Summary
RimWorldis a harshcolony simulatorthat is loved for its attention to detail and punishing mechanics. Between theharsh climates, lack of food, wild animals,and raids, keeping a colony alive and flourishing can sometimes feel impossible. Raids, in particular, can be annoying, especially once you’ve conquered all the other problems in your colony. Turrets, traps, and sandbags are helpful, but it’s easy for hordes of raiders to overrun them.
That’s where ‘killboxes’ come in. These are rooms or areas designed to entice the invaders to run through when raiding, where they are attacked by heavily fortified defenses. By taking advantage of the finer mechanics in the game, you can optimize the chances of keeping your colony going until they can finally escape on their ship.
Updated July 05, 2025 by Caitlin Thursfield:It’s important to keep your colony safe from outside threats in RimWorld. When you’re already struggling to keep your colonists happy and healthy, the last thing you need is a party of enemies raiding your home and stealing your things.
Killboxes are one of the best ways to keep everyone safe by forcing raiders to focus their attacks on a single weak point. Putting your hardest hitters at the choke point means you can deal with enemies before they do any damage. This list of tips will make sure you’re getting the best out of your killbox to keep your colony thriving.
10Understanding Collision
Unit collision is a game mechanic that isn’t immediately obvious. When pawns move around the map, you can often see them overlapping one another, and this is even true when hordes of tribals enter the edge of the map. A dozen enemies can be bunched up on top of one another, running at your colonists, and the next thing you know, they’re spread out, swarming your base.
The game’s collision system forces individual units to separate from one another once they engage in combat. This is why you sometimes see a stack of enemies enter through your single-tile killbox entrance, before suddenly spreading out everywhere across the entire room. To counter this, have a pawn close to the entryway of your defensive area so that the enemies are forced to separate before they’re inside your base.
9Understanding Enemy Pathing
Enemies in RimWorld aren’t always the brightest. With the exception of sappers and drop pod raids, enemies will generally try to enter your base through the path of least resistance. In RimWorld, that means an open door.
By keeping the front door of your base open, enemies will naturally funnel into whatever defenses you have set up between your outer walls and the bait door. This is the essence of a killbox; without it, enemies will just start bashing into random parts of your walls to break in.
Since some raids can start through transport pods, inside protection is still needed. Digging a base in the side of a mountain can give you some more protection against those specific raids.
8Use Long Snaked Corridors
The first part of a good killbox is the entrance. Having a single-tile entryway is obvious; what’s even more important is the pathway to the entrance. The goal is to get your enemies as spread out and lined up as possible so that instead of several enemies bursting through your entryway, you can pick them off one by one as they enter.
The easiest way to accomplish this is by creating long snaking corridors one tile in width. Assuming the enemies are not bunched up from lack of collision, this forces them to travel in a single-file line to you and right into your turrets and guards.
7Place Traps Inside The Corridors
Traps are a great way to defend your base, andit is common senseto spread them out around the entrance to your base. What’s even better, though, is placing those traps in the snaking corridor you made at the entrance of your base.
Once in place, the first line of attackers will either die or be severely weakened as they make their way in an organized single-file line into your killbox. If you’re lucky, the enemy will even retreat before they reach your pawns. And if they don’t, it won’t take killing many to break their morale. Cheap wooden and steel traps are the best for this setup, as they are easy to produce and won’t damage your walls.
6Slow Enemies Down With Obstacles
Obstacles like sandbags or rock chunks are essential to spreading your enemies out in your snake corridor. By placing an obstacle on every other tile (and maybe putting traps in those empty tiles), you force the enemy to slowly climb over each one, bringing their charge to a crawl.
Once enemies reach the end of your corridor, you want to place obstacles on every tile from the last turn of the corridor to the entryway. Since pawns can’t stand on obstacles, it will prevent the enemy pawns from using the walls of your entrance as cover and force them to move into the open.
5The Killbox Shape Can Help Colonists Fight Back
After the entrance to your killbox weakens and slows down your enemies, the next step is knowing how to set up your killbox so that your enemies are in the open and your pawns are in the least amount of danger possible. Having a wide open area is common sense, but certain shapes like the semicircle or funnel are ideal.
Both the semicircle and funnel shapes force the enemy to enter from one spot, while your pawns have a wide area to shoot from. The wider the area the side of your base is on, the more pawns you can set up to send bullets and arrows down range at the same time. This design also allows better angles for your pawns to shoot from, optimizing their attack and cover.
4Use Melee Killboxes For Brawling Colonists
Whether you created a religion that hates ranged weapons or you simply prefer to have brawlers, a melee-centered colony changes the approach to building a killbox. Instead of having an open area for your enemy to walk out to, you instead want to keep your box small and condensed.
The idea is to have three pawns with melee weapons in front of your killbox entrance, one directly in front and one on either side. If your snaking corridor was effective, the enemies will stream in slowly, one by one, only to be blocked by your center pawn and hit by all three melee guards at once.
3Place Turrets In The Killbox
Turrets are amazing at providing additional firepower to your defenses with no risk to your pawns. They’re great, but also expensive. They take power to maintain and need to be repaired after every couple of uses. That’s not even taking into account the damage they do when they explode after being destroyed. To mitigate these cons and take full advantage of your turrets, you should place them on the sides of your killboxes.
It’s important that your turrets are a good distance away from your pawns in case of an explosion. Build walls around the back and sides of your turrets before putting obstacles in the three tiles in front of the turret. This will give the turret some protection, and by putting the walls on each side, you minimize the risk of an explosion creating a chain reaction and destroying all your turrets at once.
2Use Fire To Trap And Kill Raiders
Fire is everywhere in RimWorld. You can cook with it, heat your colony with it, and it’s even your main source of light before electricity. Fire is also deadly. A large fire will rapidly increase an area’s temperature until pawns collapse from heat stroke and things catch on fire.
Just make your normal snake corridor, being sure to make it out of non-flammable material, and then make doors on either end of the corridor. Cover the corridor with carpet or wooden flooring, and place wooden objects or chemfuel around. Then it is just a matter of waiting for the enemy to funnel in, closing the doors behind them, and setting everything on fire with a Molotov. Just remember that you probably won’t get any drops from this killbox, and make sure the room cools down before opening the doors.
If you feel the fire is out of control or your colonists are close to being injured by it, use frag grenades to beat the flames quickly. Just verify no one’s in the way first.
1Utilise The Environment
The environment in RimWorld has a big impact on how you plan out and build your base. Weak floors that can’t support heavy terrain can make it difficult to build large buildings, and a running river might restrict you to one side of the map. Caves can also house hostile insectoids that you’ll want to avoid.
You can use these features effectively by implementing them into your killbox. Water and marsh slow characters down and infested caves make for a dangerous journey, raider or not. Forcing raiders through the environment can slow them down, giving you time to gather your colonists and prepare to defend.
