Believe it or not, the size of a room can sometimes be critical in Rimworld! Sure, you can jam a few tables and chairs in a little space and call it a dining room, but your colonists won’t be delighted to eat in a coat closet sized room! To keep everyone happy, some rooms need more space.
“Space” is the room stat that determines how large your rooms feel to your colonists. To increase the “space” stat, make more empty space in the room without furniture. That’s right, you can build a massive room, but if it’s crammed with furniture it’ll still feel like a tight squeeze to your colonists! “Space” will add to an overall “impressiveness” score that affects your colonists’ moods depending on the room type.
But, the impressiveness score doesn’t always matter. For example, storerooms, workshops, and laboratories can be as ugly and cramped as you’d like without a severe mood debuff. Impressiveness only matters in nonwork environments, so think bedrooms, dining rooms, and rec rooms. Ultimately, you’ll be balancing form and function, with some rooms prioritizing form and others focused on function.
With all that in mind, let’s dive into three different room sizes and their utility based on my own experiences! As you read, remember that Rimworld is a very flexible game, so don’t feel you need to take my word as gospel. Your playstyle might differ radically from mine and I’d hate to discourage anyone from experimenting!
Also, as a final note before we start, for my suggestions below, I’ll be using a very rough but proportional estimate for these room sizes. These estimates are going to be fairly malleable, so you can stretch the boundaries a bit on one of the axes and still consider it in the same size class that this guide uses.
Small - Around 3x3 to 6x6
The smaller rooms you’ll build will usually be utility rooms and bedrooms. Bedrooms are rooms with only one single or double bed. If there is more than one of those beds in a room, what you have instead is a barracks! Utility rooms will typically be used for things like crematoriums or generator rooms. The difference between these rooms is “space.”
With bedrooms, space matters a lot, as an impressive room will improve your colonists’ moods significantly! That said, your average colonist will be happy in a room with a 5x5 interior, though you can make bedrooms as big as you’d like. I simply wouldn’t recommend it.
Utility rooms on the other hand can be as cramped as you’d like. Yes, the room’s impressiveness score will suffer, but having an impressive generator room won’t improve your colonists’ mood. At worst, seeing an ugly room will only slightly worsen their mood until they leave it.
You might also consider building a small, specialized workshop with a small storage space so your craftsmen can quickly move between their supplies and workbench.
Small Room Advantages:
- Compact
- Can increase efficiency if employed well
- Useful for bedrooms
Medium - Around 6x6 to 9x9
The medium rooms you build should be utilized as room types that require a little more space for all the essential furniture. Think kitchens or compact dining rooms with only a few tables and chairs. Additionally, medium rooms can act as crafting rooms that cram a bunch of crafting tables together, but you’ll eventually run out of room.
Medium rooms can also be semi-temporary structures that expand over time. For example, you could use a medium room as a starting barracks, then transfer your colonists over to their own private rooms as resources expand. I often do this, then turn the old barracks into a workshop.
If you have the Ideology DLC, temples can also reliably be made from a medium room. Just remember, extra space is free impressiveness and an impressive temple will bolster the mood of all you colonists!
Medium Room Advantages:
- Adaptable
- Useful for either form or function-based rooms
- Can be used as barracks
Large - 10x10 and up
Large rooms are fairly impractical constructions with limited uses. More room means more travel time, which means less work gets done throughout the day, so building a large workshop is inadvisable unless it’s at the center of your colony. Since workshops don’t need to be pretty or spacious, focus on making them as functional as possible in a limited space first, though!
Your large rooms need to justify the space they take up, through their function or beauty! Dining rooms and temples can utilize all the extra space of a large room to easily improve impressiveness without needing to carve any sculptures!
On the functional side of things, large rooms will usually be storerooms, which utilize the extra space to store more items, or utility rooms for your generators and batteries. Don’t worry about furnishing these rooms, instead focus on optimizing how well your colonists can traverse them through thoughtful zone and object placement.
Large Room Advantages:
- More space means more impressiveness
- Useful as expansive storerooms
- Plenty of room for generators, batteries, and other bulky objects
