Children and Pregnancy [Experiment]IntroductionHello, and welcome to my experimental children and pregnancy mod. This mod is a mediocre attempt to replicate what I imagine a RimWorld update would look like if children were added to the game. The mechanics are incredibly basic, but functional.
BasicsHuman pawns have "Gonads" which are responsible for determining their fertility stat. Gonads are susceptible to damage during combat, and damaged gonads will make it harder for your pawns to reproduce. Fertility can also be influenced by surgery (neuter) or drugs (birth control, fertility treatment).
When a child is born, their appearance is reset based on the physical characteristics of the parents. Skin color is the first thing you'll notice, which I've attempted to simulate as a polygenic trait as best as I could. Hair color is a random dice-roll between mother and father. Their automatically generated story is wiped clean. No backstories, no passions, no skills, no traits. Over time, the pawn will grow up and start to gain these things. Think of it as a form of character development.
Body Types and ClothingChildren have custom body types, which means custom clothing textures. I've gone ahead and made the base-game textures necessary, but any mods that add apparel won't play nice with this unless they also include the necessary textures. These custom body types are necessary for babies to not look like full-grown adult humans, unfortunately. It also helps toddlers and children not look like they've already gone through puberty (Female breasts, Male hulking bodies)
RelationshipsOne of my main concerns regarding this topic revolves around romantic relationships being formed randomly. I don't like the idea of toddlers forming romantic relationships with adults and potentially lovin' and getting pregnant. So, the work-around that I've implemented is a simple check for age in my own InteractionWorker and an XML change to the appropriate interaction def.
Child EncountersYou will NOT encounter any children that are not produced by your own colony. Other factions will not use children to defend their bases, because that would put the player in a situation where they are forced to kill children to accomplish a successful raid, and that's just poor game design... They will also not appear in trade caravans or raids.
HealthMothers that give birth have a small chance of dying due to bloodloss; However, that is incredibly unlikely. I added bloodloss as a complication of child birth because I thought it was weird how mothers could get up immediately after childbirth and get back to work. With this, they now have at least a short resting period before they can get back to their daily duties.
Newborns are born with a hediff called "Human Development", which is my way of getting the game to call my methods which are responsible resetting/setting a pawn's story/stats.
Older pawns will ALWAYS develop infertility eventually. I initially wanted to go for "Menopause" for women and "Andropause" for men. However, I couldn't get my custom HediffGiver to work properly with specific genders; That's not the game's fault, I'm just not a great coder
Time ScaleOne of the biggest arguments I've heard in the past in opposition to children in the game is that they don't fit with the time scale. However, I think this argument is made by those that tend to play at higher difficulties, exclusively. I'm personally a bit more of a casual player, who plays to survive on the planet for as long as possible and not speed run to the spaceship escape ending(s).
For me, personally, children have added a layer of story development I didn't previously have.
Issues/BugsTHOUGHTS: Babies and toddlers have thoughts they really shouldn't. It's something that really bothers me, but I don't have enough control over all of the thought workers and the thought workers added by mods to fix this issue in the way I'd like to. Ideally, these thoughts wouldn't happen in super young pawns...
TRAITS: Pawns sometimes gain traits with descriptions that don't always make sense. For instance, the Cannibal trait suggests they've eaten human flesh, but that doesn't always happen before that trait get inherited with the way I have things laid out... This kind of thing can be very immersion breaking.
APPAREL: More body types means more work for apparel modders... I know the pain of trying to make a mod like this, and can only imagine how frustrating it would be to have to make SIX more textures for one piece of apparel...
Future Updates/PlansI have absolutely NO plans to expand on this idea more than I already have. I feel like it's really easy to expand this kind of thing too far, and make it more frustrating than interesting.
Feedback and ConversationFeel free to converse on the topic of children in the game here, but make sure you stick to the forum discussion guidelines.
DownloadYou can download the mod
here.
I have opted to NOT upload this to Steam.