Can someone explain room-roles for me? (Dining room, kitchen ect.)

[stigma]

Hey all,

The room system is new to me. Either it got added recently, or I never knew it existed before... and I'm having a hard time understanding it.

Firstly, what game-mechanics function does it serve? Is it only to make "impressive dining room" ect. bonuses possible, or does it have other uses than this?

Secondly, what are the rules for what a room gets designated as? The wiki says that a table is required for a dining hall, and a crafting table for a workshop - but what happens when these conflict, such as having both in the same room? In a quick one-time test when I tried it got set to a workshop despite having loads of eating areas, and apparently workshops have "no demands" ... does this mean that I am effectively gimping the potential of a beautiful dining by having any crafting stations there and I need very specialized rooms? Even just a stove in the room (a logical thing for an eating area) does the same thing by designating it as a kitchen.

Am I forced to choose between sharing one good large room or specialize it to get a bonus but then having crafters and cooks spend their time in cramped working areas? (or else spend a huge area for worksshops and kitchens that is 95% empty space...)

I hope someone can fill me in on how this works, and maybe also give me some basic strategies for optimizing. Thanks!
-Stigma

[Mutineer]

Basically you need to optimize most common tasks your colonist do. Lets look on colonist day. He waik up. hungry and probably not well entertain. He going to pick some food and then move to room with table to eat.
Optimisation - his sleeping room should be near food storage and food storage should be next to dinning room.
Then he probably would like to entertain himself. Forms of entertainment - socializing, using entertainment objects, like chess, hoop, billiard, watching tv. The best place to put all of them is same dining room, to reduce amount of walking colonist need to do. In addition it is good idea to raise beauty of this room as colonists spend a lots of time in and it is improve his activities. The more entertainment options you have in this room, the less chance colonist will use less efficient options like watching sun raise, walking, et. with could take him to mach more agly parts of your base, or later in base existence could be just very far away. Then colonists go to work. again, it might be a good idea to have stationary work done mostly near your dinning/entertaining room, so colonists did not had to walk far. I tend to put research benches, been expensive and not needed access to materials into dinning/entertainment room. Other example could be communication bench. Then I have separate working room with have storage area for ready products and equipment racks to speed up all work. Next to it is store room for raw resources, which often ugly and you want to keep your colonists working away from ugly spaces. I will try to beatify work room a bit to keep colonists happy. That is basic rooms i use.

[Mutineer]

Some more rooms and optimization.
Kitchen. Kitchen is where you transform raw food into ready to eat food. In my believe it should be located next to your main grow area, as to minimize hauling. Basically i promote one big kitchen witch double as freezer with probably addition storage space next by for slow spoiling food. You can channel your waking colonist try kitchen to pick up food or you can have storage in the dining room to with you hail ready to use food. Please note, meals are more optimum to store space wise then raw food, it is my believe if you can freese food to transfer raw food to meals as fast as possible, because you create buffer in case of emergency. 200 ready meals is not that mach for colony of 20.
2 other important rooms which should be somewhere near food storage:
Prison and hospital. You need to feed your prisoners and your sick/injured. Minimizing time your warden/doctor spend on that very important.

I will put dinning table to prison room . hospital should be near common room to, as it could be a good idea to sent your sick to eat them self and then entertain before forcing them back to bed.

[b0rsuk]

The room system has very minor impact on gameplay because you have to pour lots and lots of wealth and effort into a room to make colonists notice...and keep it clean. Typically high quality floor (stone tiles or carpet), smoothed floor, and multiple sculptures or flower pots.

Then they get between +1 and +4 mood for some time. On the upside, it can stack if they use the room multiple times.

This works in dining rooms, recreation rooms and maybe a few others like hospital.

Jealous and greedy colonists actually need to have the abovementioned stuff or they become unhappy.

Hospitals need to be clean.

Room system recognizes: dining room (has a table), bedrooms (has a single bed), kitchen (stove), hospital (medical bed), workshop (work tables), barn (animal beds), prison (prison beds). It doesn't recognize storage rooms, greenhouses or hydroponic rooms, no battery/power rooms, no freezer, no tomb (not 100% sure on this one).

The end.

[stigma]

Mutineer, thanks for the advice - but I think maybe you misunderstood me a little. I was looking for information very specifically to the "room role" system. Other than that your advice is very good though, so thanks for answering.

B0rsuk, thank you - but what you mention there are sort of the parts I know about already. Can you have hybrid rooms? Can you self-sabotage your potential mood bonuses from rooms by having "inappropriate" types of furniture in those rooms?

From the reading I've done on the forums and other places since I made the initial post I kind of suspect that rooms can only have one "type", so hybrid rooms can't get bonuses for both. Seems like different furniture score differently for certain types of rooms, so essentially if you put too many joy items in your diningroom rather than more tables it may eventually switch from counting as a dining room and turn into a recroom.

I'm going to try experimenting with more tables in a diningroom and see if I can avoid it turning into a kitchen from a stove or production bench also being present - as those roomtypes AFAIK can't have any mood bonuses and are thus pretty undesireable as a role I think... If I am understanding it right.

-Stigma

[Mutineer]

There basically only 4 types of rooms.
Room that has a bed - bedroom.
Room that has more then 1 bed - barrack.
Room that has prisoner bed - prison.

Rooms that have no bed - anything else. Any other links to function define by items in room and modifiers room can have. Practcally the only way you can sabotage yourself is by making room your colonists spend most of time in ugly room.

[b0rsuk]

... and Laboratory, for a room with research tables. I don't count barracks. So that's 8 types of rooms.

You pretty much summed it up. There are no hybrid rooms, and I think some rooms don't yield mood bonuses (Dining room and recreation room yield them for sure, hospitals used to but I'm not sure they can anymore). It's mostly too expensive to make rooms impressive. The cheapest option seems to be smoothed floor + flower pots, if you have 10 flower pots in dining room it costs 10*15 = 150 material + standing lamp + heater if you have winter.
Yes I think you can sabotage it by making it a room type that doesn't get a bonus. I mean how does a colonist use barn ?  Bonuses are linked to using a room.

Focus on bumping each of the room's individual stats: beauty, wealth, cleanliness... A wooden sculpture is beautiful and fast to make, but not very valuable. Armchairs are not pretty, but very comfortable (comfort actually is not counted for impressiveness).

Oh yeah, 10th kind of room - recreational room.

[Calahan]

There is also a "Rec room" for joy related stuff.