What you must have in a midgame base:

• Large-sized freezer with at least 10 days' worth of food
  
• Cover structures around the base
  
• Self-sufficient food supply + kitchens to cook food
  
• Sufficient power supply + Backup Power
  
• Medium-grade Hospital
  
• Warehouse

What you should have for a decent midgame base:

• Private bedrooms for your colonists
  
• Dining room
  
• Recreational room
  
• Workshop
  
• Laboratory
  
• Prison with personal cells

If you don't have personal bedrooms, or have awful bedrooms barely big enough for a bed, you should now upgrade to a decent bedroom at least.

Bedrooms should be at least be 3x5; this gives you enough space to squeeze in a bed and a table, without making the colonist feel cramped.

Obviously you will need a bed for your colonists to sleep in. For better comfort and rest effectiveness, make sure the beds are of Normal quality or above, otherwise deconstruct and try again until you get it. If you have lovers or couples you will need a double bed so they can sleep together and spend some... 'quality time'.

You should also have a table in the bedrooms, as colonists often carry food with them, and without a table, colonists will resort to eating their breakfast on the floor. Also turn off the 'Gather Spot' option otherwise colonists will go off into the bedrooms to chill off on their own, most likely in someone else's bedroom (though nobody seems to care).

Originally posted by Johnhwc9:

An armoury is also quite handy, put it in the same area as bedrooms and have all your armour and weapons there. Prisoners can't get there without getting caught and you don't need to worry about the moving debuff of armour, just put it on in a raid!
Make sure walls are steel, gap, steel (stone works too) and make sure the gap got steel tiles or stone tiles so no fire. It can also be emergency room in mid game but in late game u may want something more.

Giving your colonists a table to eat on is an early game thing; now you should consider building something better for them.

A dining room should be built as close as possible near the freezer/ food storage so your colonists will actually use the dining room, instead of eating on the floor of the storage, giving them a -3 mood debuff. This is especially true for larger freezers, in which colonists retrieving food from the far end may simply give up searching for a table and eat on the floor.

Expect your dining room to be pretty crowded during meal times, so have enough chairs for at least half your colony. Colonists will also hang out in the dining room if you set them to do so, occupying seats.

For increased mood buffs, decorate your dining room using sculptures, plant pots or quality furniture.

While in early game you can live on a rudimentary hospital, or even a spare room converted into a temporary infirmary, in midgame you should have something more dedicated than that.

For starters, a decent hospital should have sterile tiles as a floor instead of any other flooring. Sterile floors provide a slight cleanliness buff that can increase surgery success chance and reduce wound infection chance.

Hospitals should be built somewhere where colonists can quickly bring their downed comrades to treat them. Keep doors open, or use autodoors so they don't obstruct colonists' access. If you need to you can also build a mini-hospital or clinic elsewhere in the base.

If you have hospital beds researched, obviously you will want to use them instead of your regular beds. Being made specially for medical purposes, they provide a boost to treatment quality and immunity gain speed, meaning that your colonists will gain immunity to diseases faster, hence recovering faster and are less likely to die. Colonists resting in a hospital bed also heal faster than they do when on a normal bed.

The vitals monitor brings even better boosts to treatment and immunity gain, so once you've researched them it's recommended that you put them down near your hospital beds.

Store your medicine near (not in) your hospital so your doctors can quickly grab them to patch up colonists before they bleed to death. Sometimes just that little distance can already make a difference between life and death.

Originally posted by Chuck:

Why not put your medicine on a shelf in the hospital? Wouldnt it be faster to access the medicine if you dont have to go through a door to get it?.

Originally posted by TOYG:

Probably this guide was written before shelves were in vanilla.
Herbal medicine will degrade if left in heat, though even in relatively high heat IIRC it takes 3 months to degrade so it's pretty safe to store as you described.

Decorating hospitals to make them beautiful can give colonists inside a great mood boost (max +15, plus impressive room stats). This is good, especially considering that some colonists will stay in the hospital for a long time (such as the severely injured, incapacitated or sick).

To provide joy, you may also build or buy televisions to install into your hospitals. Patients lying in hospital beds within the viewing area will watch TV to entertain themselves when they are bored, and you won't need colonists coming to cheer them up as their only joy source.

If you have even more resources you can build a separate room for each colonist. While they don't mind sleeping with others in a hospital, they do get disturbed by them walking around, and dirt can more easily affect cleanliness as well.

