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How Toxic Wastepacks Are Generated In RimWorld
How To Safely Store Toxic Wastepacks
How To Safely Dispose Of Toxic Wastepacks
How To Survive And Thrive With Toxic Waste
RimWorld's Biotech Expansion adds a new level of management to an already notoriously difficult game. Mechanoids are no longer exclusively enemies and can now be harnessed to work for you. The pollution they produce, if it's left ignored, can cause your entire colony to fall deathly ill, attract dangerous insectoid raids and ignite wars with environmentally conscious factions.
Related: Rimworld: Biotech - Every Xenohuman Type, Ranked
With good waste management, you can completely avoid the downsides of pollution or even weaponise it to empower you. There are different approaches here and each has its own advantages, drawbacks, and tech requirements.
How Toxic Wastepacks Are Generated In RimWorld
Toxic Wastepacks are generated by several of the new buildings added in Biotech. Most heavily, the ones related to Mechanitors and Mechanoids.
Tamed Mechanoids are a powerful asset to your colony, carrying out simple tasks and defending you from raiders without needing to risk your fleshly meatsack colonists. The downsides are that they need large amounts of electricity for maintenance, and they produce a lot oftoxic waste.
Choose your mechanitor carefully. They should have a high smithing skill but shouldn't be so vital to the colony that other jobs will go undone while they're managing their machines.
You also want to keep them well protected, as their mechanoids can quickly go feral if they die. It can be fun to make the same person your mechanitor, ideology leader, and royal psychic but they won't have enough time to do any to the fullest.
Mechanoid gestation chambers andrechargers will accumulate wastepacks in their internal storage as they're used. Larger mechanoids will generate more waste both when created and recharged.
Additionally, they require bandwidth, a new resource unique to mechanitors. This determines how many mechanoids you can control at once and requires bandwidth nodes to be increased.
The bandwidth nodes, along with the gestation chambers and rechargers will all consume a steady supply of electricity.
Even with bandwidth nodes, you will want to be careful with how many mechanoids you create. If a solar flare disables your electronic buildings your mechanoids will initially become non-responsive but can turn feral and attack you.
For this reason you'll also want to position your nodes somewhere safe and invest in consistent electricity sources such as geothermal generators.
An easy way of meeting this electricity demand is with toxifier generators, which produce large amounts of energy at the cost of generating even more toxic waste.
Even if you aren't playing with a mechanitor you might still encounter toxic waste. Some maps will have a high amount of starting pollution, and quests may ask you to safely store or dispose of toxic waste for other factions.
How To Safely Store Toxic Wastepacks
When left unattended, toxic wastepacks will dissolve and release their contents into the groundwater. The scent of fresh poison can attract insectoids to the area, likely burrowing up into the room you were storing the toxic waste.
Having a high pollution level near your colony will also cause other harmful events, such as acid smog that block solar panels and hurts peoples' mood.
When stored below zero degrees Celsius wastepacks will not decay and can be stored indefinitely. They still only fit five to a stack, so you would need a large warehouse to store them en masse.
Some popular mods for Rimworld adjust the number of items a single resource stack can contain, making warehouse management less taxing. For most resources, this doesn't heavily impact balance but for toxic wastepacks it can remove the main consequence by allowing you to store large numbers of them in small freezers.
Frozen storage is not a perfect solution, since you're only ever one crisis from having to deal with all the stored pollution simultaneously. A solar flare can knock out the coolers, raiders could break open the walls, or a power short could start a fire inside the warehouse.
You can minimise this risk by using thick walls that retain heat and keep out intruders, and not running any power cables through the inside of the building.
Related: Rimworld: How To Use The Biosculpter Pod
How To Safely Dispose Of Toxic Wastepacks
Toxic wastepacks are difficult to destroy and the various methods each work at different scales and require specific technologies or equipment.
