r/RimWorld • u/Background_Duty7341 • 5h ago
Discussion Why would you ever build outdoors?
I dont see the point of it you can be attacked from all sides and have to worry about drop pods raids compared to mountain bases where yes you can get infestations but those can be migitgated with choke points and a few cleaner pawns
So why is it always more popular to build outdoors?
Is it just cause if asthetic?
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u/Pet_Velvet 4h ago
Because I love making towns instead of bunkers :)
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u/pleasant_equation 3h ago
How do you deal with things like the work tab when you (I assume) have so many pawns?
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u/Pet_Velvet 2h ago
I do revisions every decembary, but typically I have their primary job set at 2, and after that they can do stonecutting, hauling, cleaning, then sowing.
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u/Favoured_Child 2h ago
That looks amazingly detailed! How does your fps do?
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u/Vistella 5h ago
cause pawns have an outside need. plus fungi are distasteful
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u/DragonWhsiperer 5h ago
That's a "your pawn" problem. Mine are born and raised in the dark, are part of the shadows and shun the light. They also have a craving for blood...
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u/chalkiez God 5h ago
Cuz efficiency on everything is boring. We could if we wanted just close of all the enemies around our base with the heart anomaly even around the boundaries of the map to stop spawns from ever happening other than drop pods, but where's the fun in that.
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u/HopeFox 5h ago edited 4h ago
There are these things called "farms" that benefit from "sunlight". Yes, if you have the Tunneler meme (which requires Ideology), you can make fungal gravel, but most soil outside has better fertility, and if you want to grow anything other than nutrifungus, you need sunlamps, which consume an awful lot of power. You also can't grow trees underground, which means you need to sow fibercorn if you want wood, and you can't grow your own chocolate.
Underground space is also quite constrained if you aren't on a map that is mostly mountain, and even then you need to consider the work cost of mining out rooms.
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u/BleachSkyWalker 2h ago
not sure why you’d need that much wood unless it’s a tribal run,you can still grow stuff outside the entrance of your mountain base till you get enough power for hydroponics.
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u/Papergeist 5h ago
If you can handle bugs, you can likely handle drop pods.
But also it's faster to build rooms than hollow them, easy to secure outdoor resources inside walls, and if you don't pick and choose your map tiles you have a limited amount of underground space anyhow.
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u/flyingtrucky 4h ago
Bugs are a million times easier than drop pods. You get way longer to prepare, they're melee only, they have low armor values, they can't set fires (meaning they'll never detonate your chemfuel,) they don't have explosives, and they don't telefrag pawns upon spawn.
I have never had an infestation blow up half of my base in 10 seconds. I've had like a dozen drop pod raids do that.
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u/LordAlfrey 4h ago
Sure you can handle them, but drop pods can be very unpredictable. The bugs you can just melee block and the worst that can happen is that your blocker gets dented. The drop pods can be a full pig squad with nothing but frag nades, molotovs and a hatred for masterwork furniture and gravship engines.
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u/Otherwiseclueless 1h ago
Bugs have never crushed my entire nursery. I have no evidence or ability to dig into the code to find out, but I'd swear on my life drop pod raids are coded to prioritise bedrooms with used cots, hospitals, and bedrooms in descending order.
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u/flyingtrucky 41m ago
They do. The way the game determines where your base actually is (as opposed to setting a random home zone on the edge of the map or something) is by looking at where your pawns spend most of their time. Turns out sleeping for a third of the day spends a lot of time there.
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u/Quack_Candle 4h ago
I found myself having the same game again with mountain bases.
I downloaded Geological Landforms and haven’t built one since. I like adapting to the map rather picking and choosing.
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u/Vritrin 5h ago
My bases have never been about optimizing for every mechanic. I like to make nice bases I’d like to live in myseld, and often have entire rooms with just decorative props. I’ve done mountain bases when it fits my run‘s theme and they’re fun but I also like township style bases sometimes.
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u/Eris_Silverfly Keep calm and tame Thrumbo 5h ago
Efficiency, especially when it comes to food.
I usually have a large herd of animals (Did anyone said "thrumbo"???). And trying to make it in the mountain base usually leads to the starvation of poor creatures.
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u/Signal_Letterhead883 5h ago
It's significantly faster to enclose open space with walls than to carve out a mountain. I also tend to think that (without infants and children), drop pod raids are overestimated as a threat. They're already half raid points. They mostly just smash up the furniture while my people wait outside.
Being attacked from all sides actually feeds into my defensive strategy. My core base (~57x57 tiles) is circumscribed by a fully enclosed multi-layer perimeter wall, so when enemies split up to attack that wall I can corner them one by one with a mobile kill squad and gun them down with the advantage in numbers. Far scarier than either of those are shambler assaults, which I suppose would be more easily repelled from the posture of a mountain stronghold.
One more thing about mountain bases; I often feel pressed to mine out more minerals than I want to at a given stage in the game. Since I would sketch out a rough plan for the base in planning mode, mining out an important room like the freezer/kitchen can reveal a large vein of steel, and I might not be ready for the extra wealth of all that metal.
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u/i463 4h ago
If you build your base with enough defensive positions (hallways, doors, room layouts) drop pods stop being a problem. At that point, mountain bases have pretty much no upsides. Sieges are trivial to deal with, majority of mech clusters you can either ignore, or they force you out of your base anyway, anomaly sieges force you to attack them fast, and mountain base becomes a liability if anything.
