Messages

[<power>]

social fights have special handling in game's code and damage is already reduced.

removing negative effects from social fights equal to removing social fights completely

I can hardly believe that the rampant death and destruction I've been witness to is from reduced damage. In that case I'm even more dispirited than before. I might as well remove them completely, but as my original post mentions the insanity extends well beyond social fights. Sadistic rage is also pretty much guaranteed to mangle a limb.

So reducing the values of unarmed damage won't even affect any change from social fights? I am more than alright with them happening, but honestly, how do you figure a low-skilled pawn can rip through power armor with his bare fists and pulp the heart of his conversation partner over a minor disagreement? This as a result of reduced unarmed damage?

The one permanent injury I see most frequently is destroyed fingers. It's a matter of routine for a punch to somehow collide with a finger in such a way that it just ceases to be. Oddly enough I never see fingers bitten off, which would make more sense. No, they are always punched which is a borderline impossible feat for me to visualize.

*Deep sigh.*

Genuinely nothing can be done to make unarmed combat less lethal? It's so absurd how frequent death and dismemberment occurs, especially from low-skill pawns. It's as if the death/injury ratio is inversely proportional to skill. The most dangerous pawns are the ones with 0 or close to it in their melee skill. They leave a string of shattered limbs and pulped organs in their wake, the result of reluctant punches.

Am I the only one who is weary of the insane lethality of unarmed combat in Rimworld?

While I do not offer a mod, change should be VERY simple:

RimWorld\Data\Core\Defs\ThingDefs_Races\Races_Humanlike.xml backup the file (just in case)  and then open in notepad++ or Wordpad.

search for <power>, behind it you will see a number, just lower it as much as you wish. There are 4 instances in total (each hand, bite and headbut).

Won't it break my game to just edit the game files manually like that? Suppose I want to play multiplayer with a friend and my local game files list different values than the other player? No one has thought to make a mod to adjust those values?
Will adjusting them even affect social fights in the first place? Since another reply in this thread claims the damage is already reduced during a social fight (the very idea that actual unarmed melee combat is somehow even more extreme makes me want to laugh and cry).

I might just make it a thing in my next playthrough: scenario editor - stat multiplier - melee damage multiplier 50%

See how Rimworld works then. Somehow I'm afraid it will have the opposite effect and colonists will merely survive twice as many punches until RNG sees to it that one of those punches has the quality of a shounen power anime.

Come to think of it, a leg has 30 HP and a punch deals 7 damage, yet the internet is full of threads where a SINGLE punch destroyed a leg. Everyone who replies typically dismisses it as impossible, but it happens extremely often. Healthy leg HP 30/30. Pawn with vastly inferior melee skill takes a SINGLE swing. Leg gone. All 30 HP vanished in a single strike.

How? Is the game glitched? Are we expected to remain happily immersed when the most feeble colonists in the game randomly deal more than 4 times their maximum damage in a single attack, and this at 'reduced' values?

Simply put unarmed damage is incredibly arbitrary and potentially always deadly no matter how inferior any given pawn's melee skill is. Even at 0 skill without any traits that might conceivably make them more dangerous (no bloodlust, no psycopath, no brawler), they can always manage a random crippling blow or even a fatality from a social fight or any kind of mental break that results in unarmed combat, like sadistic rage, i.e. taking out their anger on prisoners.

I am not looking for an elaborate workaround like increased pain from limb damage. This would only turn everyone in Rimworld into wimps.

I am looking for something very simple and thus far completely impossible to locate with all my efforts to reword my search query:

Reduce unarmed damage. Nothing else. Don't rework every single aspect of combat damage, only that one in particular.
Don't specifically make only social fights less deadly. The mod https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1542424705&searchtext=ugh+you+got+me badly disappointed me by making bloodlust colonists even more homicidal than before while otherwise normal social fights are every bit as deadly as before. The chance that one of the first few swings will cripple or kill is still unacceptably high no matter how brief these fights may be.

I want a very simple and tiny, cute mod that finds the variable for all unarmed damage and simply reduces it.

The examples of randomly lethal unarmed strikes are simply without end in Rimworld. Most glaringly I read about a 6 melee skill pawn who punched through power armor and destroyed the heart of his buddy.
My own example is from visitors from the Shattered Empire, only here it wasn't anything obvious like a missing heart. It was simply a bruised torso that proved to be fatal. They came to visit, had a social fight on my doorstep and within seconds someone just died. I had to look through the logs to find that highly unlikely fatal wound. A bruise.

Another time my colonist went into a sadistic rage and destroyed the entire leg of a prisoner with a single punch.

So please someone heed my request and simply make a mod that impacts unarmed damage and only that. I don't care if it's a variable that can be adjusted with a slider. It just needs to be made less lethal for the sake of my immersion.

I don't refuse to play commitment mode because I lose raids. I refuse to play commitment mode because random punches obliterate limbs and entire lives. I will keep playing if something like a bullet takes out my colonist. I guess that was a lucky shot. I will save scum if the log shows the most ridiculous description of a low melee skill pawn reluctantly punching an arm or a leg into a fine red mist.
That's right. As a final insult to (literal) injury, most of these instances of random maiming have included some kind of adjective to describe how the mutilating pawn was comically frightened and panicky when they defied the laws of physics and obliterated their friend in a social fight. They didn't do it ruthlessly, but they did it barely allowing themselves to throw said deadly punch in the first place, and invariably their melee skill was low.

I'm having the exact same problem. The game appears to run flawlessly, it is only the options menu screen that gets blacked out and I can still click blindly.