Post your lean moneymaker colony layouts.

[fritzgryphon]

I'm trying to find all the tricks for making an efficient base layout that makes money fast and crushes the tech tree.  Things like getting the colony compact, minimize the building time, minimize structure wealth, cut down on hauling distances, find the cheapest ways to get mood buffs, and so on.  I'll show the one I've pretty much settled on, but I hope you'll share your plans.  I'm pretty new to the game, so please feel free to point out anything I missed.

https://i.imgur.com/Ky4rx7e.jpg (huge pic)

It starts with picking a decent growing area in a defensible location.  In this case, by the sea.  In this case, the farms are exposed, because herbivores haven't been a problem on this map.  Cotton is grown until carpets are done, then switch to a little devilstrand for clothing, and a lotta psychoid.

The vegetable storage room, dining room and kitchen are directly adjacent to the food fields to minimize hauling.  The kitchen is far enough away from the nearest dirt tile, that tracking mud into the kitchen is unlikely.  There will be stone sidewalks placed outside to reduce dirt even more.   Simple meals are dropped on the floor near the table, right in the doorway to negate the -4 beauty.

The dining room and rec room are just big enough to be "very spacious", and with a statue, get "very impressive" for the mood buffs.   With a few more statues they will be "unbelievably impressive".  "Wondrously impressive" doesn't seem worth it, because I'd have to make the rooms double their size, or add a crazy amount of wealth to them.

The stove nearest the freezer makes PSMs, which are stockpiled in the central trade beacon room.  The trade beacon room has a prisoner bed so no one will eat the PSMs.  The PSM has the same value per work as fine or lavish, but they don't need to be refrigerated.  The value per work is less than drugs, but at least it's something that exotic traders will buy (and gotta get rid of all the meat somehow).

Butcher table is in the freezer, right next to the trade beacon room, so pelts and horns can be quickly hauled.

There is one workshop with all work benches attached to two tool cabinets.  All the benches are directly adjacent to the trade beacon room to minimize hauling.  Raw materials are put on the floor near the appropriate benches.   Shelves are not used because they take up space or slow down movement, unlike stuff on the floor.  The beauty penalty can be offset by a tile floor or one statue.

Psychoid is grown directly outside the workshop, and is hauled right behind the drug bench for rapid flake production.  The tile directly on the drug labs interaction point has the highest priority, so it is almost always topped off.   The flake work order has an ingredient radius of 3, so the drug maker doesn't walk out to the fields to pick up small amounts of leaves.  Hauling animals are allowed to deliver leaves to the bench, but are restricted out of the flake and PSM zones.

There is only one trade beacon room and it only holds trade goods, and some excess materials for workbenches.  Any surplus steel, gold, uranium, wood, jade, etc can just go outside.  The chemfuel should really go in a small room of it's own, just in case.  It would be a small room.  Chemfuel is worth less than it's component parts, so there's no reason to stockpile it.

Bedrooms are barely big enough to be "average sized" and with carpet and a piece of furniture can be made "impressive" for the mood buff.  There are smaller bedrooms for ascetics and/or temporary prison cells.  I notice some players use two-tile bedrooms, but I don't want to take the awful debuff.  I wonder if there's an ideal minimal bedroom without a debuff.  Once the hospital has a statue, all bedrooms will connect to a beautiful space.

All bedrooms are in the interior so the perimeter of the base can be lined with doors.  All perimeter areas count toward either the dining room, rec room, paste room or hospital (no empty corridors).  The paste room can either be a prison or hospital as needed.  Whenever possible, paste is the primary food to save time and money, especially if the colony is hurting and there is a risk of food poisoning.

Interior doors are always stone, and held open by default to help movement.  They can be closed as needed during a raid.  Exterior doors are stone, save for a few that are wood, because they open quicker.  The wood doors would not be used while door-cheesing during manhunter pack events, so the animals don't attack them.

The vulnerable sides of the settlement are covered by door-sandbag bunkers, which also serve as protection for tree farms or geothermal generators.  During a raid these are be manned and pawns hop from door to door, taking advantage of raiders' weapon warmup and state changes. 

Mortars, when built, will be out of the way but left exposed, like the solar panels and windmills.  It's fine if these things draw aggro away from your pawns.  Tables and chairs will also be built outside for this purpose.

The research room is gone, but it was a small room with a sterile tile floor for the research speed bonus.  The room is only big enough for the bench, analyzer, chair and light, no more.  At first, two benches, then one, now zero.  I used two researchers and skipped a lot of tech to get to microelectronics and deep drills, and luckily Cass rough didn't make me pay for it.

The hospital may get hospital beds, vitals monitor, and TV, but it can stay small.  Pawns only get a mood bonus for an impressive hospital when they are recovering in it.  With a statue, it will be nice enough.

Starting to build a greenhouse in case of toxic fallout.  Until then, it'll stay unroofed and use hydroponics for the 280% growing rate.  It, too, will have doors and sandbags to fire from.