You should build your kitchen near your cold storage, just as you build the workshop near your warehouse.

Kitchens should only have cooking stoves, and sterile tiles for flooring to reduce the chance of food poisoning. The butcher table is best put elsewhere due to the heavy cleanliness debuff.

Originally posted by Xeno42:

Food in you kitchen won't cause cleanliness to go down if its on a shelf. This way your cook can produce faster and your freezer stays cooler.

You may want to have a room dedicated to research, with hi-tech research benches, multi-analyzers to increase research speed and unlock new research, as well as sterile tiles to keep the room clean, increasing research speed. For even better cleanliness, restrict the lab to your researchers and janitors only, reducing traffic and hence the amount of dirt in the room.

You can build a separate room to accommodate colonists who will undergo surgery, to make sure that colonists undergo medical operations in the cleanest of places.

Your operating theater should be forbidden at all cases except when someone is about to have surgery. This prevents colonists from tracking dirt or blood into it, staining it.

Like colonists, prisoners will also suffer from the mood penalties associated with being kept together in a prison barracks. In addition, prison breaks are also more serious should they happen, for every prisoner locked up in the same room will simultaneously break out, while prisoners in different cells may choose not to join. Thus, you should keep them separated.

Each prison should have a table with a chair, a bed, and a light source. This is the bare minimum you need for a prisoner to be decently kept. Decorating the cell and making bigger cells also increase mood bonuses for easier recruitment. They can't use any joy items put in the cell, but you can add them anyway for a better cell.

Prisons should have doors facing towards your base, but not outwards. When prisoners escape they will go towards your base instead of away, giving your wardens time to deal with the break.


Like your early-game prison barracks except it should be only be used when your prison cells are overflowing. Put your less important prisoners inside them while assigning your more valuable prisoners into the cells.

Originally posted by Johnhwc9:

Then of course for a bigger challenge just put armour in middle of prison and watch your kill count go really high.

You should have a wide variety of joy sources so your colonists don't get bored repeatedly throwing horseshoes at a pin, or wandering around aimlessly. Putting all of them in a room also provides a mood bonus after a colonist uses the facilities inside, depending on the impressiveness of the room.

If you're in midgame, basic resources will not be that much of an issue. You can afford to build more joy facilities such as chess tables or billiards tables. In addition, you can also obtain telescopes or televisions (coming in tube, flatscreen or megascreen varieties, in order of effectiveness) from exotic traders, which provide different kinds of joy for additional variety.

Similarly to the dining room, decorating it can improve the mood bonus from using the room.

Each room should have its temperature regulated by some method or another.

Large rooms such as your dining room or rec room should have their own heaters and coolers. If they are interconnected you may want to open doors for faster colonist access and temperature exchange. Though if you choose to do so, remember to close doors if a fire breaks out in the room.

Originally posted by Oops:

Closing doors is in a lot of cases the exact OPPOSITE of what you want to do during a fire. if you don't leave a path between the fire and some outside air, the temperature skyrockets very quickly (hundreds of degrees), rapidly injuring pawns who try to fight the fire with searing-hot air burns.

Smaller rooms such as your bedrooms should be thermally connected to a larger central space through vents. Your heaters and coolers should be all placed outside the bedrooms. This reduces the number of heaters and coolers you need to build while keeping your bedrooms at a comfy temperature at the same time.

Keep in mind that you will also need to be prepared in case of a freak temperature event such as heat waves or cold snaps. Without enough temperature devices rooms can get uncomfortably cold or hot, and in severe cases begin to cause hypothermia or heatstroke.

Workshops are places where you put all your crafting stations and benches, probably including your cooking stoves as well. You should put them near your warehouse so your colonists can spend less time hauling the needed resources to the workshop for crafting. Also remember to put chairs of any sort at the interaction spot so your colonists won't have to keep standing while crafting.

Putting all the crafting stations inside the warehouse isn't recommended despite the convenience, as colonists do not enjoy the sight of random objects laying around. This lowers their beauty opinion of their surroundings, in turn giving mood penalties. You should however put crafting materials near the workshop for quicker retrieval.

Mods used in this guide from RimWorld Workshop, mod 0.17:

* Essential to have imo

Special thanks goes to the following people for sharing tips and information:

• Oops
  
• Xeno42
  
• Chuck
  
• TOYG
  
• Johnhwc9

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