Question about Floor and Colony Wealth

[Talithmara]

I haven't really played in awhile since I've been so busy (I still have yet to buy Anomaly, and I barely got to dabble in Biotech, enough said) but I've been seeing a lot of people say a lot of things lately and I wanted to ask:

Did they reduce the value of floors?

I'm asking because I keep seeing "advice" like "Floor everything immediately when you build your first rooms upon landing" and I'm just over here thinking "Oh my gosh you are literally tripling the amount of earlygame raiders before you even have the resources to fight them off, why would you do that?"

So yeah. Floor Value. Still a trap? Or is it actually worth flooring before you need the beauty bonus/ dignified room now?

[Astasia]

Floor value hasn't changed as it's derived from the value of the materials needed multiplied by a work factor. It's never been a significant amount of wealth, a wood floor is 3.9 silver, building wealth counts as half for raid points, it costs about 10000 wealth points roughly to add a single enemy to a raid on 100% scaling, so you would need like 5000 wood floor tiles to add one enemy. Concrete is about half the value of wood, so you'd need like 10000 concrete tiles for one enemy. This is a bit of a simplification of the mechanics but it's in the rough ballpark to give you an idea of how trivial floor value is and how little it affects enemy scaling.

The reason people used to avoid floors was in the past dirt couldn't accumulate filth, and some people felt it was better to just not floor things so they didn't have to clean. The fact that it was "less wealth" was just used as a secondary argument for that strategy. This was nerfed a few updates ago, dirt floors now accumulate some forms of filth, so all avoiding floors really does now is reduce colonist movement speed.

[whatamidoing]

I think it might be a misconception caused by some strangely-valued modded floors that could appear in ancient ruins, causing maps to start with a value in the hundreds of thousands. I don't think any vanilla floors have ever been a "trap" like that.

[Veylox]

Where do you keep seeing that you should floor right away ? Haven't seen anything like it in years, it's a bunch of work and a resource sink for no important pay-off during the first weeks, there's too much else to do

I sure as hell don't floor my colony until I'm somewhat secure, I notice a change in raids every single time

[Astasia]

Typically you want a somewhat secure base before the tutorial raids end, and the end of the tutorial raids will noticeably increase raid sizes. I suspect that is something people see and form the wrong connection. Each stage of the tutorial raids is typically a marked increase in raiders, even if your colony wealth hasn't changed at all, especially with adaption coming up to balance at that stage as well.

Putting down some early wood/stone floors in rooms and bedrooms is likely only several hundred silver of raid wealth total, it's not going to do anything whatsoever to raids and is a really easy way to get some impressiveness and reduce infection chance, not to mention increase overall efficiency with movement speed boosts. Soil to floor is a 15% speed boost, sand to floor is a 32% speed boost, this can really make a difference early game when you have limited workers and have a lot to establish. Wood/concrete floors build almost instantly and are super easy to get the resources for.

Lets say you have 3 bedrooms that are 7x7, and two rooms that are 15x15, that's about 600 tiles, and that's fairly substantial for an early base. If you use wood for all of them that's about 2300 silver, which is halved to 1150s, so about 1/10th of an extra raider to deal with. For a 15-30% movement speed boost, and several points of extra mood. It really is a great way to get an early benefit for no extra risk.

Edit: And it's also worth noting a wood floor is less raid wealth than the wood used to make it. So using your starting wood to floor a few initial rooms will actually reduce raid scaling marginally.

[Veylox]

The problem with the math is it's too reliant on starting assumptions. Wood was chosen here because it's cheap, not because it necessarily is what people build. Same with concrete. Wood is flammable and concrete is ugly, for the longest time it was agreed upon that flooring goes to stone. Add difficulty on top and suddenly floors have 4 to 8 times the impact compared to the initial guess. Better yet, any talk of min-maxing wealth is likelier to be relevant when talking about higher difficulties, not lower.

