doctor researcher guy to sit on while he researches. Don't bother with using the better chairs for now. Right now your priority is to set up a basic amenities and worry about getting proper and more permanent things later. Right now everything is temporary.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885603744

Next is setting up growing zones. I was lucky this start and managed to have some rich soil right next to my crash area. There are three main crops you want to focus on at the start. Rice, cotton, and heal root. If you don't have a colonist with at least 8 growing you won't be able to plant heal root. This isn't the worst thing in the world as there should be enough heal root randomly growing around the map to harvest, but its a bit of a pain to hunt them down one at a time.

[Sad Cat]

By your second day you should have your basic research bench and stool built. I go by the rule of A.B.C. Always Be Constructing. And if you're not constructing, you're hunting. Now its time to prioritize your research. It doesn't really matter which one you research first, but getting both batteries and solar power are essential. Prioritize both. Holding shift and clicking a research option adds it to a queue to be researched. If you're running the fuse mod, you'll want to get that right after batteries.

While you wait for your solar panels and batteries to research, now is a good time to work on your more permanent structure planning. Getting a kitchen and dining room set up right now would be a very good idea. You can attach these to your stockpile if you like mega bases, or build separate free standing structures in a more "town" like fashion is fine. I like separate buildings for things so most of my structures end up being free standing for that town feel, but that does come with the downside of dirt getting tracked in places they shouldn't be. There's nothing wrong with mega structures where everything is merged into one building either. You do you. The kitchen and dining/rec room is the next priority. Also keep in mind that this is only day two.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885607798

An example of how I build my free standing kitchens. My pawn managed to start building part of the freezer before I could pause it. Industrial little guy! The upper area is the freezer (meat priority). The lower area is where the stoves and where priority raw food goes (non-meat). If you have the Rimfridge mod, you can put a few 4x4 refrigerators in the lower area to preserve your rice/corn/potatoes better. Also, make sure you dis-allow the coolers. We have no power yet so theres no point in wasting time building them right this second. You may need your grower/cook to chop more trees if you don't have enough wood.

Also don't forget to build a horse shoe pin some where like I have!

[Sad Cat]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885614868

I went ahead and pre-planned a few things while the game was paused. The power shed is un-allowed because I wanted my pawn to finish work on the kitchen/freezer before doing any work on the power shed. Since my grower/cook isn't doing much at the moment I added a new 10x10 field of corn to plant. Keep in mind that if you're in a biome with less than 30 days of growing time, don't bother trying to grow corn on non-rich soil. Also, if all the rich soil is near the edges of the map far away from your base, don't bother trying to grow there right now. Your pawns will end up spending most of the day just traveling rather than working. If the harvest is too far away, your pawns may also not bother to try and haul it back to your base as hauling prioritizes closer jobs, and hauling is already one of the lowest priority jobs.

A thing of note about the freezer. Some people like to put the butchering table in the same room as the stove. Never do this. Butcher tables create filth in the form of blood when used. Filth will cause food poisoning chance when cooking meals in that same room. Always try to keep your kitchens as clean as possible. If you're having issues with your pawns not cleaning, you can force a pawn to clean a certain area by selecting one and right clicking the garbage on the ground to prioritize cleaning. Keep your kitchens clean! Later when you can afford it, you can replace the flooring in the kitchen with sterile tiles which drastically lowers food poisoning chances. I personally like to put the butcher table in the freezer so the meat just drops right on the floor and I don't have to worry about creating additional hauling jobs. The entire area is one big stockpile so if the meat falls to the floor its already considered "stocked". Although if you want you can put your butcher table outside.

Make sure that the freezer stockpile is set to important or critical priority, to accept only raw foods, meals, and fresh non-rotten animal corpses. Make sure "allow rotten" is unchecked and that "fresh" is checked. Addtionally, uncheck hay, kibble, and hemogen packs from that list. Hemogen packs can't spoil (for some reason) and you don't want hay and kibble taking up space in your freezer. Set your butchers table to have a work order for "butcher creature", and set it to "forever". That way your colonists will always automatically butcher any animal when they kill it.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885616793

Now that the kitchen is finished, you can have your hunter go out and get some meat for the cook to make some simple meals out of. Don't over hunt, at least not yet. Only get a few animals for right now as doing anything more will just cause the meat to rot. We don't have a functioning freezer just yet. Stick to simple meals for the time being. They won't give you a mood buff, but they also won't give you a debuff and simple meals require less food to make than fine and especially lavish meals. We don't have the resources for luxuries yet.

