Barracks are OP

[kennygnu]

I've been playing Rimworld a long time and for the first many playthroughs I usually tried to make bedrooms for everyone. Then I played tribals and since it seemed to fit the theme I made everyone sleep in barracks. Sort of like a communal hut. Then I noticed how strong this was.

Now I can't play any other way. I always make one absolutely garguantuan room with a roof supported by pillars and do absolutely everything in there. A few sculptures and a stockpile zone automatically makes it extremely impressive. My pawns get mood boosts from dining hall, rec room, spaceous environment, beautiful surroundings. All from this one room. They never waste time in transit between their beds and their work tasks either. Playing on higher difficulties it also makes it incredibly effective for managing wealth.

Does anyone know of mods or alternate playstyles that can encourage making separate structures for your colonists?

[The Blind One]

I wouldn't argue with Astasia, I did it once and lost 😭

They know their stuff.

[Veylox]

"Does anyone know of mods or alternate playstyles that can encourage making separate structures for your colonists?"

realistic rooms
But honestly even though I always had this mod I never build bedrooms these days. It just takes way too much space for how little the buff is, I'd rather just find a source of mood elsewhere like prepping meals one quality higher

[Narn]

Efficiency game play is the cancer of this game.

[Veylox]

Originally posted by The Blind One:

I wouldn't argue with Astasia, I did it once and lost 😭

They know their stuff.

I could try. His -4 mood number assumes you're getting the best barracks and the best bedrooms, but getting the best barracks is done automatically while getting the best bedrooms is basically not gonna happen until way too late or if you artificially buff it up, and you have to do it for every single room. Meaning that realistically your barracks are always one or two tiers above your bedroom in terms of impressiveness, which evens out the mood. The fact that space is a factor in impressiveness severely guts the viability of bedrooms.

Space is a hidden currency in rimworld and bedrooms are a silly sink, though I guess people who play on larger maps wouldn't notice

[Veylox]

I don't see how you would be creating excess wealth boosting up barracks either since they multiply wealth by one while bedrooms multiply it by whatever your number of colonists is.

Any calculation regarding bedrooms has to be multiplied by 20 or something (number of rooms) to get the actual impact on wealth, space, raid points, etc

You're also saving plenty of walking around with barracks but that's beside the point


Damn I just read that hearing only affects social and trading, so inhumane colonies could just chop their ears and get a +3 mood on top of everything else for barracks

[Wraith_Magus]

Originally posted by Astasia:

You are incorrect and I covered the numbers in my original reply. A 426 wealth personal bedroom provides more mood than a barracks loaded with sculptures. This is like 2.6 raid points on 100%, or 13 points on 500%. That is trivial, and that's ignoring the cost of the barracks or shared walls, when in reality the difference is going to be even less.

You can have a cheap +6 mood rec/dining room and cheap +4 bedrooms, with 0 sculptures or excess wealth, and have higher overall mood than using barracks. If you are making sculptures to try to boost a barracks to be remotely comparable then you are not being efficient and are creating excess wealth. This is just basic math.

Well, since I'm interested, let's do the math, then...

I guess this depends a bit on knowing how to get the right amount of room impressiveness for relatively low value. Looking at the wiki's room stats[rimworldwiki.com], if your target is +4 mood, you'd need tier 10 ("wondrously impressive") barracks to tie with tier 6 ("(slightly) impressive") personal rooms.

Flipping over to impressiveness[rimworldwiki.com], we see that it takes 65+ impressiveness value to get tier 6 ("impressive") for a personal bedroom, or 240+ value for a "wondrously impressive" barracks.

As for what actually qualifies, it's worth noting that there are four stats, and there's heavy weighting towards the worst one. Because "cleanliness" is a stat that can fluctuate heavily, just going for the minimum possible value to qualify might mean a bedroom that just barely has enough points to qualify for an impressiveness tier can fall out of that tier from a single tracked spot of dirt or trash. (Ban pets from bedrooms, even low filth animals like dogs create filth and love to track dirt.) There are mods like Common Sense that make colonists clean their room before sleeping, however...

Now then, scrolling down further to the actual formula[rimworldwiki.com], it might seem like getting a 240+ value isn't hard compared to getting a 65+ value, but the actual formula takes the natural log of values, so you have serious diminishing returns. (That is, it takes ~2.72 times as much per each point of value, so if you wanted to go from a value of 2 from wealth to 4 from wealth, you actually need to increase the value of objects in the room by ~7.39 times rather than simply double it.) There is a "grace" zone of all the values being 1 before the natural log kicks in, and if everything has a value of 1, it actually multiplies that by 100, so if you have every component value for this formula at 1, you wind up with a value of 100, or "very impressive." This requires 1500 room wealth, 125 space, 3 average beauty, and 0 cleanliness. If we want to drop this down to 65 for just an "impressive" bedroom, because the lowest value is boosted to half the value of the whole formula, we actually can't drop far below all this.

