Template:Stone Blocks Analysis

Template documentation

Standardizes the analysis of stone blocks, for transclusion into the pages for all the variants of stone blocks. Intended to be placed under a heading labelled "Stone blocks" or similar.

For example:

== Analysis ==
=== Slate blocks specifically ===
Fascinating analysis about slate blocks goes here
=== Stone blocks generally ===
{{Stone Blocks Analysis}}

results in:

Analysis

Slate blocks specifically

Fascinating analysis about slate blocks goes here

Stone blocks generally

This section is transcluded from Stone blocks analysis.

Stone blocks are an important option for construction throughout the game. Stone is cheap, available in large quantities on all maps, and is incredibly useful at all phases of the game as a fireproof, low-wealth material for sturdy walls & buildings and beautiful floors and sculptures. Yet stone is slow to work with, heavy, and makes for absurdly slow doors, making other materials better choices in many circumstances.

Wealth management

Stone blocks have the lowest market value of any material in the game after bioferrite. Not only does this make them easy to acquire in bulk through trade, it means using blocks for construction and beautification (and keeping stockpiles for said construction) will result in fewer raid points, and therefore raids that are slightly easier to deal with. Stone is half as expensive as steel, and 1/10 as expensive as plasteel, which directly translates to half or 1/10th as many raid points, respectively, resulting from those stockpiles and constructions.

Resilience

Buildings made from stone blocks boast some of the highest HP totals in the game. Even the lowest-HP blocks, marble and slate, are rivaled only by expensive plasteel and uranium, and fire-susceptible bioferrite. Given this, they are a solid choice for exterior (and even interior) walls, providing you with a longer timeframe to respond to sappers and breachers, as well as some peace of mind against fire.

Beauty

Stone blocks can be made into sculptures, one of the easiest-to-use tools for improving room impressiveness. While wood and steel are both much faster to work with, all stone types besides granite and limestone have beauty factors of 1.1 or higher, acting as a multiplier on the final beauty value. Between this boost and stone's low market value, sculptures made from stone have a higher beauty-to-value ration than any other material, besides wood in certain cases. Marble, particularly, is excellent for this purpose, with a beauty factor of 1.35.

Downsides

Stone is incredibly slow to work with. Not only does it take more than twice as long to build with than any other material, but it is also the only building material that needs to be processed from its raw form to be usable, requiring even more pawn labor. While time is not typically limited in RimWorld, as enemies typically scale with wealth rather than game duration, with one notable exception, consider using other materials in time-sensitive circumstances; stone is a poor choice for emergency defenses, and for most things in the early-game when you are racing to secure food and shelter for your colonists.

Additionally, stone doors open extremely slowly, which can inhibit both productivity and tactical maneuvers. Wood is much faster, but can turn a building that was completely impervious to fire into being mostly impervious to fire. Uranium and plasteel doors can be used in situations where having a firebreak, opening speed, and durability are all factors of concern.

Finally, stone should not be used for colonist beds as it only offers 90% of the rest effectiveness a non-stone materials or jade bed of the same quality. This means more time spent sleeping and less time being productive. Conversely, this can be a benefit for prisoners - time spent sleeping is time spent unable to prison break, and at awful quality, a stone bed has a lower rest effectiveness than sleeping spot. Bioferrite has an even lower rest effectiveness however.