Human leather industry should carry more severe penalties

[SpaceDrunk]

So human leather is the second most valuable leather after the elusive Thrumbofur, and it's easy to accumulate large amounts for either selling directly or crafting into high value clothing given the steady flow of people in the game, especially if you're playing on a high difficulty level that spawns large raids.

Butchering humans to get that sweet $15.00/hide manskin (that's more valuable than synthread or devilstrand, by the way) is currently not a big deal at all: there's a slight mood debuff (-4) on the colonist doing the task that lasts only 1 day and doesn't stack. Nobody else has any mood debuffs of any kind, and nobody has a problem with all the funky looking jackets that are popping up in the trade zone. Hell they'll happily put them on and strut around in them, or sit in chairs made out of the stuff like little Ilse Kochs.

Given the severe penalties for organ harvesting that really puts a cap your ability to make money from it, it seems weird and out-of-whack that you can butcher hundreds of people and make a fortune from them with only small consequences. Unless I'm playing in an extreme environment where I may be forced to butcher people to survive, I make a point of not doing it in most of my games because I find it's just too unbalancing and too easy to accumulate a lot of money very quickly.

Butchering humans enmasse also gives a lot of meat in short order which can either be sold or used as a good source of animal fodder, which I find is also really unbalancing given the tools we're obviously supposed to be using like setting up pastures and growing haygrass. (Yes I obviously understand that herbivores can't eat the stuff).

I feel that the act of chopping people up to get their hides and manflesh should probably be grossing the non-psychos out more than it currently does, and that should go for everyone in the colony and not just the guy doing the grisly deed.

You could even take it further and perhaps have it damage your relations with otherwise friendly factions, like the townies, as your nefarious reputation as a purveyor of designer-wear people parkas spreads far and wide.

[NuclearStudent]

+1

It really is strange that everybody appears to be chill with harvesting and eating the liver of a dead person, while they freak out when you harvest an organ from a brain dead person.

[SpaceDrunk]

To be fair, actually eating human meat does cause some pretty hard mood debuffs to the ones consuming it, especially if it's eaten raw. My point was more about the act of butchering humans and making things out of their skin, which has virtually no consequences. That's obviously extremely fucked up, and if your colonists are going to freak out about selling prisoners or cutting out their hearts, it seems reasonable they should be freaking out more about chopping people up and turning them into hats as well.

[Kajin]

Whenever human leather or human meat drops in a cargo pod (WHY?!) I usually just leave it be and not bother with it. Too creeped out to use it.

[Loki88]

Whenever human leather or human meat drops in a cargo pod (WHY?!) I usually just leave it be and not bother with it. Too creeped out to use it.

I used to leave it and now RimWorld has desensitized me to it... On a side note though, I now turn dead raiders in to fuel for my base using the Bio Generator mod It's under the vegetable garden post if you're interested.

[jamesinar]

 Even if there isn't a mood debuff for human leather you'd think there wouldn't be that many traders willing to buy it.

[LordMunchkin]

It really should. As it is, the main source of income from raids is human flesh and skin.

[akiceabear]

+1

[cultist]

I completely agree that there is a balance problem with human leather. Killing or selling prisoners carry a 15-day penalty for the entire colony, which makes large amounts of slave trading dodgy if you have several mentally fragile colonists. But the penalty for butchering humans is neglible, and the money is almost as good.

[Loki88]

I completely agree that there is a balance problem with human leather. Killing or selling prisoners carry a 15-day penalty for the entire colony, which makes large amounts of slave trading dodgy if you have several mentally fragile colonists. But the penalty for butchering humans is neglible, and the money is almost as good.

Maybe its intended that way because obviously if a drop ship our whatever would come in to pick them up the whole colony will likely notice. Conversely if someone butchers a corpse then it'll only be whomever is in the room that would see it. That being said, they guy butchering corpses should get a much bigger or longer lasting mood debuff.