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How to build a refrigerator and cool your base in RimWorld (no mods)
In this tutorial, you'll learn how to effectively manage base temperature in RimWorld. Learn about the impact of temperature management on colony productivity and colonist happiness. Learn how walls, roofs, and doors affect temperature, and how to build refrigerators and freezers to preserve food. With this guide, you can prevent your colonists from dying of hypothermia or heatstroke, increase workshop productivity, and keep your base temperature perfect to keep your colonists happy.
1. 🌡️ Understanding the Importance of Temperature Management in RimWorld
- ✅ Proper temperature management in RimWorld is crucial for the productivity of your colony.
- ✅ Temperature affects the mood and thoughts of your colonists, as well as the decay of food and corpses, the work speed of workbenches, and the growth of plants.
- ✅ Extreme heat and cold can cause mental breaks and heatstroke or hypothermia in your colonists.
- ✅ A room must be completely enclosed by walls, doors, or impassable objects, have a roof, and have no open space to the outside.
- ✅ Failure to meet these requirements will cause the area to be considered open to the outside and have the same temperature as the map.
- ✅ The outside temperature depends on the latitude of the map, the time of day, the season, the biome, and random events such as heat waves, cold snaps, or volcanic winters.
| Element | Influence |
|---|---|
| Latitude | Affects the base temperature. |
| Time of day | Causes temperature fluctuations between day and night. |
| Season | Causes temperature changes throughout the year. |
| Biome | Affects the base temperature range and extremes. |
| Random Events | Causes extreme temperature changes, such as heat waves and cold snaps. |
00:00 - 01:26
1. 🌡️ Understanding the Importance of Temperature Management in RimWorld
- ✅ Proper temperature management in RimWorld is crucial for the productivity of your colony.
- ✅ Temperature affects the mood and thoughts of your colonists, as well as the decay of food and corpses, the work speed of workbenches, and the growth of plants.
- ✅ Extreme heat and cold can cause mental breaks and heatstroke or hypothermia in your colonists.
- ✅ A room must be completely enclosed by walls, doors, or impassable objects, have a roof, and have no open space to the outside.
- ✅ Failure to meet these requirements will cause the area to be considered open to the outside and have the same temperature as the map.
- ✅ The outside temperature depends on the latitude of the map, the time of day, the season, the biome, and random events such as heat waves, cold snaps, or volcanic winters.
| Element | Influence |
|---|---|
| Latitude | Affects the base temperature. |
| Time of day | Causes temperature fluctuations between day and night. |
| Season | Causes temperature changes throughout the year. |
| Biome | Affects the base temperature range and extremes. |
| Random Events | Causes extreme temperature changes, such as heat waves and cold snaps. |
01:27 - 03:32
2. 🧱 Factors Affecting Temperature: Roofs, Walls, and Room Size
- ✅ All tiles in your colony share the same temperature, and the temperature is influenced by adjacent tiles through walls.
- ✅ This creates a temperature gradient between the outside, the tiles in your colony, and heat or cold sources like heaters or air conditioners.
- ✅ All living organisms generate a small amount of heat proportional to their body size (unless the local temperature exceeds 40 degrees).
- ✅ Heat transfer only occurs in the cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west.
- ✅ Open doors and unroofed areas will quickly equalize with the temperature on the opposite side.
- ✅ Larger tiles have more thermal mass, so they change temperature more slowly, but they also lose heat faster when in contact with the outside.
- ✅ If a wall, door, or roof connecting to the outside is destroyed or removed, the temperature will immediately equalize with the outside temperature.
03:33 - 06:22
3. ⚙️ Manipulating and Controlling Temperature in RimWorld
- ✅ The game handles temperature very precisely through a unit of time called a TIC.
- ✅ Every 120 tics, the temperature of a tile will adjust to the temperature of its environment through walls, roofs, vents, and doors.
- ✅ Walls balance the temperature with adjacent tiles, whether it's another room or the map itself.
- ✅ The material of the wall or floor does not matter. Wood, stone, metal, or mined rock slabs all insulate equally.
- ✅ The shape of the room matters. Square rooms retain temperature better than long, narrow hallways.
- ✅ Adding a second layer of walls will halve the heat transfer with the outside. However, adding more than two layers has no additional effect.
- ✅ Some structures, like nutrient paste dispensers, act like walls in terms of insulation, making them very useful for refrigerators or freezers.
- ✅ Roofs are crucial for insulating tiles from the outside, as they are always trying to balance their temperature with the environment.
| Roof Condition | Temperature Effect |
|---|---|
| No roof or less than 25% covered | Temperature will always equalize with the outside temperature. |
| Roofed or thin rock roof | Roof will equalize the temperature to around 57 degrees. |
| Thick rock roof (under mountain) | Adds a cooling effect if the temperature exceeds 15 degrees. |
- ✅ Vents can be used to equalize the temperature between tiles, but they are not recommended.
- ✅ Doors are the true queen of ventilation, as they equalize temperature very quickly and can completely dissipate heat.
- ✅ Placing two doors in a row will improve the insulation of the tiles, reducing temperature changes.
- ✅ Leaving doors open allows you to control the temperature as desired.
- ✅ Essentially, doors act like vents with a dual function: allowing insulation and controlling the passage of heat or cold at the same time.
- ✅ For this reason, the more doors a tile has, the more difficult it is to control the temperature. The fewer doors, the better the temperature control.