Steel is also one of the most important and less available early resources, I wouldn't fish for unnecessary steel sinks. Even 600 units down the drain early on is gonna be felt at some point during mid-game

[Wraith_Magus]

In general, I do build wood floors in a lot of spaces, (or concrete in places like freezers) especially early in the game, just because I have a lot to construct, and I'm more worried about not having a freezer or getting my power grid up and running than going back to make things "fireproof." I'll put some "fire breaks" for a little safety (mostly concrete), and I often build inside some ruin walls with flagstone floors just to start unless I'm deliberately rushing for a cave, but generally, I do start with wood floors or concrete, and I just rely on having stone walls and/or concrete firebreaks to keep any fires from reaching the base insides until then. It's only when I'm at something like year 3 that I start trying to replace floors, and until you're several years in, you don't tend to see too many firestarters that actually get into your living area.

In the grand scheme of things, $8 stone tile floors (or $5 if you use smoothed stone from mined-out areas) is not huge. When you start the game with the crashlanded scenario, you often have something like $13,000 on the map before you do anything (mostly from junk from the scenario start at that), and a 1,000 tile base made with only stone tile floors is only raising your value by $8,000, and structures only count for half value, so it's functionally $4,000, which is basically a rounding error by the time you're a year into the game and have actually built that much. The workstations you build on those floors are several hundred silver each, every chair you build is often worth as much as a dozen floor tiles, doors are worth $50 for even a basic unpowered door, every shelf full of food you have is in the four digits in value, the raiders' weapons and clothing you haven't smelted/incinerated yet are worth several hundred each, etc.

With that said, if it bothers you that much that you can't get the idea that floors are driving up your value each time you build one, there are mods that eliminate the value of floors entirely. (Note that this also makes it harder to increase room value for making impressive throne rooms and such, however.)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3269219537

You might also want to use mods like Wealth Here and Visible Raid Points to give you a better understanding of what's causing raids to be the size they are. For example, if you're in summer of the first year, there's that "early game modifier" that cuts the raid size down. Likewise, even beyond colony value, the number of colonists and combat-capable animals you have makes for a dramatic boost to the raid points, and just being able to see the formula being used can help you focus your attention on the main causes.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2593103416
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2562730174

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Veylox:

The problem with the math is it's too reliant on starting assumptions. Wood was chosen here because it's cheap, not because it necessarily is what people build. Same with concrete. Wood is flammable and concrete is ugly, for the longest time it was agreed upon that flooring goes to stone. Add difficulty on top and suddenly floors have 4 to 8 times the impact compared to the initial guess. Better yet, any talk of min-maxing wealth is likelier to be relevant when talking about higher difficulties, not lower.

Steel is also one of the most important and less available early resources, I wouldn't fish for unnecessary steel sinks. Even 600 units down the drain early on is gonna be felt at some point during mid-game

I used wood and concrete as examples because it's what I use early game. Stone requires extra work through stone cutting and then stone tile takes 13 times as much work to construct compared to a wood floor which generally isn't worth the effort early game. Flagstone is only slightly more wealth than wood and isn't any better, and still takes 6 times the work per tile. Flammability only matters for walls. Within the first few days unless I'm on an extreme map without ample wood I have personal bedrooms and a dining/rec room with wood floors, and a storage/work room with concrete. Steel is tremendously easy to get through various means in the quantities required to make concrete floors. The entire point is wood and concrete floors are extremely cheap and quick to make and provide significant benefits to colony efficiency and mood.

Normal game difficulties go from 30% to 220%, I specifically mentioned 100% scaling to make things clear, but 220% doesn't change anything because if you take a completely trivial value and double it, it's still trivial. People often talk about wealth even playing on lower difficulties because the mechanic is widely misunderstood and exaggerated.

[HunterSilver]

Floors have always been worthwhile. Wood floors are dirt cheap, quick to build, increase movement speed, increase research speed, reduce infection chance, reduce food poisoning chances, and don't generate additional filth when being walked on.

You can tile a massive, 100 room end-game base with wood flooring and not generate enough wealth to add 1 additional enemy raider.

If you're playing on a map without trees then concrete is very worthwhile and, again, you can tile an entire endgame base with the stuff (though I'd recommend against it) and never add a single new raider.

More than anything, filth is the newbie trap. Dirty rooms will cause mental break spirals, increase infection chances, increase food poisoning, decrease research speed, and just generally make every situation become significantly worse. Anything that reduces filth generation is insanely valuable.

[Talithmara]

Just a few replies:

"Where do you keep seeing this?" Youtube's been recommending me Rimworld content again and I've been curious about getting back into it so I sometimes click on them. And when looking at tutorials for newer players because I also have friends just recently getting into it. Some of the advice is good. Some of it... not so much.

