Your Strangest Bases

[Penguinmanereikel]

What are the weirdest, most eccentric and/or most esoteric bases that you've made in RimWorld? This can't include bases that are weird because of content from a mod, like guard huskies armed with sniper rifles. That would just make it too easy. (You can tell me if this rule is too strict.) It can be weird even in the simple things like building everything in one room to building your entire base as seperate buildings spanning across your local map (I don't mean multiple settlements, I mean 1 settlement with buildings all over it)

[asanbr]

Some alphas back, I had a base that either had too much food or somehow didn't depend on growing food. Can't remember.

Either way, I somehow had no problem letting a poison ship stay on the map for long times, so I would build large wall sections across the map so that any raid towards my base would have to pass the poison ship and the mechs, effectively using them as guard dogs.

It was hilarious and they took out so many raids before they were finally down.

This was before trade caravans.

Will add screenshot later if I can find one.

[khun_poo]

All my base is similar with 13*13 building block. The difference is kill box.

My strangest kill box design is a rose field with a separate single wood pillar block to cover for enemy from bullet in the middle. Then light the whole field with fire and let it spread. Next is focus fire at the pillar until it break. Most of the time, each of the roof collapse will get 1 or 2 casualties.

Still, not work very well with mechanoid and manhunter pack. 

[patoka]

i guess my first base was pretty weird. i started building random rooms and extensions and what not, always experimenting with how much space i needed for torches and stuff to work the most efficiently.

at some point i noticed (pretty damn late) that the pawns didnt like to sleep all together in one big room, so i assigned them seperate rooms, which then looked very orderly in comparison to the rest of my big weird building.

obviously everything connected to the main big room. quite soon i removed all walls inside the big weird part to make it one very long room with lots of corners and curves to improve movement speed.

not too much later i noticed how pretty much the only use of rock chunks is making floorings out of, which i gathered too much of (but i didnt yet get how you can make furniture out of them or even how art worked or how you made that and many other things) so i put rock floors everywhere, luckily i knew not to use flagstone for that to further improve beauty.
you could perfectly see where old rooms were because they often used different rocks.
i used all the rock types because i deconstructed all ancient buildings and their respective floorings to get more and cheap material for floors.

it was quite a bit later when i noticed i could build sterile tiles in a central hospital for more cleanliness, so that not everyone would just cure in their own bed that i would make a hospital bed for as long as the sickness remains. then i noticed how people didnt like the hospital, so i made it larger and since they still didnt like it i made it even larger.

in the beginning my prison was tiny so i enlarged it like three times and you can see all the different sizes in the flooring. also, i fused it with an old storage room, so i had some issues with weaponized prisoners in the beginning and them taking drugs and what not. but i solved everything by increasing the size of my by then main building a lot and putting storages in two wings of it on the outside of them. heating and cooling was also an age old issue, after many cold and hot nights i figured out a complicated (well, not really) system of cooling, heating and vents. i would only ever directly cool the prison and the main huge weird part, because those were my original two rooms and summer came first. by the time winter rolled in my pawns had their own rooms so i would only heat the main compartment anymore and then let the heat go to the other rooms, while trying to build as many rooms as possible around this main part to conserve as much heat/cold as possible.

storage rooms were never cooled or heated for saving energy, but i still had a very significant cooler room with ridiculous amounts of food because i got stuck with quite a few pawns that could only really cook aside from minor other abilities. i had a lot of tries to make optimal use of it to only slight success. in one particularly cold winter (due to cold snap mid winter) i even built a few cooling units into the wall between the cooler room and the main part in hopes of rl physics helping me out, but since that isnt more efficient at heating than proper heaters, i just kept to heaters from then on.

i first built and kept all batteries outside and made a roof over them to keep them dry so that most cables wouldnt go through the building because of zzzzzzzz. but as the building increased in size and i needed more energy in more and more places this plan didnt really work out anymore.

some other details were how the nightly active pawns always slept in the same room with someone else because they wouldnt ever disturb eachother's sleep and how i made all sleeping rooms' flooring out of white carpet so that i could see dirt more easily to make them fix it. also, i didnt have anything to make it out of for almost a year because i didnt get that you couldnt use wool or leather to make it. i guess i got the wording wrong back then, as english isnt my first language.

i always let my pets sleep outside near the edge of the map on all sides, i tried to distribute these animal sleeping spots evenly so that the wargs hunt newly arrived animals more actively and the muffalo herds graze more and eat less of my food aswell. in that particular winter i built a stable with plenty of hay and sleeping spots for freezing animals. turns out they dont use them automatically and will rather freeze to death. later when i understood kibble i also made some of that and put it in there. i only made hay once and it's been years since then. i still have plenty. i believe the sleeping spots are highly effective at making my animals not eat my food, as once they ate more than i could produce so i had to cut them down to like 20% to survive a winter. but they multiply quite fast and my animal herders recruit quite fast aswell so a year later i could sell the superfluous ones again. btw the stable is cooled so that the food doesnt go bad, but also because i hoped a cooler set to a warmer temperature would also heat up a room in case of harsh winters for the animals. didnt work.