06:23 - 07:40
4. 🌡️ Maintaining Optimal Temperature for Workbenches and Colonists
- ✅ Many workbenches, such as electric stoves or stonecutting tables, have an indoor comfort range between 10 and 35 degrees.
- ✅ Above or below this range, the work speed of the workbench is reduced by 70%, so you need to cool the work tiles well.
- ✅ Colonists have a maximum and minimum comfortable temperature.
- ✅ Exceeding these limits by more than 10 degrees will start to cause heatstroke or hypothermia.
- ✅ The further the temperature is from the 10-degree limit, the faster the severity of hypothermia or heatstroke will increase.
- ✅ Colonists will also receive negative mood modifiers depending on how extreme the temperature is.
- ✅ You can find statistics on comfortable temperatures in the equipment tab at any time.
- ✅ For humans, clothing raises both comfort thresholds depending on the material and type of clothing.
- ✅ However, colonists' moods ignore clothing when considering mood modifiers while sleeping.
- ✅ Therefore, if the room is not warm enough, you cannot avoid negative thoughts about sleeping in the cold, even if you are wearing the warmest clothes.
- ✅ The opposite situation occurs if the room is too hot.
07:41 - 09:16
5. 🔥 Structures for Temperature Control: Campfires, Heaters, and Coolers
- ✅ There are four structures you can use to control the temperature of your tiles and base, whatever the cause.
- ✅ Campfires are a quick and temporary solution for producing heat in an emergency.
- ✅ They are temporary structures that do not require electricity but need to be replenished with wood every few days.
- ✅ They produce the same amount of heat as an electric heater but cannot raise the temperature above 30 degrees.
- ✅ They are also not adjustable, so your colonists may feel uncomfortably hot.
- ✅ You can open doors or roofs to reduce heat when using a campfire.
- ✅ The true usefulness of campfires lies in the early moments of the game.
- ✅ They are important during cold weather, cold snaps, or power outages during volcanic winter events.
- ✅ Heaters are used to raise the temperature of a room to a comfortable 21 degrees.
- ✅ In cold biomes like the tundra, heaters are essential for every base.
- ✅ Passive coolers are a very low-tech option that is automatically unlocked at every basic start.
- ✅ They use the cooling power of an electric cooler to cool a room to about 15 degrees.
- ✅ Passive coolers last for 5 days, after which they need to be recharged with wood.
- ✅ They cannot preserve food due to temperature limitations, so they are not suitable for building refrigerators or freezers.
- ✅ However, they become a lifeline in very hot climates. They can be built quickly, are immune to electrical events, and can be used in bulk during heat waves.
09:17 - 11:02
6. ❄️ Cooling Your Base with Air Conditioners
- ✅ Air conditioners are mainly used to lower the temperature of a room.
- ✅ In hot biomes like deserts or jungles, air conditioners are essential for every base.
- ✅ They can be used to lower the temperature of a room to about 21 degrees and will be the main choice for cooling your base and creating freezers.
- ✅ These coolers are heat pumps with a cold side that emits cold air and a hot side that emits hot air.
- ✅ These sides are easy to see when installing.
- ✅ The hot side is completely useless and problematic in the current state of the game.
- ✅ To cool a tile, the hot side must face an outside space so that the cold side is cooled.
- ✅ Alternatively, you can use doors to install a cooling chimney.
- ✅ Depending on the size of your colony and the temperature requirements of your colony, you can build one, two, or three air conditioners according to these three construction plans.
- ✅ Build a door, select it, and click the Keep Open option.
- ✅ Then recruit a colonist to move to the door and keep it open.
- ✅ Then install one, two, or three coolers according to the pattern shown on the screen.
- ✅ The cooler should always be placed with the hot side facing the door.
- ✅ When in operation, the refrigerator emits cold air to the colony's base, and hot air is emitted over the door, which completely dissipates heat thanks to the power of the dissipation queen.
11:03 - 13:08
7. 🧊 Creating Refrigerators and Freezers
- ✅ Keep in mind that this method requires free floor space around it for the cooling chimney to work properly, as this method will not work if placed against a wall or if another refrigerator is added to another point nearby.
- ✅ It doesn't matter if it's under a roof or under a mountain.
- ✅ You can cool your base and tiles without any problems using this design.
- ✅ As long as the refrigerator vents the hot side over the door, and it's much more efficient if the door is open.
- ✅ Warm temperatures spoil food, corpses, and certain plant-based substances such as psychoid leaves and herbal medicines.
- ✅ Even the longest-lasting foods, such as corn and rice, will eventually spoil if not refrigerated.
- ✅ Colder temperatures preserve food and slow the decay of corpses.
- ✅ Freezing temperatures completely stop decay and preserve these elements indefinitely.
- ✅ Lowering the temperature allows the air conditioner to reach sub-zero temperatures, so if you build a tile with a closed roof and lower the temperature to sub-zero, you can preserve food.
- ✅ In RimWorld, this is called a refrigerator or freezer.
- ✅ To turn one of the previous cooling chimney designs into a refrigerator or freezer, simply place one of these designs in a closed tile with walls, a roof, and at least one door.
- ✅ Then lower the temperature of the refrigerator to a sub-zero value.
- ✅ The required sub-zero temperature depends on all the variables discussed in this video.
- ✅ The more doors a refrigerator has, the more heat enters from the outside and the more cold escapes, so the fewer doors, the more efficient the freezer.