"Tutorial Raids." If you mean the fact that the first raid always seems to be just one guy, then yeah, I get that. I never actually noticed that the first few raids scale up like that, and always just assumed that the "baseline minimum" raid was closer to 3 people and the first raid was a scripted softball since you didn't really have time to set up defenses.

"What people actually use." Yeah, exactly, wood is being used as an example here because it's cheap and easy in many biomes, but the flammability and next to zero actual benefit means most people will jump right to stone. But this is admittedly my fault for not specifying.

"The value of steel." Exactly. I keep seeing things like "Start as a mechanitor in a tropical rainforest? Build your buildings out of steel and floor them with steel because you start with steel!" And I'm just over here like "oh my gosh no, keep that for your mechs and mech-based infrastructure! Just chop down a few trees! Sleeping ONE night on the floor because you're not done in time won't kill you!"

"A lot to build in the earlygame." This also confuses me; Why add more to the earlygame workload by clogging up your construction queue with floor when you could be prioritizing other, more important things? Like, what *actual benefit* does wood flooring actually provide in this context? It's not like it can be built over terrain that slows you down (mud needs a bridge, etc) and any impact to room beauty would be negligible. The only real "benefit" I see is... aesthetic for the player?

"Fire Breaks." Oh, cool, that concept has finally caught on in the community? I always felt like I was imparting friends with forbidden knowledge when I taught them about Fire Breaks, considering it wasn't something I saw the community talking about. I'm not going to pretend that I created the concept, but I definitely figured it out on my own and never saw anyone else talking about it until they were mentioned in one or two videos I recently saw, which may have been one isolated youtuber.


All right, there's probably more worth replying to, but I'm sleep deprived and yearning for the pillow, so I'll check back later >_<

[Wraith_Magus]

Originally posted by Talithmara:

"A lot to build in the earlygame." This also confuses me; Why add more to the earlygame workload by clogging up your construction queue with floor when you could be prioritizing other, more important things? Like, what *actual benefit* does wood flooring actually provide in this context? It's not like it can be built over terrain that slows you down (mud needs a bridge, etc) and any impact to room beauty would be negligible. The only real "benefit" I see is... aesthetic for the player?

As HunterSilver pointed out, there's a notable downside to allowing your base to be a pigsty, which is that your room value/impressiveness will plummet (making your colonists have a bad mood because they slept in "awful barracks") and you risk food poisoning. The rate of food poisoning is based upon the cleanliness of the kitchen, with it starting at -2 cleanliness, and having a dirt floor automatically starts your kitchen off at -1 cleanliness. Just having A floor in your kitchen gives you significantly more leeway. (Also, butcher tables are -2 cleanliness by themselves - make sure they're in a separate room!) Dirt floors also mean your colonists track dirt (among other things they step in) and spread them to other areas, spreading even more negative cleanliness.

Note that a mod I swear by lets you set some behaviors like making pawns clean up around their worksite before doing work. The biggest problem with cleaning is it's inherently a low priority for most pawns, so you have to often manually order cleaning.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1561769193
Beyond this, there's move speed. Pawns move 15% faster over most floors than dirt. Because of this, I even make "sidewalks" along the edges of my fields (because crop rows notably slow my pawns down, so I have a few walkways to make travel faster and also soak up some of the dirt they'd track outside before getting to the base.) Much of your pawns' time is really just spent in transit, so making a few concrete walkways pays for itself in faster movement.

There's also a pretty marked difference between the amount of time it takes to make different things you need in the early game. Stone tiles take 1,100 ticks to construct and that's before you talk about it taking 4 stone blocks each which take 1,600 ticks to make 20 blocks plus hauling time. Making a workbench generally takes thousands of ticks, and the chair you make for someone to sit in while working takes 8,000 ticks to build. Concrete takes 100 ticks to build, and wood floors take 85 ticks to build. There's hauling time to consider, but since it only takes 1 steel to make concrete, pawns will often bring enough to pave a couple dozen tiles with concrete in one go. There's a reason I build firebreaks with concrete out away from my base to keep fires from my crop fields - it's blindingly fast to make concrete floors compared to almost anything else. You can pave your entire early-game base in concrete or wood in about the same time it takes you to make one dining chair.

