Kitchen layout

[gussmed]

I've been fiddling a bit with kitchen layout, and this is my most recent iteration. I'm using Rimfridge here, but you could make a somewhat similar layout without it. I'm not suggesting this is ideal, but it works a lot better than my prior versions.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2065028409

Keep in mind that this is for a fairly late-game base with 22 colonists. The butcher table in the kitchen is for making kibble, not butchering animals.

While the ultimate goal is short walk distances and efficiency, there are a few things I've observed that aren't necessarily that intuitive.

The key distances to keep short are meal storage to dining room, and raw food storage to the stove. These are the times colonists never carry a full load. When picking up a meal to eat, they only carry one. When cooking a meal, they only carry at most 40 ingredients, not 75.

With that in mind, the kitchen has its local, tiny refrigerators as buffers. I've got dedicated spots for vegetables, meat, milk, hay, and insect meat. The latter two are for making kibble. The kibble-making butcher table is in there because regular meat and vegetables are a fallback for making kibble if it's really necessary for some reason.

Cooks walk very, very short distances while cooking. Anyone else can haul the food to the freezers. Including Huskies, who fairly often do this job for me.

Other distances aren't so important, because long-ish treks to refill the kitchen freezers are inevitable if you've got a lot of food storage.

The butcher table does NOT need to be adjacent to the kitchen. You don't generally move meat directly from the butcher table to the kitchen. The flow is carcasses -> butcher table -> meat freezer -> kitchen meat freezer -> stove. The meat freezer is a buffer, and that needs to be convenient for both the kitchen and the butcher table, but the butcher room and kitchen don't need to be directly adjacent.

The kitchen and meal freezers are dead ends, so there's no foot traffic going through either one on the way to someplace else. Avoiding through traffic is more important than saving a few tiles in walking paths.

Large animal carcasses, ones that yield more than 75 meat each, are frozen and stored until the meat stocks get low. They take up less space that way. The carcass freezer is a dead end that is only reachable through the butcher room. It's hideous in there because dead animals are very ugly.

Vegetable storage is mostly local to the fields, not the central kitchen facility. A central vegetable storage isn't important because the trek from fields to kitchen is the same distance regardless. Vegetable storage is near the fields because getting crops indoors quickly is important to prevent rot.

I've organized the meal and meat freezers with shelves, but that's mostly aesthetic. However, it's worth noting that open lanes in storage improve efficiency. Colonists are slow when walking through squares with food in them. If there's a clear access path, getting stuff into and out of the freezer's a lot faster.

[MortVent]

other than a personal preference for airlock systems on freezers with double outer walls for efficiency in cooling not much changes I can see other than finish up a full stone conversion of the walls. And sterile tile throughout as the lack of doors actually makes the whole room affect the clean stat (so the wood floors would be bringing it down vs sterile tile)

[Raymond]

not the most optimal kitchen but as long as it works.

[Cormac]

just fyi:
butchering animals creates blood, making the room dirty.
if there is another pawn cooking while one animal is butchered, you might end up with an increased food poisoning chance..... i never cared for it, but just as an info

[Raymond]

Originally posted by Cormac:

just fyi:
butchering animals creates blood, making the room dirty.
if there is another pawn cooking while one animal is butchered, you might end up with an increased food poisoning chance..... i never cared for it, but just as an info

if you look at it carefully, that butcher table in the kitchen is most likely meant for kibble production as op has storage for hay and bug meats next to it. The real butcher table is on the other side of the freezer

[Cormac]

Originally posted by YariMurai:

Originally posted by Cormac:

just fyi:
butchering animals creates blood, making the room dirty.
if there is another pawn cooking while one animal is butchered, you might end up with an increased food poisoning chance..... i never cared for it, but just as an info

if you look at it carefully, that butcher table in the kitchen is most likely meant for kibble production as op has storage for hay and bug meats next to it. The real butcher table is on the other side of the freezer

whoops, scratch my commen than, i didn't see that one XD
@op you did great, forget i ever said anything

[Jigain]

Why do you have a cooler facing the dividing wall between the food storage and the corpse storage?

