Service Buildings and Interdome Use

[Stretchytall]

So I'm having a hard time understanding what service buildings need to be where in order to make my people happy. Sometimes they visit a service building in another dome, and sometimes they complain no particular service building is available even when there's one in another dome. Do I really need one of every type in each dome to make sure no one is left unhappy?

What's the best way to make sure colonists don't miss out on comfort needs?

[Tankfriend]

Colonists only travel to domes one passage away, so you have to keep services and work places close by.
It could also be that your service buildings are overcrowded and you need more of them.

[koimeiji]

Two likely causes are above. Either your "connected dome" is not accessible, or you've too much demand and not enough supply.


For the former, make sure any dome with residences is directly connected to other domes. They will not go from residence dome > other dome > service dome. They can only move one dome away.

For the latter, build more of that service building.


An easy layout is a central service-filled dome (aka: all grocers, diners, bars, what have you) which is directly connected to your residence-filled domes.

[Stretchytall]

Thanks! I think that explains it.

[Blake Walsh]

Originally posted by Stretchytall:

What's the best way to make sure colonists don't miss out on comfort needs?

If you want some more details.

Colonists always prefer to take services in their home dome, it's only after they can't find any open capacity in their home dome that they look into directly connected domes.

In practise it's highly preferable to give colonists basic services in their home dome, i.e. Diners, Grocers and Infirmaries. The comfort boost from Diners is very important for keeping colonists in middle comfort (colonists have to eat every day, so visit diners very consistently regardless of interests) and there's no point in taking an inter-dome penalty on that comfort boost. Infirmaries are also important, colonists only visit the infirmary when they need to recover their health or sanity and there's no point taking a penalty on the health and sanity rewarded, that would mean you need about twice as many infirmaries to provide the required medical care, inter-dome infirmaries are a seriously bad idea (though Medical Centers provide such a huge boost that the inter-dome penalty isn't so significant for them).

So I would say, Diners and Infirmaries: always in the home dome. Grocers good too. A good rule of thumb is a Diner, Grocer and Infirmary per 50 colonists but you can stretch this to about 80 colonists if you only care to keep colonists out of low comfort.

You don't really need to build any service buildings other than Diners, Grocers and Infirmaries at all, as those 3 will suffice to keep colonists in middle comfort and healthy/sane, nevertheless you might want to at least provide cheap services. I often put Decorations and Open Air Gyms in connected domes, the trick is that these buildings have low Service Comfort, a colonist is only awarded comfort if their comfort is lower than the Service Comfort of the building. So a colonist with 55 comfort visiting a Garden with a Service Comfort of 40 ain't going to get any comfort - but he also avoids the -10 comfort penalty for the service being entirely missing. So these buildings, you only really build them to avoid the penalty for the service being missing, and in practise there is no penalty for them being in a connected dome because they're not going to award comfort anyway.

If you want to get really technical and advanced, it's also beneficial to put Casinos in connected domes. Why? Well the reason you make a casino is to provide Gaming and Luxury, however it also provides Social (and at a higher Service Comfort than Diners) and Social is a really really common interest, so you'll find your Casinos filling up with socialites and your gamers are still whining. The solution is to provide plenty of Social service in the home dome from Diners, and then put Casinos in a connected dome, as I said at the start of the post colonists first look for a service in their home dome, so the Socialites will find and go to the Diners. The gamers can't find gaming, so they look into connected domes and find the casinos. This is a really efficient use of dome-space, because a "slice" of Diners supports 30 capacity per shift, whereas a Casino is only 10 capacity per shift, so it's waaaay more space-efficient to force socialites to go to Diners than providing Casinos for everyone to socialize at.

[some moron]

Thanks for that explanation of the nitty-grritty Blake, I'm gonna try that out.