Bodies go in the mass grave and get burned when it's full.  Graves and sarcophagi can do recreation, but it shouldn't be necessary if you have other recreation sources.

And that's my modest little base.

[bbqftw]

you can offset awful bedroom with 6x2 and clean with wood floors (or clean + 1 plant pot), but 6x2 realistically caps at slightly impressive

more chairs than necessary but you have right concept that sculptures give many orders higher beauty than most sources. Many experienced players miss this!

without exterior wallin you can say goodbye to all your power generators on the higher difficulties.

[Greep]

All in one room is pretty great.  Hospital, barracks, workshop, dining room, rec room.  Get it to extremely impressive which is not hard from the wealth of buildings and size needed and you've got a whole lot done for very little work.

[dragonalumni]

nerf inc in 3
2
1
..

[Greep]

Well all in one has been a thing for a while.  It just recently added barracks in a recent update.  It does risk being completely trashed by a single drop pod, though, so there's that.

[fritzgryphon]

without exterior wallin you can say goodbye to all your power generators on the higher difficulties.

Yeah, if I played harder than rough I would wall myself in a mountain or something.  I usually just powergame to a ship ASAP, so neglecting defense speeds it up.

Can you get the impressive rec/dining/hospital mood buffs with one room?

[bbqftw]

You can indeed. And people like working in beautiful environs (+15 mood at max) so your triple benefit from sculptures.

I wouldn't worry too much about integrating impressive hospital. Since people in hospital will be sleeping a lot and mood does not change while asleep. And foot traffic there may lead to more pressure on cleaners.

[fritzgryphon]

Dang, that is a good idea.  Can't believe I missed that.  Maybe have an impressive workshop/dining/rec/hospital room and a separate garret apartment.  Bedrooms don't even really have to be defended if the furniture is cheap.

e.  Wow, that is cheesy.  My base is 1/3 the size now, and no one minds listening to the workbenches while watching TV (and the benches improve the wealth of the room, too).  Plus the wounded can watch the megascreen while they are being patched up.

[dragonalumni]

There is some infection mechanic, I don't know how it works yet but if you look as hospital bed it says the room infection rate multiplier.. Not sure how the would work a single open room.

[fritzgryphon]

Work benches have a small cleanliness penalty (-2 for machining, -5 for stonecutting), but it's not significant.  You can put a patch of sterile tile to counter it.  If anything, the huge size of the room will help mitigate the effect of bloody tiles, making the infection chance lower overall than a smaller dedicated hospital.

Check this layout:  All-in-one room with just over 350 space.  Super compact (could be smaller but I wanted "extremely spacious"), all mood buffs, medical beds near doors.  I'll add hydroponics to the west side, and this should give almost the bare minimum walking distances.  After all, every second a production pawn spends walking is worth a silver.

https://i.imgur.com/9hlgouA.jpg

[zizard]

btw, the various "phrase levels" for spaciousness, beauty, wealth, etc, do not have any threshold effects. The numerical values contribute smoothly to the impressiveness, and it is the "phrase levels" of this that has effects on mood.

[Grimelord82]

So compact!
It's been almost a week since I booted the game up, but with fields like that I would worry about Blight very much.

Blight events seem to attack any contiguous set of growing zone. So a simple 1 width walkway in 5x squares or whatever you like both speed up your pawns and cuts down on blight (pun mortar incoming)

[fritzgryphon]

Blight can jump gaps.  The roads are handy for the move speed and minimizing dirt, though.

With all the space saved with the mega-room, I can put some power inside the wall without the settlement getting too big.

https://i.imgur.com/i8dDVT7.jpg

Some thoughts:

If I had planned the psychoid farm and the size of the exterior wall better, I could have fit more windmills inside the wall.  They have to be planned at the very beginning, as well as what non-blocking tiles to put around them (crops, hydroponics, panels, etc).  I can deconstruct and rebuild, but that's against the spirit of an efficient playthrough.

The workshop could have been closer to the psychoid, for less hauling.   

By suspending/resuming the PSM bills, I can control vegetable inventory.  Don't need a veggie storage space anymore.  The PSMs will be the emergency food (though an inefficient one).  In case of toxic fallout, the hydroponics room can grow rice.

If the psychoid leaf stack on the drug lab interaction point ever goes empty, the pawn will drop flake there.  Then, the nearest leaf stack will be at least 1 tile away, which reduces production speed by half.  The flake bill should be suspended until there is a good supply of leaves near the bench, and there are haulers ready to keep the interaction point topped off.

When a good is produced and dropped on the floor, it goes to the nearest open tile.  If you keep most of the tiles around the bench blocked, you can control where the good drops.  Then make a stockpile there that accepts the good, and no hauling.  This is a big deal because hauling small stacks of flake to a stockpile can take more time than it did to actually make the flake.  Also, flake hauling jobs will compete with leaf hauling jobs.