125 space is a crazy amount, though, although note that empty tiles are worth 1.4, while tiles with obstructing objects (like beds, end tables, floor lamps, and sculptures) are only worth .5, so once again, we're talking about a very unintuitive formula. (And remember that beauty is an average of beauty per tile in the room, so the larger an empty space, the more diluted your beauty becomes.) Hence, you basically need 100 tiles (with about 5 tiles occupied) to get that 125 space, otherwise, space becomes your constraint on the formula.

To get to 65 without affecting any of the other formula functions, we can have a 1500 wealth room with 3 beauty and 0 cleanliness with a space value of 57.6. Presuming about 5 occupied tiles, you need roughly 45 tiles in a room (9x5) to get to "impressive" while keeping the other elements constant. (Quite a bit more than I normally allocate for private rooms! Then again, I tend to just chuck a large wooden statue in everyone's personal room...)

To get to the "wondrously impressive" barracks, cleanliness becomes a bolo on your value score since it's hard to get it above 1 value in the impressiveness formula without making the whole room have sterile tiles. This means that not only does wealth or beauty scale at natural log rates, but they only contribute 16.25% of their value to the overall formula. Getting to 240 therefore takes a pretty extreme amount of statues. Even assuming you have a 2 value from size (requiring about 250 tiles in the room), you need wealth + beauty to hit a value of about 9.62, with both having ln growth rates. This means the simplest way to hit it is to have a room wealth of $183,739 and a beauty of 367.5, which basically requires paving the room in excellent+ gold sculptures. This is roughly 100 times as much as it takes to satisfy the requirements of an "impressive" personal room.

So, basically, unless you have 50+ colonists or something, you're probably better off going for the personal rooms.

Something I do like to do is encourage pairing off in my colonists, since double beds mean they share a "personal" room, which can cut the amount of room value you need in half. Hypothetically, if you go full polycule, have an "everyone is bi" mod and use that mod with the bed that's 13 spots wide, you could still have a "personal bedroom" that fits a huge chunk of a colony... (A pretty unorthodox way to optimize, but it would work, I suppose...)

[Veylox]

"which basically requires paving the room in excellent+ gold sculptures."

I play in unbelievably impressive rec rooms all the time and not a single statue is needed. I do use a couple of them (usually just decent marble quality) for meditation but as long as you cram everything else in the actual room impressiveness goes up on its own, you don't need the statues. The thing is, when you scatter your wealth in your colony across different rooms, bed or otherwise, impressiveness goes down but wealth remains the same (say you have a work room with quality armchairs, that's wealth, but it's unused in terms of impressiveness because it's in a separate room. Once you cram it in the actual rec room, you're not using more wealth than you were before, you're simply boosting up the impressiveness for free)

[MadArtillery]

Indeed like half the point of an all in one room barracks is it's a super impressive every room without any effort.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Veylox:

I could try. His -4 mood number assumes you're getting the best barracks and the best bedrooms, but getting the best barracks is done automatically while getting the best bedrooms is basically not gonna happen until way too late or if you artificially buff it up, and you have to do it for every single room. Meaning that realistically your barracks are always one or two tiers above your bedroom in terms of impressiveness, which evens out the mood.

That is a different argument. Objectively bedrooms are 4 mood higher than comparable barracks, and eventually getting unbelievably impressive bedrooms later game is pretty trivial. I pretty much never get any room to wondrously impressive in most games. Early game efficiency, yes barracks will be a couple tiers higher most likely, however that's still a mood loss compared to bedrooms, just a lesser one. Still, barracks are convenient early game.

Originally posted by Veylox:

I don't see how you would be creating excess wealth boosting up barracks either since they multiply wealth by one while bedrooms multiply it by whatever your number of colonists is.

Any calculation regarding bedrooms has to be multiplied by 20 or something (number of rooms) to get the actual impact on wealth, space, raid points, etc

Because you can get a better bedroom mood bonus than the best barracks mood bonus without contributing any real wealth. Just a floored room with a bed in it is better than the best barracks, basic floors are dirt cheap, walls are dirt cheap, you need the bed in either case. For essentially 0 wealth you can have a +4 bedroom and a +6 dining/rec room. Getting that big dining/rec room to +7 from there takes a considerable amount of wealth investment, if that was a barracks it would still only be +3. Trying to get it to a +4 barracks is creating excess wealth compared to the spartan empty bedrooms, unquestionably.

Your base is still taking up space, you are still flooring things (for movement speed and cleanliness), if you have a barracks for 20 people that avoids disturbed sleep then you aren't going to be saving that much space compared to bedrooms, it's more a matter of segmenting it for better moods. If you are cramming 20 beds in next to each other, especially if you have work areas right near them, well you have basically permanent disturbed sleep so that's another noticeable mood loss compared to bedrooms.

