Seperate Bedrooms Worth it?

[tymur999]

I feel like seperate bedrooms take up too much space. This is not very good if you are being hindered by marshes, mountains, etc. where you have little space. Barracks debuff is easy to counter by putting statues everywhere, and the disturbed sleep thing is easy to counter as well by putting the door far away from the beds. What are your opinions?

[Kiter5]

do you mean each bedroom a stand alone building... vs.. everyone sleeping in one large community room?

My husband makes a big building and puts the bedrooms inside the building- so they go into the building... then into their bedrooms. I have only ever done the long rows/groups of bedrooms that open into the outside it seems. I put doors between all the rooms- which one will connect to the great room/dining room/food storage.. so when they need to hide out from acid rain or 57 mad camels they can all sleep in their beds and still eat, etc.
I forbid the go-between doors unless of emergency.
(been playing for 3 months)

[Toast]

A more advanced colony can afford enough manpower/money to make a communal barracks so breathtaking that no one will mind sleeping in it, but in the early-to-mid days of a colony, those small debuffs add up too quickly to make it a reliable strategy. Whatever you save in space or time you give up in the decrease in happiness and thus slower work speed and increased potential for mental breaks.

Also, I try to make life nice for my poor colonists, and I'm an introvert who values the sacred privacy of my personal room greatly, so I try to respect my colonists' wishes for the same. 

[tymur999]

You can still make the bedrooms extremely impressive early-game. I have a tribe, and all my people sleep in extremely impressive barracks. I just put carpet and a bunch of statues.

[Dashthechinchilla]

I use the community room with adjacent bedrooms even in swamps. Though to be fair, when I play a swamp I enable the mod that changes pumps from 60 to 22 days.

[jamaicancastle]

Between the passive bedroom mood hit and people constantly getting disturbed in their sleep, I find individual rooms are one of my earliest priorities. They don't have to be all that big; even once the colony is reasonably established I don't usually go for bigger than about 3x4. I normally have multiple bedrooms that empty out into a single dining room/rec room/general common area, which is where all the decorations go. (If they eat and take joy in the same impressive room, it gives them both mood buffs.) It's also pretty easy to heat/cool via vents from the common room.

[Spaceman]

I would generally recommend it, just to not have to worry about those debuffs. You also only have a few colonists in the beginning, so they don't take up too much space (depending on the size of the map you are playing on). Then again, I'm the one who typically makes 6x7 single bed and 8x8 double bed (for when they couple up) bedrooms, so I may be an outlier. I have them fit with the terrain, which helps in them not taking up extra space the few outer mountain rock layers weren't already taking up. Giving them beach-front rooms with windows, even though the water is ice cold most of the time, gives them no right to complain either.

[sick puppy]

playing on higher difficulties gets rid of noob-mood-bonus, so i feel myself forced to get all the good mood possible. i keep my base clean, go for carpets quite early and build 5x5 becrooms with two daylilies each. as soon as i have a decent builder i upgrade all my beds (if the lumber amount of the map allows it) to at least normal, later on i go for good, then supreme. supreme is late game though, usually. as long as i lack the resources though (especially on tribal starts where you dont really have fridges and have to look out for so many things, having enough fire wood being one one of them) but also on just generally difficult maps like ice sheet/sea ice/desert/extreme desert) i just build a single huge room. it might start out as an 9x9 or just 6x6 (or in case of rich explorers on sea ice as low as 3x4) but soon gets increased to around 12x12. if i lack the resources to build a seperate room for everyone still, for example with a tribal start and early recruits, joined wanderers or refugees, i might even increase the room above this size by adding pillars in the one-room house. downside is, everyone sleeps and works together, meaning constant -8 on mood because of disturbed sleep. but since you can very easily keep the room warm/cool, beautiful, clean and it's huge, you get your mood back (and more even) very easily and it costs you barely a thing. if i have to do this for more than a quadrum or two, another upside crystallizes: you have very short hauling distances even in the worst cases and doors dont stop your colonists constantly. protip: to avoid beauty debuffs in one-room houses, expand your roof by up to 6 tiles outside of the house and put stockpiles under them. works perfectly, except that it's a bit warm/cold in comparison to room temperature. like this i can very easily have a very impressive barrack, rec room, dining room, hospital in case of injuries and still keep everything clean for faster research speed and low probability of food poisoning and infections. really, cleanliness is the most important factor in bases like this. i always keep your house clean with a dedicated janitor with a small home area, but nothing else. if fire breaks out, i solve it with armed pawns, not with the home area and auto-firefighting. too annoying to do and if my janitor happens to be a pyromaniac, he will start to clean the forest and march. no need for that.