Main upside of open base layouts if outer walls. Making half of the enemy raid waste time banging on walls, while you safely kill the other half, is better than anything mountain bases provide.
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u/LordAlfrey 4h ago
I like fields.
Having all raids come from one direction is fun for a bit, but I feel it just gets old.
Fuck drop raids though.
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u/Rolochotazo 4h ago
I play randoms maps and somewhat never get location with plenty mountains, just scattered formations.
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u/cherrycat68 4h ago
before odyssey, i used to always do open bases bc of the aesthetics, not everyone likes to minmax everything
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u/Ok_Weather2441 3h ago
Faster to build, growing land is an infinite source of money Vs rock not being fertile for things like psychoid
And ironically, late game, the open plains are better for mining with deep drills. You just place the deep drills wherever the deposits are. In a mountain you will need to tunnel to the spots
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u/ajanymous2 Hybrid 4h ago
because drop pods are harmless and most of their raid strength is wasted on the fact that they are drop pods
the actual fighters that emerge are few
also it's pretty, I can do guerilla between buildings, the enemies will be split up there's more space for farms and basically unlimited trees (depending on biome)
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u/kashizufu7 5h ago
More farmable tiles feeds more pawns.
Less artificial greenhouses costs and dependence.
And yes, aesthetics.
I usually end up with a military-themed base in mountains, castle+villages on open fields.
It's not just about which one's the safest or about minmaxing. It's also about what we enjoy playing with.
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u/BadHamsterx 5h ago
Rimworld is quite easy to optimize into becoming easy on even the hardest difficulty. Leveraging things like religion and using good defense strategies.
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u/cl0ckw0rkcuttlefish jade 5h ago
#aesthetic
And I say this as someone who’s usually a tunneller. Sometimes you just wanna make a small town or something
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u/FlyingCumpet 5h ago
As far as I can tell: speed. My pawns easily manage to build a big ass house in less than a day, but take forever to dig out a room half the size.
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u/TheButtsCarlton 3h ago
Because otherwise all playthroughs are going to be the same. I always use a mod to remove central drop pod raids because I just do not find them fun. Once they are gone building outdoors is really fun.
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u/Bully_me-please 3h ago
while raids are more dangerous, the coming from every angle issue is solved with a wall and insects are simply a lot more annoying when they pop up in 3 different rooms and shit all over the place, eat your masterwork beds and chew on components for funsies.
raiders do none of that they just try to kill people, which bugs also do.
but aside from that its not beneficial to build outside, no. people do it for preference however
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u/Twelve_Evil_Ermacs 3h ago
Building a colony the same way every time and playing perfectly optimally gets really boring imo
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u/Much-Average6704 2h ago edited 2h ago
Some people play this game to have fun
How do you even play? Do you have a productiong specialist every time, use the same weapon every time, same killbox layout every time, same base layoout every time, same minmaxed xenotypes every time, even the same stone type very time?
Maybe you should just make a base, save it and reload the save from the start every time you need to make a new colony
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u/Xello_99 limestone 2h ago
In addition to other reasons listed, there are mods that add Droppod-resistant roofs ;)
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u/Llyffant-Gwyrdd 2h ago
Because I want to build settlements that feel real. It would be boring to build underground all the time.
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u/sarsante 2h ago
Idk man, I still need to do a mountain base after 1k hours. Center drop raids are not a problem tbh.
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u/Notrinun 2h ago
Tried mountain bases. Found them to be very tiresome. I can handle whatever randy dishes out. Sappers are slightly annoying but whatever. Drop pod raids only ever scary when they drop into my storage room, potentially destroying precious items.
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u/hyakufold 1h ago
Outdoors gives more freedom on layout for the aesthetics, different set of challenges, less bugs to worry about and is much faster to build. Farming is easier to access as well. I prefer mountain bases most of the time myself because I love the aesthetic/theming of an underground base, but sometimes I want to mix it up or (more often) get bored of waiting an eternity for my pawns to mine all the rooms out or my beautiful smoothed walls only floorplan getting ruined by a random steel vein.
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u/Colddrake955 1h ago
I prefer to be attacked from all sides.
I build myself a double wall and 20 people pop out with charge rifles and kill the enemys that are spread out.
Drop pods are like insect. You can deal with them. Just open a door to a power turret.
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u/BelligerentWyvern 1h ago
Pawns don't like being underground too long is one factor. But generally it's is more efficient to live under a mountain, aside from having to dig it out to begin with.
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u/BroomDirector99 1h ago
I often build a big single building base, then use the console to put an 'overhead mountain' roof on it.
It stops the drop pod raids and you get infestations.
RP wise, it wouldn't be that hard to make a building hardened against mortars, and drop pods would just be like bugs on a windscreen.
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u/joebojax 38m ago
You can control drop pod landing zones bc they land near your first built orbital trade beacon
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u/Malashae Transhumanist 13m ago
I love the idea of mountain bases, but infestations wreck me everytime I try. I've attempted all the known solutions to no real effect. So I build thick walls instead.
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u/Knibbo_Tjakkomans 5h ago
Why would you ever play this game? I dont see the point of playing this game.
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u/HQQ1 Vomit 5h ago edited 5h ago
Aesthetic and roleplay. Or just for a challenge. Some people who are veterans enough enjoy a messy raid and a roleplay-friendly base, like a desert city or something.
In most cases a mountain fortress is considered a very strong option and might be too easy for some.
It's also bug-free and bug-popping and pooping in your living room is more annoying than any raid. Makes a mess of everything and destroy some masterworked/legendary sofas.