RimWorld – Mechanoids Waste Management Guide

In this guide, you’ll find out the basic facts about pollution that are important to understand when dealing with a mechanic in a settlement.

Waste bags are a harmful thing in the game, and it’s not easy to get rid of them. They show up when you’re fixing or charging mechanoids. If you leave the waste to just sit there and rot, then the six closest areas where the waste bags were will only support a few plants. Standing on these spots can make you sick, like in toxic fallout.

Just so you’re clear, battling mechanoids, even if there’s a whole bunch of them, won’t cause pollution problems. You can keep them turned off when there’s no danger, and they’ll slowly recharge without making any waste. If you want to know about waste, it’s the folks using mechanoid workers who need the info.

Waste Disposal Methods

When one bag of waste leaks into the soil, it makes six cells around it all dirty.

There are four ways to get rid of waste:

• You can keep the waste frozen in storage.
• Take it outside the settlement for disposal.
• Put it through a purification tree.
• Use a toxin splitter to deal with it.

Freezing

This way of dealing with waste needs a big area to freeze and store the bags, and you’ll need electricity for the air conditioning.

Even if you use shelves, only 15 bags of waste can fit in one cage. If the air conditioner breaks and the waste spills, you can clean it up by putting it back into bags.

Transporting Waste Outside the Settlement

If you toss one bag somewhere on the world map, it makes a cell’s pollution go up by 0.05%. So, to make a cell totally bad for waste storage, you’d have to throw 2000 bags on it.

The tricky part of this way is that you have to move the waste manually, not using transportation capsules. Each capsule needs 60 steel, 1 component to build, and fuel every time. One capsule can take 25 bags of waste.

The best spot to dump the waste should be at least a fifth of a cell away from your settlement and at least twenty cells away from the closest neutral settlement to keep good relations.

Tree of Purification

To use this method, you have to wait for the Purification Tree to show up on the map or hope that a special merchant sells the tree’s seed. The highest price for the seed is 2016 silver.

The tree shows up on the map after around 5188 bags have made the place dirty. But for the last two trees (there can be three in total), you’ll need about 7802 bags to make them appear. On places that were already dirty from the beginning, all three trees will be there from the start.

This tree gets rid of waste that seeped into the soil near its roots. Each tree can clean up all the waste from one bag in 60 hours.

Toxin Breaker

This is a machine you can use after doing some research, and it needs 400 electricity to work. You put a bag of waste in it, and after 12 hours, the machine totally gets rid of the bag.

Keeping Mechanoids Waste-Free

Mechanoids make toxins when they charge from recharge stations or get fixed by another mechanoid. If a mechanoid charges from a small recharge station, it makes 5 bags of waste for every 100% of its charge replenished. Those charging at a large recharge station create 10 scrap bags for every 50% of their charge replenished.

To find out how many mechanoids can be kept if all the waste is destroyed by a purification tree or toxin splitter, you need to consider that working mechanoids use 10% of their charge per day when active and only 3% when they are not working. Combat mechanoids use 10% of their charge whenever they are on. By using this information, you can figure out how many mechanoids can be maintained without making unnecessary waste by destroying them in a toxin splitter or purification tree.

For mechanoids using the small recharging station:

• 1 toxin splitter can completely get rid of the waste from 4 mechanoids.
• 2 purification trees can completely destroy the waste from 1 mechanoid.

For mechanoids using the large recharging station:

• 1 toxin splitter can totally remove the waste from 1 mechanoid.
• 5 ancient purifications can completely eliminate the waste from 1 mechanoid.