Without food, all of your colonists in RimWorld will die in a few seconds. Food deteriorates incredibly fast, so you won’t have a chance to eat it all if you make a lot.
Or can you? If you refrigerate food in RimWorld, you can make sure that it will almost never deteriorate. This allows you to get an unending stockpile of nourishment for your pawns.
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However, the game never explains how you can make sure that your food is kept refrigerated and safe from deterioration.
So, to make sure that your pawns never go hungry here is how to refrigerate food in RimWorld.
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How to Refrigerate Food in RimWorld
To refrigerate food in RimWorld, you will just need to build a room with one of the walls being a cooler.
A cooler is a building in the Temperature category that allows players to cool down rooms using electricity and outside temperature.
The cooler uses 200 watts and needs to have the blue (cold side) positioned inside a roofed room. The red side (warm side) will have to be placed outside. You will see these two colored sides when placing the cooler.
Once the cooler is built, you can select it to see its target temperature. You can now control the target temperature by just clicking the buttons that have appeared at the bottom of the screen.
Items will usually be considered “Refrigerated” if the room is somewhere between 0 and 10 degrees Celsius (32 and 50 Fahrenheit).
Once the temperature goes below 0, the items will become frozen. For many reasons, it is preferable to have your food and animal corpses frozen, as they can never spoil this way.
One problem with coolers is that they are relatively expensive to make (90 steel and 3 components). Also, raiders will often target them.
If you don’t have a defensive wall around your colony, raiders (and even escaping prisoners) will target the cooler. This happens since it has low HP and high value.
How to Build a Safe Walk-In Freezer in RimWorld
A method to combat the weakness of the cooler, and to be able to position freezers wherever you want in your base, is to make an outside tile inside the freezer.
In the image above, you can see the general design of a freezer with a safely positioned cooler.
In the space where the red tile is positioned, you should make sure that there is no roof there. You can do this using the “Remove roof area” action in the Zone category.
Just add a one-tile “Remove roof” area in the space where the cooler should have access to outside temperature, and the room will work like a charm.
Though you might lose some of the space inside the room using this method, you are free to expand and place the freezer however you want.
That’s everything you need to know about how to refrigerate food in RimWorld!
Have any input or suggestions for this guide? Let us know in the comment section below.
Holy I can’t believe I never thought of making a chimney to deal with the hot air.