Now lets construct the power shed. Yes, we're building everything out of wood right now. I know this will probably trigger a number of people but we're on a time limit and the most important factor is getting that greenhouse built in time before winter hits. Don't worry, we will be replacing every wall with stone very soon. We're just getting the basics set up right now.

[Sad Cat]

Research for the batteries managed to complete before I finished the power shed, so technically we have everything we need to make the green house. If you have the fuse mod, go ahead and keep researching fuses. Otherwise, now would be a good time to start researching for turrets if you're worried about defenses. It has only been roughly 6-8 days in my game. Kinda lost track but I haven't hit summer yet, so we're off to a great start.

Just a quick note, I generally make heavy use of the pause feature when I'm planning my buildings or construction. Whether you want to do this or not is up to you, but if you wish for time to pass while planning, I heavily suggest you use the slowest speed possible when planning.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885618739

Lets get back to that power shed. You'll notice I constructed the floor out of concrete instead of wood. Concrete cannot burn and it only costs 1 steel to make. The downside is that concrete has a negative beauty factor. But we won't be putting any of our work stations inside this room, with the exception of the chem-fuel refinery and crematorium later on, which is why there is so much space at the bottom of this design. Soon we will be replacing those walls with stone as well, making the entire room virtually fire proof. We will also eventually add some fire foam poppers just to be safe once research for those has been unlocked. This means it will be nearly impossible to burn down one of our most critical structures. You will also note that I have built the batteries in little cul-de-sacs. The reason for this is when batteries catch fire, they will explode. If you have your batteries stacked next to one another when one explodes, it will cause a chain reaction of explosions taking out everything. But a battery explosion cannot penetrate walls. Especially stone walls. So if the worst of the worst happens and a battery goes boom, it won't take another battery with it. Later, if you desire, you can even enclose them with a stone door for access. You always want to leave a door for access so you can repair them in case of component failure.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885620344

We now have power. You will notice that I haven't finished constructing the wood powered generator. Eventually I will build it, but for now we don't need that much power, and a pair of solar panels, a wind turbine, and three batteries should be enough. Also keep in mind that solar panels do not block wind turbines! They also help keep the area clear of trees! Very efficient use of space! How you wire your buildings is ultimately up to you. At this point you can now replace the fueled stove with an electric one to save on resources. Now is the time to allow the construction of the coolers. Once the coolers are built, don't forget to set the temperature to at least -5C, though I generally do -10C. If you're using Fahrenheit I would go to at least 25F. Preferably 20F. You want to go below the freezing point by a fair bit to allow for some wiggle room with opening doors letting some air out. You can also start replacing torches with lights to save on wood.

I also managed to get a new colonist from a "being chased" event. The raider chasing her was quickly dispatched. Unfortunately the pawn I got wasn't very good. Low stats over all, but I can still make use of her and at least she can haul and clean. She does have passions in Medical, Social, and Intellectual. Didn't have a pawn with social passion this start so she'll end up being my warden and second researcher. Don't forget to set work schedules and work priorities when you get new pawns! Also a bed for the new pawn!

I went ahead and built a second research bench for this pawn to speed up research. Yes, you can have two researchers and they will both contribute to research, dramatically speeding things up. A note worthy thing to mention, once you get high tech research benches and micro-analyzers, you can hook up two high tech research benches to a single micro-analyzer!

The cook has been busy turning meat hunted from the construction hunter guy into simple meals. Now that we have a working freezer we can stock pile a few stacks of meat. The first harvest of rice has also now come in. Don't switch to fine meals just yet. We still have too much to do and we need our constructor back on construction soon to finish the greenhouse.

I also managed to run out of the starting steel we had and took a day to mine some steel from the nearest vein. Don't worry about mining it out completely just yet. Just get enough steel to finish construction projects for the time being.

Next, lets plan that greenhouse.

