The Art of Room Combination

This guide illustrates what rooms you can combine and the benefits of doing so.

What rooms can you combine?

To answer this we must divide rooms that require certain attributes from the ones that don't.

Temperature requirement
Freezer - needs lower than 0C

Temperature change
Generator room - generators create heat
Crematorium - crematoriums create heat

Cleanliness
Hospital - needs to be clean to avoid infections
Kitchen - needs to be clean to avoid food poisoning
Research - should be clean to increase research speed

Impressiveness:
Recreation room - gives moodlet for impressiveness
Dining room - gives moodlet for impressiveness
Barracks - gives moodlet for impressiveness
Bedroom - gives moodlet for impressiveness
Throneroom - gives moodlet for impressiveness, and required impressiveness for titles

Other requirements
Throneroom - needs fine flooring

All rooms under the same bracket can and should be combined (with the exception of the throne room unless you have thousands of stone/cloth for fine flooring).

Benefits of room combination

Social rooms

The 5 "living" rooms (throne, rec, dining, barracks, bedroom) all give your colonists moodlets depending on their impressiveness. However, if you combine them all, colonists get a seperate moodlet for each room purpose.

For example, a room containing a horseshoe pin and a table and chair will give a moodlet for a rec room AND a moodlet for a dining room.
Note: these moodlets only occur if the colonist has used each corresponding facility. e.g in a rec/dining room if a colonist eats but doesn't play they will only get the dining room moodlet

This can be used to your advantage.
By combining rooms you get two benefits:
More efficient use of space
More impressiveness and therefore better mood

Most rimworld guides will tell you to ditch your barracks and move on to bedrooms. I recommend ditching your old barracks and making a single super-room.

An extremely impressive barracks/dining/rec room will give you a +14 moodlet and is quite easy to make (as illustrated below) and allows for 21 people to sleep and dine. This does not included "disturbed sleep" which stacks to -3.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1593666765009270149/9BE1B8A9B6B0F32A114C091BB4CD0E93349608DA/?imw=256&&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

You cannot combine a barracks with a throne room due to throne room requirements, and I have found that combining with a barrack is more effective due to the cost of fine flooring.

Clean rooms

The only benefit to combining these is that there's only one room to clean and food is nearby the patients.

Other room combinations and benefits

Workshop and prison: making your warden work next to your "guests" will increase their social reputation and therefore recruitment chance. This also works with research.
Corpse room and barn: some animals eat corpses (check their info page). Just give your trainer some drugs to make sure they dont go on a slaughtering spree.

[CryoChick]

@Strictly Casual depends on the animal, higher attacks per second lower dmg is better as well as animals that mostly do blunt damage. your pawns likely have sharp weapons don't they?

[IchigoMait]

Nice only if you play a game where you're not attacked by something or some bad events don't happen.
Otherwise I just use the max map size and build inside a mountain, plenty of space to expand, with huge storages.

[Steve The Was]

will the cold debuff is annoying having the Kitchen next to the frezer is a good idea

[Strictly Casual]

I love to combine my prison with trainable animals, on a prison break, just draft the tamer and prevent the break. On a sidenote, animals seem to kill opponents WAY less than pawns, so another double benefit

[PicardOrion]

Thanks! That is a really good early base setup. And when migrating to single bedrooms I can just leave the beds as a reserve.

[Mr C.Folt Scruff]

nice guide while iwont combined them all in the long run
it give me nice idea for starting base so idont spend too much building in first year

[BingoBungus]

I really appreciate this analysis! One could certainly save space and effort with the right combinations! ...I do hope these researchers can focus on their work over the smell of cooking muffalo meat. :P

[Jelly Creeper]

Workshop and prison assuming vanilla mehcanics, means you will have all the prisoners inside with the workshop workers, if they atempt a prison break, depending on the number of prisoners not only will you put your workers at risk, they will have access to weapons dropped by the workers.

Also, if you are like me you will have single job dedicated pawns that sometimes have no combat experience and are therefore weak when it comes to fighting. When I used this trick what ends up happening most of the times there is a berserk prisoner or a prison break and they beat my workers and manage to flee until they meet the turrets.

Only use the prison workshop tip if your workers can handle all the prisoners, as it can be annoying to relocate all the workshops when they can't.

As a final tip avoid making stockpiles in prisons. Wood can be used as a weapon, and so can beer bottles.

[Orkestrated]

Also, Having a super-room is great, until a mortar lands in the middle of it and sets everything on fire then all of a sudden, all your pawns will are sleeping outside, probably on the floor, without any rec, or a dining room until its all rebuilt. Part of the advantage of having a modular base is that, If a room gets destroyed by a siege or anything like that, Its only 1 room that served 1 purpose so it isn't that detrimental of a loss. Your room can fit 21 Pawns but if it goes up in flames (like those floors and furniture would) then thats 21 pawns without beds. If you use a modular base design and have 21 pawns and 1 bedroom gets destroyed, well only 1 pawn is without a bed.. If your layout works for you, thats awesome, wish you the best of luck with it but It does have some glaring issues that need addressing.

[Orkestrated]

Okay, So while I agree, all three rooms need to be cleaned, I don't agree with them being connected. In my opinion, kitchen should be combined with or adjacent too the freezer (so the ingredients are close to the stove for quick access) and both rooms should be adjacent too or in close proximity to the dining room (so people can quickly and efficiently get their meals and eat)

While the hospital, which as you said, needs to be clean BUT also, needs to have shelves in it to store medicine on, I feel should be close too/connected with your jail(s) So that when capturing a downed enemy your pawn only has a short trip to run to get the herbal meds for the prisoner AND if they try a break out and you shoot them up, they are close to meds.

As for the research, I like to put the research room close to the bedroom of my researcher, making it more efficient for them.