Method | where to find them | Strengths | Limitations |
|---|---|---|---|
Pollux Trees | This new species of flora will begin to appear naturally on highly polluted ground. Seeds for them can be bought from traders or rewarded by quests. | While difficult to get these trees will naturally extract pollution from the ground around them, creating a clean space around them. Other forms of cleaning require you to first pump the toxins out of the polluted terrain. They require no maintenance. | They work slowly and will struggle to keep up with the amount of waste produced by a colony relying heavily on mechanoids. They can be destroyed by fire or beavers. Growing them in large numbers is difficult. |
Wastepack Atomizer | Unlocked by the research "Ultra Mechtech". This building requires a nano-structuring chip to research and construct, obtained from defeating the dangerous Apocriton mechanoid. Alongside the nano-structuring chip, you will need steel and plasteel to construct it. | A single atomizer will destroy wastepacks as fast as five pollux trees, averaging 10 wastepacks in five days. You can store your wastepack atomizer indoors and close to your pollution-producing buildings to minimise the time spent hauling toxic waste. | The nano-structuring chip used to construct them can also be used for creating powerful mechanoid war queens, Mechlord equipment, and upgrades. Each Apocriton you summon will bring a larger group of supporting mechanoids meaning that using your nano-structuring chips for only a small amount of waste disposal is often not worth the price. |
Make it somebody else's problem | The research "transport pod". Large amounts of iron, chemfuel, and electrical components to construct transport pods. You can alternatively use a trade caravan with cargoanimals to carry the toxic wastepacks. | Can eliminate large amounts of waste in a short span of time. A useful method for clearing out storage space when your freezer is full. Committing war crimes is a rite of passage in the Rimworld Community, and dumping toxic waste outside somebody's door counts. | There are severe diplomatic consequences for dumping toxic waste, even when placing them in uninhabited land. This can escalate to enemies launching their own toxic wastepacks into your colony, or sending raids to attack you. |
Pretend it isn't happening | Create a storage zone on the farthest edge of the map and place all your wastepacks inside of it. Configure your allowed area to minimise the time your colonists spend in this area. | Requires no resources or commitment besides the time spent carrying the wastepacks away from your base. Insects that burrow up will begin dormant and may be woken up by raiders or mechanoids. Watch them fight each other and be glad it isn't you. Can serve as a stalling mechanism until you have access to other methods. | Eventually, the pollution will spread across the map. Hostile insectoids and wasters gain the pollution stimulus buff from fighting on polluted terrain. |
How To Survive And Thrive With Toxic Waste
The other main addition of the biotech expansion is the introduction of genetic modification, which offers several ways of gaining resistance or immunity to the harmful effects of toxic waste exposure. There is also clothing that allows you to safely handle toxic wastepacks without risking health effects.
If you equip your entire colony to be immune to toxins then you no longer need to fear pollution and can actually turn its debuffs into positives using the gene pollution stimulus. This gives you an edge over raiders who will have to trudge through toxic waste and insect nests to reach you.
This isn't an easy strategy to pull off: You'll have to grow pollution-resistant crops, deal with the acid smog, and fend off more waves of bugs than the Mobile Infantry.
Method | Source | Strength |
|---|---|---|
Tox Immunity Gene | Can be extracted from sanguophages with a gene extractor. Sold by exotic goods traders. | Provides full immunity to all toxins, including poisonous weapon attacks. This gene is difficult to procure and has a high metabolic cost. A weaker version is sometimes sold by traders that offer 50 percent strength. |
Total Antitoxic Lungs Gene | Can be extracted from Wasters with a gene extractor. Sold by exotic goods traders. | Provides full immunity to environmental toxins but can still be affected by poison attacks. A weaker version is sometimes sold by traders that offer 50 percent strength. |
Face mask | Can be crafted at a tailor's bench after completing the research of "complex clothing". | Offers 50 percent resistance and is very cheap to craft. Can be worn with a hat but not a full helmet. |
Gas mask | Can be crafted at a machining table after completing the research "machining". | Provides 80 percent resistance. Cannot be worn with most headwear, including some that can still be combined with a face mask. |
Detoxifier kidney implant | Can be crafted at a fabrication bench after completing the research "toxin filtration". Sold by exotic goods traders. | Each kidney gives 50 percent resistance, stacking to 100 percent. More efficient than a normal kidney, increasing resistance to diseases. You can sell the old kidney. |
Detoxifier Lungs | Can be crafted at a fabrication bench after completing the research "toxin filtration". Sold by exotic goods traders. | Each lung gives 50 percent resistance, stacking to 100 percent. More efficient than a normal lung, increasing movement speed. A used lung sells for slightly more than a secondhand kidney. |
It can help to keep a spare set of toxin-resistant equipment for new recruits to use or create a cleanroom for them to stay in until their new genome or organs are ready.
Next: Rimworld: Tips For Making The Best Killbox
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