i experimented with a killbox once for the bugs in the ancient structure, but i didnt invent auto guns yet, so i just built a bunch of wooden deadfall traps and made a line of sandbags for my colonist to shoot them. i still needed a gutsy and quick pawn to open the building, but that one could escape to the side and another quick builder filled the hole it left with a wall. workedout surprisingly well. i first experimented with building a labyrinth of wooden walls and deadfall traps, but that wasnt as efficient, and anonther try was first having a little way without any traps on the side so that my pawn could flee through there after opening the structure without a third pawn building a wooden wall over his exit but the second one jumping over the sand bags in the end. i guess there is no need for me to tell that that didnt work either.

once i was afraid of wood shortages for various reasons, so i made a little teak forest. didnt need it to this very day.

i also mined in straight lines for while to ensure maximum visibility of valuable ores and speed to move around the map. i then extended this system of straight lines solely for discovering ores and then a third time i mined in very specific patterns to ensure 100% that i have mined everything aside from normal rocks. this is also the time i became conscious that i didnt have any sandstone or granite on my map, everything else came from ancient structures, raids, caravans and trades. these formations are quite characteristic aswell.

and lastly, i never cut any trees to make room for sowing fields and extensions of my building because for the longest time i was afraid of deforestation (i guess that's because of a very early alphabeaver event where they turned manhunter after the first random hunting dog bite.) i never really got a feel for how much wood is useful to have and how much is too much or too little. so i always ended up having lots of lumber laying around all over the map or having an empty storage or a way too big storage with thousands of pieces of wood in them. i guess that is also why i later made so many wooden statues and still use torches. but it also is the reason for why my building has two very long extensions. it's just that i built wherever i could because i would only cut adult trees, so sometimes a big patch would mature and i suddenly had enough space to build or to make sowing fields. that's probably also why i have way too much food, i am just happy to be able to use the sowing fields xD

i got my hands on a mega screen tv very early on aswell. it was just after i started building coolers. so there was always a random ass megascreen tv in an otherwise very primitive wooden house. (i think it was a very lucky early deal with some locals)

lastly, but i guess most people would assume this, i had always all my productivity furniture and tables to eat in that main big compartment. may seem weird, if you didnt do it like that in the beginning, i might be slow in that regard, but also kinda efficient.

i also put anything drug related after the first issue with ambrosia in a seperate ancient building that i made a door for that i then sealed with a wooden wall block to stop my chemically interested and druggies to access it (or even prisoners as in the beginning). but then i had to increase the size of my cooler like 5 times due to food overload and now it is connected and cooled through a vent. also, luciferium is walled one more time inside of that room because i was afraid some retard would punch through the wooden wall. also, the stone walls act as additional defense in case someone on a berserk drug rage wanted to access it.

sorry for the long post, but i added some pics of everything i talked about. unfortunately i dont have the save game anymore but these are some leftover screenshots from almost year 4. you can see almost everything i talked about, luckily, except the prison improvements because half of it isnt lit because a few months or so earlier the prisoners fought a lot and i had to split them. you can still see approximately where i started with the tutorial, because it is just above the oldest and smallest part of the prison and it is too densely stuffed with furniture and weirdly built around it.

[attachment deleted by admin: too old]

[b0rsuk]

I frequently impose challenges on myself to get to know the game better or just test Rimworld.

One base I think back in A12 was with no mining allowed at all, I only destroyed one rock tile with handgrenades. I built in the desert and won. Selling art got VERY tedious.

I had a base where I planted no plants in the ground and in hydroponics. There was also winter, and I made a scenario with several cows and chickens. I wanted to see if the game can be played without Growing skill basically. It's theoretically possible, but extremely awkward. Like, you manually harvest berries and try to freeze them for winter for nutrient paste dispenser but NO, they will avoid it like the plague. Stockpiling berries for winter is extremely micro-intensive. I had eggs, but not enough eggs, I wanted to cook fine meals. I aborted that game because it was such a chore.

I successfully played an all melee tribal colony. The only ranged weapons allowed were EMP grenades. No mortars, no rocket launchers, nothing. It was Fun and it made me design my base like never before. It looked all wrong, there were many walls in odd places to break line of sight, and 2-tile wide corridors. The same base managed to harvest 453 devilstrand before first winter (took 2 average researchers working on it from start, and one skill 8 grower who became skill 10 before the research finished).

I started a colony in Boreal Forest with a labrador and 3 geezers, the least crippled had only Frail or Bad Back, I don't remember (back when it was more serious). With short summer it was HARD to build a hovel to sleep in and a heated (geyser) greenhouse for potatoes.

I had a farming colony in the desert, with hydroponic tables outside. Other than occasional heat wave, it works great.