Also, concrete is 1 steel. Practically everything you're building is going to take something like 100 steel, and again, an early game base might only have 50 or so tiles of floor you need to cover. You get about 40 steel from one tile of compacted steel. People overreact to how the description says concrete is ugly, but note that 50 tiles of concrete is also $300 cheaper than 50 tiles of stone tile, while 100 points of beauty lower. You can just put a normal quality large wooden sculpture in a room for $196 to offset that beauty loss, and still be $104 less colony wealth than making stone tiles.

With that said, I do see tons of people talking about how you always need components, but I form caravans and try to make my base near neutral settlements (especially civil outlanders, since they have the industrial tech stuff,) and I'm never hurting for components when I constantly make caravan trips to 2-3 nearby settlements, while what I tend to trade all my excess livestock for is often hauling back 100-200 steel per trip. (Based on how many muffalo I can bring, since that stuff's heavy.) Steel's dirt cheap, and once your early supply is gone, it's pretty easy to trade for steel so long as you have the carry capacity for it. Settlements pretty much always have steel to trade.

Originally posted by Talithmara:

"Fire Breaks." Oh, cool, that concept has finally caught on in the community? I always felt like I was imparting friends with forbidden knowledge when I taught them about Fire Breaks, considering it wasn't something I saw the community talking about. I'm not going to pretend that I created the concept, but I definitely figured it out on my own and never saw anyone else talking about it until they were mentioned in one or two videos I recently saw, which may have been one isolated youtuber.

It's mentioned in the game's hint/tutorial system (on fire) itself. A two-tile thick band of concrete out to stop fires from getting to your base or crop fields is something that takes a week or so, and it's not the highest priority, but it is something I try to get done in the first year. Again, concrete is dirt cheap and can be paved amazingly fast compared to nearly everything else.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Talithmara:

"Tutorial Raids." If you mean the fact that the first raid always seems to be just one guy, then yeah, I get that. I never actually noticed that the first few raids scale up like that, and always just assumed that the "baseline minimum" raid was closer to 3 people and the first raid was a scripted softball since you didn't really have time to set up defenses.

It's more than that, it's basically the first 4-5 raids are scaled down compared to what your wealth/pop/difficulty would normally get. The first couple raids significantly so, the following ones gradually raising up to normal values. You might be at the "minimum" raid size for raids 2-3 depending on difficulty and how quickly you start gather resources though, and only see an increase after like the 4th or 5th.

Originally posted by Talithmara:

"The value of steel." Exactly. I keep seeing things like "Start as a mechanitor in a tropical rainforest? Build your buildings out of steel and floor them with steel because you start with steel!" And I'm just over here like "oh my gosh no, keep that for your mechs and mech-based infrastructure! Just chop down a few trees! Sleeping ONE night on the floor because you're not done in time won't kill you!"

I imagine this has to do with what methods you are willing to use to get resources. Steel is nearly as limitless and easy to mass collect as wood. Between trade caravans, mining colonies, mining camps, deep drilling, and the extremely generous surface deposits on a map, I am never at any point in a run even close to being low on easily collectible steel. I'll definitely build steel beds day one if I don't have the wood for them laying around, even in a forest, because it's not an important resource and sleeping in a bed is hours of extra productivity to get back to building/hauling the next day.

Originally posted by Talithmara:

"A lot to build in the earlygame." This also confuses me; Why add more to the earlygame workload by clogging up your construction queue with floor when you could be prioritizing other, more important things? Like, what *actual benefit* does wood flooring actually provide in this context? It's not like it can be built over terrain that slows you down (mud needs a bridge, etc) and any impact to room beauty would be negligible. The only real "benefit" I see is... aesthetic for the player?

It's not just mud, all natural terrain significantly slows pawn movement compared to floors. Rough-hewn stone (technically natural?) is only a 93% multiplier, but soil is 87% and sand is 76%. In a desert building floors over sand is a larger movement increase than bionic legs, and on forest or other maps with soil it's nearly as good. This is a significant efficiency bonus for a trivial amount of resources and nearly no build time. Wood/concrete floors truly get built almost instantly.

I only generally hold off on floors in underground bases as mined stone is the smallest penalty to speed and doesn't have inherent dirtiness, and I might just smooth it later.