Planetbase

Planetbase

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Planetbase layout considerations
By Guffrus
I accidentally wrote 9500 characters in response to someone else's guidance as i thought it could be improved upon, rather than posting a 10 page reply to their thread i thought it best to start my own guide instead, so here it is. Its fairly comprehensive, at least with regards to layout considerations. You will need to look up or deduce the food production ratios and class ratios elsewhere as I don't recall the numbers.
   
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Sorry about the wall of text.
Firstly dont build a store at all.

Processing should be adjacent to airlock and mine and linked to factory without being seperated by o2.

Every work area should have its own canteens and its own beds, you should never have to walk away from your job to eat or sleep. You move food to the people not people to the food.

Water should be everywhere, within reason and its great to have water near exits, such as the main exit that goes to your power grid, which should be near to the factory that makes the parts but not to the point of prejudicing mining and manufacture.

You might want to build a high traffic exit near starports with a triple airlock onto a tiny multidome containing only water so that people can get in and out fast and grab a drink if they need it as soon as they are in from outside, they could have been trapped waiting in a queue out there for along time if you cranked a massive shipment out the doors.

Sickbay should also be as close as possible to the mines, as with the food you move the medicine and the doctor to the worker not the worker to the doctor.

(this isnt the real world where doctors are important high fliers and workers are ten a penny, workers are the bottleneck because they get the metal and doctors spend more time shunting goods than anything else.)

I like to start with a small bio dome which will later transition to become exclusively for medicinal plants. The reason for this is that in the event of a SHTF situation you can focus farmer efforts on dealing with your short fall, which most likely means shutting off the medicine and only making food, though you can do it the other way too if that is your problem. In any case it gives you control.

O2 near airlocks is a good thing but its not mission critical and so should not prejudice processes such as metal mining.

You must never enclose an outside space in such a way that you cannot reach it, always put an airlock in to give you access to the insolated space for repairs and such like.

Robots should be built anywhere that it it is convenient for humans, probably near to power grid exits as engineers spend a lot of time outside performing maintenance. Robots should charge near to exits and those exits should go to mines and or starports, preferably, both but human traffic is the priority.

If you really want to be fancy you could have a robot charging station near the power grid exit too so that you can optimise repair robot movement, but i consider this to be a low priority both in terms of the robots time and in the real estate value for human needs its much better that space is used to give engineers a good bed and a good meal etc. The robot can whistle for its optimal charge point, its a nice to have in all cases not a must have. The only time when robot charging would be a higher priority is if you have an insanely big robot only mining operation or a fleet of carriers servicing a storage bay in which case you may want to consider this variable in your layout but frankly robots are not citizens, they mostly live outside and their needs do not matter, they also consume vast amounts of power and so should be used with caution.
You dont need a fleet of carrier bots if you arent producing mountains of stuff that you dont need, there is really never a need for it because if you are in a position to be producing a surplus it should be high quality engineered products. So why would you have humans out of a job literally just taking up space and creating a cascading famine risk so that robots can use all your power shunting worthless food around the place?
Its symptomatic of garbage design or improper ratios.

For RPG purposes miners should be given poor quality beds and beer (and as always bandages at the door) as it gives your expanding colonists something to do once your core is nailed down tight as a drum.
You should mine like a dwarf including a massive stockpile, this is the only time i would suggest using storage this will consume medical resources and extra food resources which further creates jobs.

Outside the power grid should be located away from the starport and the mines to avoid conflicts as there is no need for them to be near each other and you do not want your mining operations or much more importantly power grid maintenance disrupted by large shipments of goods.

Power production should be close to the exit and in one place or if your base is very large you might have multiple patches in order to keep the distance from the exit to a minimum but the purpose is to ensure that engineers do not have to walk miles through hazardous weather to do their work.

Having the factory nearby would be nice but its unlikely to be mission critical, its more important for metal production to be optimised as you mine and process significantly more metal than you do repair parts and even then repair parts involve the mining processing and movement of metal as well.

You might have these in a line Mine, airlock, processing, factory, airlock, power gen. where the airlocks are exiting out into very different and non competing areas.
The interior workhouses being supported directly by their own dedicated canteens and sleeping areas.

If you use good beds and have nice canteens you do not need bars or gyms.

I would suggest that bars are for rpg purposes, particularly if you are planning to have guests or dwarven miners while mutlidomes are best for water hubs as described previously and to top up farmer stats.

