Guide to workstation and stockpile efficiency in RimWorld

I've been a long fan of putting shelves with raw materials next to workstations and dropping finished products on the ground. It's fairly common strategy for stoves, but I've been thinking just how important it actually is. And exactly how much of a benefit it can give to other workstations.

So I ended up making this spreadsheet. The way to look at it is that columns with distance numbers above them signify average one way distance the pawn has to travel to grab each raw material and optionally drop the finished product. Percentage values are how much time they spend actually crafting. Zero distance is shelf touching the interaction spot of workbench - it literally takes single tick for pawn to collect resources in such case.

Doors also add up to that distance. You can think of the other values as:

• 10 tiles - basically the same room or another room that's very close behind an autodoor.
• 30 tiles - a larger room behind two doors or at end of some corridor.
• 100 tiles - pretty much other end of small base.

Specific sheets in there are:

• Baseline - just a standard early mid-game situation with perfectly healthy pawn that has no bionics and level 10 in relevant skill.
• Late game - pawn with one bionic eye, one bionic arm, level 16 in relevant skill. Workshop with two tool cabinets.
• Late game with drop - same as above, but with always dropping finished items where they stand. Just to compare how much of a difference it makes
• High end - basically seeing what would happen if you were to actually focus on making a super-pawn doing the job. Archotech eye, two bionic arms (or one archotech), production specialist role from ideoligion and maxed out level

Main conclusions:

• To no surprise cooking on the stove is much more efficient with stockpiles close by. 4x recipes reduce that dependency a bit, but it's still by far biggest effect in real game. Mostly because you just need to produce way more meals than anything else. Fairly common setup where pawn has to travel through a double airlock to the freezer reduces efficiency about as much as outright putting the kitchen table in the freezer itself and eating up the 0.7 speed multiplier from bad temperature.
• Drug lab, while not spoken that much about, is just as reliant on stockpile distance as the stove. You tend to use it much less, so the impact on total colony efficiency isn't nearly as big. It also relies on intellectual/cooking skill, so it usually doesn't take time away from main crafter pawns.
• Both of the above have 4x recipes which give pretty large efficiency gains if the stockpiles are further away.
• Crematorium and smelters work vastly more efficiently if it's coupled with stockpiles next to it. This doesn't help much in saving time of skilled pawns, but can cut down on overall raid clean-up time massively.
• Stonecutter works quite a bit faster with chunks close by. If you just leave it to its own devices with pawns fetching each individual chunk halfway across the map, the block output slows down to a crawl. Similar story is with biofuel refinery. Though with the latter you probably still want to carefully evaluate where exactly you put the chemfuel.
• Brewery, while noticeably reliant on distance, is probably less relevant simply due to really low amount of use it tends to see.
• Tailors are moderately reliant on stockpile distance. Seemingly it's not that important in "day-to-day" manufacturing of replacement clothes as they slowly get tattered. But there are two factors to consider - it takes away the time of your crafter pawns, which arguably is one of most important roles in the colony, and you might want it to be more efficient whenever you get one of those quests to make 30 hats or something. Efficient setup here also helps if you make apparel for trade.
• For smithy, at least in my eyes, stockpile distance ends up irrelevant. You never make a lot of things in it in first place on top of them generally taking a fair bit of crafting time anyway.
• Machining table was a bit of a surprise. There is a massive effect on mortar shells and mechanoid shredding. On top of that flak vests and flak helmets, which at least I personally craft quite a lot of throughout the game also benefit a little bit from it. Other things not so much, but it's still something you could want.
• Fabrication bench has moderate benefits for fabrication of components and advanced components. Basically everything else in it takes too long to make for walking distance to matter much.
• Art bench can be basically anywhere and it doesn't change much. Wooden art could be argued to have some benefits from raw materials being close by, but for everything else it just doesn't matter.

Last thing to consider is that improving efficiency by putting stockpiles closer instead of using bionics or tool cabinets is very nice for several reasons:

• It has basically zero impact on wealth.
• It reduces wasted walking time instead of crafting time which also gives exp for higher levels.