RimWorld Guide: Tainted Apparel – How to Deal With Dead People’s Clothing

RimWorld Guide: Tainted Apparel –  How to Deal With Dead People’s Clothing

This RimWorld Guide answers all the questions you may have had about tainted apparel and what to do with it. I go over everything from ways of disposing of the clothing to who can wear it without issue.

[Video Transcript]
Hey everyone, Adam here with another RimWorld guide. This one is a little more off-the-cuff as it’s a rather small topic, but one I get asked often enough that I thought it was probably a good idea to make a guide about it.
So, in this RimWorld guide I am going to talk about tainted clothing and the different ways to deal with it.

In RimWorld, when a character dies, any clothing they are currently wearing immediately becomes tainted. You can tell an item is tainted by the T show right after the durability percentage.

By default, a colonist will receive a mood penalty if they wear tainted clothing. You can use some of the clothing rules I go over in my previous RimWorld clothing guide, link in the description, to make sure they never put these on, though.

However, there is an exception to this. A pawn with the BLOODLUST trait will not get the mood debuff for wearing tainted clothing. As of this video, this is the only background that does not receive the mood penalty. Both Cannibals and Psychopaths will not be happy wearing the clothing.

Now, sometimes, it can still be worthwhile to force tainted clothing onto a pawn. Getting a tainted marine armor early game when pawns have super low expectations can be amazing, for example.

Now, what do you do with all that tainted clothing you receive if you’ve ran out of Bloodlusted pawns to outfit? Well, there are several ways to rid yourself of these.

I want to first talk about the smelter as this is a way to actually get some resources back from certain tainted pieces, namely armor.

Go to your smelter. Click BILLS. Click ‘ADD BILL’. Click ’SMELT APPAREL’. Make sure you click smelt and not destroy. I also usually go ahead and suspend the work order for now until I get it set up as I don’t want someone to run over and start trying to smelt something I don’t want them to. Now, you will click ‘DETAILS’.

Here, on the right-hand side, you want to uncheck ‘ALLOW CLEAN APPAREL’. Once this is set, click on the ‘DO X TIMES’ button and set it to ‘DO FOREVER’.

With this set, colonists with the correct job assignment will come over and turn any tainted armor into usable material to use as you please.

You will also want to set up a work order to completely destroy tainted equipment that is NOT smeltable. TO do this, we’re going to add another bill to the smelter, only this time we will choose ‘DESTROY APPAREL’. On this work order we want to make sure to again uncheck ‘ALLOW CLEAN APPAREL’ but, also, very importantly, uncheck ‘ALLOW SMELTABLE’.

Setting up these two orders will ensure you get the most out of your tainted items, while disposing of the useless ones.
If you’d like, you can further optimize this and disable things you might want to wear despite the taint, such as early marine armors.

If you do not have a smelter, you can also destroy tainted apparel at either a CREMATORIUM or even a CAMPFIRE. However, neither of these allow you to set an order to deal with smelt able items.

The second way to get rid of tainted gear is to simply burn it out in the open. To do this, go to the Architect menu in the bottom left and click ZONE. Then select STOCKPILE ZONE. Drag a box large enough to dump all of your tainted goods in, making sure this is done in an area where a large fire will not cause any issues, such as stone, or sand. Next, click on the stockpile zone you just made and click the ‘storage’ button’. How click the ‘CLEAR ALL’ button, then change the priority to ‘CRITICAL’. Fomr here, you will want to scroll down and click to palce a checkmark by ‘APPAREL’. Be sure to then turn off ‘Allow Clean Apparel’. This will make it so colonists or animals set to hauling will load the area with your tainted clothing.

Next, make sure the area is not in the home zone by going back into the ZONE menu and clicking ‘REMOVE HOME ZONE’, then deleting any home zone that is in the area. If you do not, your colonists will attempt to save the clothing you are trying to get rid of.

Once all of the tainted items are in place, simply equip a Molotov or Incendiary launcher and target the area, burning all of your problematic clothing away.

The third, and least involved option to get rid of tainted clothing is to simply let it deteriorate. Items left outside and unroofed are going to eventually decay to nothing. You can speed this process up, though. To do this, simply make the stockpile zone we talked about earlier over some water. Items decay more quickly in RimWorld if left in water. This even includes corpses!

I did also want to mention quickly that WEAPONS as well as UTILITY items do not get the tainted apparel tag. So, if you have some enemies die with shield belts, feel free to strip their corpses and use the belts, whether your pawn is bloodlusted or not.

And that does it! Everything you could possibly want to know about Tainted clothing in RimWorld. Hopefully with all these methods, you will know what to do with tainted clothing at any stage of your RimWorld playthrough.
If you enjoyed this RimWorld guide and want to see more RimWorld tutorials on the channel, please let me know by liking the video and leaving a comment. I also have tons of crazy RimWorld challenge runs on the channel, so be sure to check those out if you have not already!
And, as always, thanks for watching.