The lab should be positioned somewhere between or near to the medicinal bio and the processor. In larger bases or when you can afford to you should consider having seperate processing areas for bio and metal to reduce transport times and increase non stockpiled storage, beware the power costs. Plastic processing should be located next to or near to food production which has a starch by product. You should not be producing starch deliberately except perhaps in the early stages and on a small scale. Once large food production is started starch and plastic surplus will be a problem you do not want. While you can put a band aid on this in the form of medicinal production this too is ultimately a problem as there are limits to the amount of medicine you can sell and make because medics are the least useful class and you dont really want to have extra medics just to make medicine to get rid of starch you dont need. If you have too much metal and too many repair parts and advanced tech you can just stop making it, thats fine but you cannot do that with food due to starvation. Hence the need to be mindful not to over produce starch. You could add starch production to the medicinal bio or perhaps in some set ups you might have a starch only bio dome but for the most part you should focus only on producing high quality food, like salad.
Im not sure i remember the food production perfectly but its something like Mushroom and wheat early for efficiency adding in tomato for faster cycling of food while still allowing a combo with wheat and then onion particularly gm to create another combo of mushroom, tomato, onion. later on you can scale back or maybe phase out the wheat and potentially the mushroom and use radishes to create a low starch yielding high meal quality food production.

Placing an or even multiple O2 next to or near to a large bio can be helpful as there is a high concentration of workers there and it can help to keep air quality high, you could also consider mixing trees with food production in larger biomes to keep air quality higher and offer a slight protection against a SHTF scenario.
Trees also restore the happiness a small amount so planting at least one tree in a bio is a very strong move especially if you are not for some reason going to be able to have a multidome adjacent as it can prevent or minimise farmer down time though high quality beds should be available adjacent to the biome which will deal with most of this requirement. Note that water should
5 Comments
Heinz 8 Nov, 2019 @ 10:56am 
this sounds wonderful, show us a picture or diagram it would help
Guffrus  [author] 24 Jun, 2019 @ 6:18pm 
Reading it back another thought occurred.

I mention early on in the guide the advantage of having a dedicated small biome for medicine, i should also have suggested that you can have small biomes which only produce fast cycling high labour food products, like tomatoes. This too is for emergency control over production.
The GM food techs are the best, i think they are tomatoes and onions but if you dont have the high tech gm then their standard variants are still the way to go. I dont recall if they both only yield food or if there is starch as well. In any case you are looking to get as much food out as fast as possible even if it is at a high labour cost.
By having a small biome only you wont need more than one or maybe 2 farmers to do the work anyway and it will ensure that meals are delivered as fast as possible.
Guffrus  [author] 24 Jun, 2019 @ 6:18pm 
In this emergency situation you could transform your medicinal biome to serve this purpose but if you did have 2 small biomes you could have onions and tomatoes in one set to priority that will yield basic meals but thats no good long term what you need are salads and thats 3 veg so in the second biome you can put all mushroom which are slow but low labour cost if your short on farmers or you could put the next best veg in which i think is something like radishes, they are not as fast as tomatoes but they are faster than mushrooms and they will give you the all important 3rd veg type.
Guffrus  [author] 24 Jun, 2019 @ 6:18pm 
A small biome like this is important to focus the efforts of your farmers, if you colony is starving its no good having 1 or 2 guys in a massive biome splitting their work amongst 15 or 20 plants because they wont be able to maintain the growth rates on anything, entropy will cancel out all of their efforts and you will yield nothing and the colony will wipe.
The small biome and high yield plants, even if its only tomatoes and you only have 1 guy will be enough to at least buy time to get in more farmers or buy in food and meals from traders.
Guffrus  [author] 24 Jun, 2019 @ 6:17pm 
At least one meal in 10 (I think?! maybe 15?) must be a high quality meal to avoid malnutrition and a trip to the hospital.
But if you have enough medics and medicine you can buy quite a bit of time even if you are only making tomatoes with 1 farmer and you can adjust the ratios to match what you have and the situation you are in.

All mushrooms is the other way you can go to maximise food production with a labour shortage.

It takes longer to produce anything and if you dont have enough labour to keep it all going at a high growth rate it will be painfully slow and labour will be wasted which is extremely bad but ultimately it will give you the most food per farmer over time.

As i have tried to illustrate though this is really about short term SHTF scenarios so fast turn arounds and minimal chances of wasted labour is the name of the game.