Spikecore plates

Spikecore plates are a type of floor added by the Ideology DLC. While extremely work intensive and moderately resource expensive, it has a very high beauty rating and, for users of the Royalty DLC, is considered fine floor as needed to meet the room requirements of high-ranking nobility.
Except for ideological style, it is statistically identical to hex tiles. Despite being similar to steel tile, they do not have a cleanliness bonus though they do retain the improved cleaning time multiplier.
== Acquisition ==
== Analysis ==
There are two primary use cases for spikecore plates, namely fine flooring for meeting the room requirements of nobles, and general flooring.
=== Fine flooring ===
Spikecore plates are statistically identical to hex tiles. 
Spikecore plates require more work to construct than fine carpets, both in their actual work to build and the work needed to get the required resources, and have beauty of 3 rather than 4. However, they are not flammable unlike fine carpets, and add almost half as much wealth to the colony. Besides these considerations, they are largely interchangeable.
They are almost identical to fine stone tiles, only differing in lacking a research requirement, requiring 12 steel instead of 20 stone, and having a slightly higher market value because of it. This lack of research requirement can give the spikecore plates an edge if trying to rush titles, and the availability of steel vs cut stone means that pawn labor can often be saved by avoiding the need to cut stone blocks.
The comparison to totemic boards is even closer, offering the same rush opportunities but exchanging nonflammable steel for flammable wood. While wood is somewhat easier to gather than steel, being impervious to fire means that spikecore plates keep one of the key advantages of totemic boards while negating its primary disadvantage. Additionally, steel is often more readily available in extreme biomes.
In comparison to the other fine floors, namely gold and silver tile there is more interplay. Gold tiles are exceptionally expensive and their effect on colony wealth bears this out, but they also provide a phenomenal beauty rating of +. They are also relatively quick to lay. The practicality of gold tile is limited however, due to their cost and the comparative ease of using sculptures to improve room beauty.
Silver tiles are surprisingly competitive with spikecore plates - with higher beauty, a cleanliness bonus, the high availability of silver and only requiring a construction skill of 3. This means they're easier to make impressive rooms out of, and to keep them impressive when they inevitably get filthy. Silver tiles are almost twice as expensive, but the work saved in build time required for spikecore plates partially pays for the difference in pawn-hours spent by using the time saved on other profitable tasks. The effect on colony wealth may be relevant to some players however. Thus, silver tile is a strong competitor to spikecore plates for many colonies.
=== General flooring ===
Compared to other floors, they are quite beautiful, but work and resource intensive. It is a good way to train construction skill as, besides failure, there is no penalty for low skill constructors, and it is an easy-to-defend way to improve area beauty as it cannot typically be destroyed without player intervention. However, their practical use as actual flooring is limited outside of player preference. It is considerably more efficient and significantly less work to construct sculptures to improve room beauty in most circumstances. 
There may be some merit to their use in defensive areas, such as killboxes, where non-flammability is important, where more beauty will improve the mood of colonists in combat and help prevent mental breaks occurring at inopportune times, but where sculptures would be at risk of destruction.
== Version history ==
* Ideology DLC Release - Added.
* 1.4.3523 - Cleaning time factor added.
* 1.4.3555 - Cleaning time factor changed from default 100% to 60%.
Category:Floor
Category:Fine floor