Lastly, the dining/rec combo room is a good place for ideology altars or thrones, both of which don't want beds, both of which want a lot of impressiveness. If you have a big combo barracks, then now you need another impressive room somewhere else for rituals. Having empty spartan bedrooms and an impressive dining/rec/ritual room is much more efficient than having an impressive barracks/dinging/rec room and an impressive ritual room.

Originally posted by Veylox:

Damn I just read that hearing only affects social and trading, so inhumane colonies could just chop their ears and get a +3 mood on top of everything else for barracks

Social impact determines the relation gains for social interactions, so a colony without ears is not going to get along as well and you will likely be losing out on mood bonuses from relationships. Deaf colonists also lose bonuses from music.

[Veylox]

You're definitely saving space with barracks because you have workstations in there, while bedrooms require you to have nothing in there (I don't remember if they stop being bedrooms with workstations in but regardless you'd gain the disturbed sleep bonus anyway so at that point might as well go barracks)

Your twenty 7x7 bedrooms will take a thousand tiles worth of space in your colony, and that will contribute to nothing other than sleeping.

A 100x10 rec room can fit damn near your entire colony in it on the other hand.

A 1000 tiles bedroom plan for 20 colonists will use all 1000 tiles for sleeping
A 1000 tiles barracks plan for 20 colonists will use 40 tiles for sleeping (the actual bed size), 960 for almost anything else.


"Social impact determines the relation gains for social interactions, so a colony without ears is not going to get along as well and you will likely be losing out on mood bonuses from relationships. Deaf colonists also lose bonuses from music."

Yeah but inhumans don't care, and you're also losing on social mood debuffs


"Lastly, the dining/rec combo room is a good place for ideology altars or thrones, both of which don't want beds, both of which want a lot of impressiveness. If you have a big combo barracks, then now you need another impressive room somewhere else for rituals. Having empty spartan bedrooms and an impressive dining/rec/ritual room is much more efficient than having an impressive barracks/dinging/rec room and an impressive ritual room."

Yeah but if you're fine dedicating 1000 tiles worth of impressiveness to sleeping only clearly going barracks and dedicating a fraction of that to an altar instead is better

Surely if you can make a bedroom cost zero wealth while being small like you say, it should be even easier making an altar room/throne cost zero wealth

Plus I'm pretty sure at least one of these two refuses work stations, so it wouldn't fit in a non-barracks multi-purpose rec room, so if you go bedrooms now you need to build an altar/throne room on top of everything anyway.

[Astasia]

The smallest map size contains 40,000 tiles. I do not consider 1000 tiles any sort of "cost." Colonists only have to walk to their bed and back once a day, you can have them just on the other side of your work areas, there's no appreciable movement cost involved.

[stun]

Originally posted by Wraith_Magus:

the wiki's room stats[rimworldwiki.com], if your target is +4 mood, you'd need tier 10 ("wondrously impressive") barracks to tie with tier 6 ("(slightly) impressive") personal rooms.

Barracks has the same tier as the dining room/rec room, so to beat "impressive" bedrooms you only need extremely impressive (which beats by +2) and very impressive is only -1 less.
This is ignoring beauty (which is a defacto +4 or more for the barracks as well) and only considering the persistent room effects.

[Bosh]

Barracks are ugly and therefore inferior

[kennygnu]

I'm pretty sure I could easily switch everyone to 7x7 rooms with carpeted floors on a big flat map, but I like using geological landforms and the more weirdly shaped maps do not give the absolutely massive footprint required to pull this off.

I simply can't cram that many bedroom into my colony so it becomes less an issue of raid points and more an issue of physically having the space for it.

Early game the extremely impressive barracks buff is very convenient and essentially guarantees everyone is near 100 mood all the time and as I start to research far enough to get everyone kitted out with high quality assault rifles, it's no longer an issue of managing wealth. At this point I have walled myself in and depending on the map I'm playing on, I am utilizing every square inch of 100% fertility soil to grow my crops. I can potentially switch over to hydroponics to cut down on the space needed, but that still won't give me the space for individual bedrooms.

When I'm late game I want more people to fight so the space needed for bedrooms increases exponentially to the point where it becomes utterly unfeasible. At most I'll have bedrooms for my most favored colonists, but otherwise it's 'welcome aboard, grab your complimentary assault rifle, duster and flak vest and grab a bunk.'

[Darkon]

Even a 1x2 room is better than barracks, mood for interrupted sleep can destroy your pawns and your colony if you keep them living for a long period inside one

Originally posted by kennygnu:

I'm pretty sure I could easily switch everyone to 7x7 rooms with carpeted floors on a big flat map

Depends on how much pawns do you have....still there is no need for a 7x7 room, 4x5 is enough even with a double bed.

Normally I build inside mountains (less room to build, less forgiving) and with 2 or 3 "4x5 room residential areas" is more than enough for me to have an army, smooth the floor+walls and you have a beautiful room. If some of them are married even more people in there.