[StinkyMonkey]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2065137059

I have similar, still working on floors and adding station and fridges. The meal fridge wall keeps the canteen separate.

[gussmed]

Originally posted by MortVent:

other than a personal preference for airlock systems on freezers with double outer walls for efficiency in cooling not much changes

The freezer sections do have airlocks, though the ones from the butcher room to the freezers are adjacent double doors, and may not work the way I think.

There are some double walls for insulation, but though lots aren't.. This is mainly because I ripped out an earlier kitchen / freezer setup and replaced it with this, and I didn't really have enough space for double walls everywhere. If I'd designed it from scratch it would be a little bigger and have more double walls.

Originally posted by MortVent:

And sterile tile throughout as the lack of doors actually makes the whole room affect the clean stat (so the wood floors would be bringing it down vs sterile tile)

The kitchen proper is entirely sterile tiles. The areas with wood floors are not part of that room.

Originally posted by YariMurai:

The real butcher table is on the other side of the freezer

That's correct. I said as much, though I know people tend to skim if there's a lot of text.

Originally posted by Jigain:

Why do you have a cooler facing the dividing wall between the food storage and the corpse storage?

Eh, that's a remnant from an earlier design. It happens that the cooler was where I wanted the partition wall between the meat freezer and carcass storage. I just forgot to disassemble it after I built the wall.

[gussmed]

Originally posted by StinkyMonkey:

The meal fridge wall keeps the canteen separate.

The colonists can still path to the main freezer area, right? Which means they'll sometimes try and pick up meals in the general freezer, rather than in the fridge wall, where you want them to grab meals.

That was a problem I had with my prior kitchen. Call that "Kitchen v.2" where this is "Kitchen v.3." In Kitchen v.2 I had the dining room freezer and a big general freezer. Colonists kept going deep into the general freezer to pick up meals. Which is why I made a separate freezer just for meals this time.

Colonists still spend more time picking up meals and moving them to the dining room than I'd like, but it's better than it was.

[StinkyMonkey]

Yes, they sometimes will but with the mods for meals they will almost always go for the stew as its lavish. To be honest the other meals are all there for when stew runs out and are a leftover of pre-stew days and the fact i have people fishing/shellfish traps going still. Most of the fridges around the base and in the main dining area stock stew, tea, coffee, or fruit drink. That canteen is there as a backup/meal storage as it faces on to the main path opposite the dining hall.

I just didn't want to store all my meals in the main fridge to reduce the pathing into it, as you say. So I put the meal storage there so most meals go that way or out to the other fridges around the base. It's all WIP though, things may change :)

[liosalpha]

Since i noticed that pawns take food with them, i switched from making a usable central dinner too just having a impressive diner and sprinkeling the base with random low end table & chairs. (only cost like 150 wood for a table and 4 chairs.)
The fancy dinner is still used but mostly for weddings and parties.

[gussmed]

Originally posted by liosalpha:

Since i noticed that pawns take food with them, i switched from making a usable central dinner too just having a impressive diner and sprinkeling the base with random low end table & chairs.

I have lots of tables and chairs sprinkled around my base for pretty much that reason. Colonists routinely (but not always) carry food with them, and if they get hungry and there’s no table nearby, they’ll eat it on the spot and get the -3 “Ate without a table” mood penalty.

However, I’ve observed that a very high quality dining room still has considerable value. Typically, a colonist has no food on them in the morning. They go get a meal from the meal freezer, and use the dining room to eat breakfast. Most of them get the full mood bonus all day.

They do grab food for later, but fairly often they eat it before going to sleep. As long as they have a table, this doesn’t hurt anything, because only the best dining room mood counts. Since they ate the food they had, in the morning they need to grab more and the cycle repeats.

If they do eat equipped food in the morning, they still need to eat again during the day. In which case, again, they get it from the main food freezer and eat in the main dining room.