Geothermal generators take up a space of 6x6, so we want to leave enough room so that we can plop down one of those bad boys once we have it researched. Use the plan tool to map out a 6x6 space around the hole so we know where not to build. You also want to leave enough space on the edges of the greenhouse in order to double up the walls. We really need this thing at maximum insulation and walls two squares thick provide the best insulation. I tend to insulate all areas where my pawns will need heaters or coolers in order to maximize the power to temperature efficiency ratio. You can technically ignore this if you want and stick to single tile thickness walls for space and aesthetic reasons, but it also means you're going to need more coolers/heaters to keep the temperature optimal for your pawns and plants. This will mean more power will be needed. Ultimately the trade off is up to you. There is no wrong way to play Rimworld. Other areas where pawns will spend little time or the temperature doesn't matter only gets a single layer wall.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885627972

Using the sun lamp you can get an idea of how big your building needs to be. The outlined area shown is the space a sun lamp can cover with its growing light. Construct the sun lamp. Its okay to do so out in the open. It won't be powered yet so you don't need to worry about it exploding to rain. Once constructed, select the sun lamp and click the create growing zone button. It will automatically create a plot as wide as its light radius. Now we just simply build walls around the growing zone to create the greenhouse. Make sure you include the steam geyser in the structure. Or if you're not using a steam geyser, just put a box around the growing zone.

Since I've already shown an example of a design with a heater way at the beginning of this thread, we're going to use this geothermal vent to our advantage and I will show you an example of a greenhouse with a geothermal vent (and eventually generator) incorporated into the design.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885631739

I decided to be lazy this time and just make a box instead of perfectly fitting the walls around the growing zone. Not as efficient but it really doesn't matter. Free heat from thermal vents don't require you to worry too much about being super efficient. You will also notice that I had to move the exhaust vent in my power shed because the walls ended up being too close to my thermal shed. Some times this happens due to the RNG nature of where things end up on the map. No big deal, I just moved the vent to the bottom of the room. Any where is technically fine.

[Sad Cat]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885637143

The final design was modified slightly as I forgot how hilariously hot enclosed thermal vents can get on maps that have normal growing periods. If your map has a growing season, make sure to add a vent some where in the design. You can open and close vents. Its a simple toggle action and a colonist will come along and flick it open or closed. In the summer and spring you want to open the vent so you don't accidentally start a fire inside. Completely enclosed thermal vents can get super hot, ESPECIALLY during heat waves. The hard part with this is remembering to close the vents during the fall and winter so your crops don't freeze.

On permanently cold biomes this isn't a problem. In fact you don't want to add a vent to the structure on those maps as you will never want one open. The heat inside will naturally bleed out much quicker due to the cold air wanting to displace the hot air inside, so you'll never need one anyway.

I still recommend keeping your solar panels operating your sun lamp separate from the rest of the power grid. Two solar panels is just barely enough power to operate a single sun lamp and there's hardly any excess power being produced from those panels to matter in the long run.

This greenhouse is technically finished. All that is needed is for the constructor to build the wires from the solar panels to the nearest wall to connect the sun lamp and the greenhouse is ready. You can immediately start planting once the sun lamp is connected.

This is the phase where you start cutting stone blocks and replacing all those wooden walls with stone. When it comes to replacing the walls around your freezer and greenhouse, do it one layer at a time. Do not knock out an entire section, otherwise you'll let all the air out and kill your crops or mess up the temperature in your freezer. Replace the inner walls first, then once everything inside is stone, then replace the outer walls. One layer at a time. One exception are the doors. Until I have auto doors researched, I tend to keep them made of wood due to the speed factor of opening doors with heavier materials. Once auto doors are researched, I will replace the wooden doors with steel auto doors, which are a good compromise between flammability, strength, and speed. My vaults always get stone doors regardless of tech.

The current game time is the 3rd of Jugust, which is around the beginning of summer. Its been about 15 days since my colonists first crash landed and the greenhouse is ready and fully functional.

What happens next is entirely up to you, but after replacing all the walls with stone and setting up barricades in strategic areas for defense, I tend to focus on a crafting building for making blocks/art/tailoring/crafting/etc, a proper dining/rec room across from the kitchen, building individual colonist rooms, building a research room so I can get that research bench out of the stockpile area, building shelves in my stockpile areas, and installing heaters and any other structures you may want or need. All built and planned with proper stone walls from the start. Adding some stone walk ways between buildings for faster pawn movement and keeping areas clear of trees and other movement impairing growth is also another thing to consider. When the cotton gets harvested I immediately start making parkas and tuques for my colonists. Need to get that done before winter. Don't want them freezing to death. Beyond that its whatever you feel is important or needed.

And until you get that greenhouse up, remember A.B.C. Always. Be. Constructing!