Are Overdoses Underpowered?

[MikeLemmer]

I have 3 colonists with Chemical Fascination and a large supply of Flake. There's a lot of Psychite Binges. However, whenever they binge, they never go above Minor Overdosage and it never becomes a medical emergency. The only way a colonist could actually die of an overdosage, I suspect, is if you manually force them to. That feels underpowered to me. Thoughts?

[FMK]

Seems fine to me, traits aren't really meant to be 'high death chance' things -- they're there to make colonists more unique, so it'd be rather silly if a specific trait had a high chance to kill someone, since then you'd have to question how they stayed alive long enough to get to your colony in the first place.

Pretty sure overdoses are specifically designed to try and ensure people can't, for example, have colonists on Wake-Up 24/7 and just ignore the tolerance buildup by having them take it more and more often.

[O Negative]

I have to respectfully disagree with you, FMK. While traits do give more personality to colonists, it's pretty apparent that a lot of them have some intentional and serious cons.

For instance, a depressive or neurotic person is almost constantly on the verge of having a mental break. The idea that a personal quality can't be your ultimate downfall doesn't fit the RimWorld universe.

Chemical interest in particular isn't always a bad thing. You can control what drugs are made available to your colonists very easily. Once you start producing high-risk/reward drugs, though, the risk should be innately higher for people who carry this trait.



TL;DR

I agree with the O.P.
Overdoses aren't risky enough at this point.

[buttflexspireling]

  Your dilemma is why I think many people want the ability to construct underground drug labs in abandoned mines. I, however, am opposed to this. Use of drugs can lead to impaired psycho-synaptic impulse control as well as impair cognitive ability. As such, I feel that overdoses are an underpowered facet of existential reality.

[FMK]

I have to respectfully disagree with you, FMK. While traits do give more personality to colonists, it's pretty apparent that a lot of them have some intentional and serious cons.

For instance, a depressive or neurotic person is almost constantly on the verge of having a mental break. The idea that a personal quality can't be your ultimate downfall doesn't fit the RimWorld universe.

Chemical interest in particular isn't always a bad thing. You can control what drugs are made available to your colonists very easily. Once you start producing high-risk/reward drugs, though, the risk should be innately higher for people who carry this trait.



TL;DR

I agree with the O.P.
Overdoses aren't risky enough at this point.

A single break/mood modifier is not going to be the difference between "everything is fine" and "this person is now stripping naked in -20C or beating peoples faces in." At most, it goes from "everything is fine" to "minor breaks", which usually aren't life threatening, just resource wasting in the form of time and/or supplies.

Minor break is also where drug binges are located at for non-Chemical Interested pawns, which is another reason that I presume it's intentional to not be life threatening. Hiding in their room? Not life threatening. Pigging out on food? Not life threatening. Sad wander? Not life threatening. Binging on [drug]? Hm... Not life threatening.

This is, of course, assuming the colony condition when a minor break happens isn't horrible. If there happens to be hostile things at or on the way to their minor break target, then it becomes life threatening, but for a majority of the cases, that isn't going to be a thing, especially given how short they usually are compared to a Major/Extreme break.

[ShadowTani]

Do I feel overdoses is underpowered? Yes, I do, but not as underpowered as first assumed.

Before I didn't think multiple drugs contribute to the same overdose, but it does. Taking a combo of yayo, wup and go will usually lead to a minor or major overdose for my pawns. And on major they will collapse.

But it seems underpowered in regards to drug binges, I only experienced a minor overdose at most from someone binging on wup or yayo; are those two supposed to be so soft that taking 4 in short succession won't lead to collapse from overuse?

[night777]

Some people, being foolish, snort lines upon lines of cocaine on all-night and day benders. Then they crash out for 12 hours sleep or whatever.

The drug breaks can already be expensive because they're burning up your stash, which you may need. And the binging pawn does eventually 'collapse' -- they don't use normal sleeping patterns when binging, so the rest bar empties out and screws them up for another day worth of production.

If a drug binge, as a random minor break, was killing or maiming pawns, that would be silly. I recommend you turn up the difficulty if your game is so easy you think minor breaks should be frequently killing pawns.

Alternatively, continue playing on a lower difficulty mode and get a mod that causes pawns to die during minor breaks. Maybe your preference is to play an insane asylum where all of the trouble comes from inside the base.

Anyway, if drug binges were killing or maiming pawns the result is easy to foresee. Chemical interest pawns becoming unplayable, and a lot of frustration since other pawns can drug binge.

Anyway the reason I focus on "if drug binge killed pawns via overdose" is because if the pawn's drug binge resulted in an overdose and they collapsed the penalty for a pawn entering drug binge is actually reduced.

*ask someone to make your desired mod or take the opportunity to enter the world of teh modderz and create it

[ShadowTani]

With collapse I mean that they faint, not die. And I don't expect binges on smokeleaf, alcohol, or flake to be too severe, which are the drugs favored by Chemical Interested.

But yayo and wup that is mid-tier drugs only giving a few percent overdose after 4 doses, far from any risk of fainting is a bit lenient imo. Those drugs are favored by Chemcial Fascinated, so of course, I don't expect them to be so severe that their binges are deadly, but risk of having to drag them to bed after they take too much hard drugs would make things more interesting.

And yes, don't worry, I could mod that myself, but this is feedback on the vanilla experience.

[MikeLemmer]

With collapse I mean that they faint, not die. And I don't expect binges on smokeleaf, alcohol, or flake to be too severe, which are the drugs favored by Chemical Interested.

But yayo and wup that is mid-tier drugs only giving a few percent overdose after 4 doses, far from any risk of fainting is a bit lenient imo. Those drugs are favored by Chemcial Fascinated, so of course, I don't expect them to be so severe that their binges are deadly, but risk of having to drag them to bed after they take too much hard drugs would make things more interesting.

And yes, don't worry, I could mod that myself, but this is feedback on the vanilla experience.

Wait, you're listing flake as a light drug? I thought it would be a harder drug than yayo due to its higher addictiveness.

[ShadowTani]

I dunno, it's possible it's considered hard by the game, haven't even seen Chemical Fascinated binge on it yet (however, as I try to maintain a 10-people colony most of the time I've only had a limited number of pawns with this trait). But it technically have less concentration of psychoid than yayo, so seems like it should be a lighter drug when it comes to overdoses.

Either way, only thing I'm saying is that wup and yayo could contribute a bit more to an overdose than what they currently are. The other drugs seems to be balanced relatively fine.

So even if I agree with the OP that overdoses are too unlikely to happen by accident at the moment and thus is really not something that have much, if any, impact on the gameplay I do agree with night777 in regards to that the drugs shouldn't be balanced in such a way that a binge results in death. Fainting however, isn't too bad.

[DuckBoy]

Nope. 

I had a solid drug farm going.  All my colonists took flake to keep themselves happy while they lived in cramped piles of blood and vomit sowing more psychoid.  They sold hundreds of flake off to every trader. 

But once they got to massive tolerance on flake (25%), they started taking it 3-4 times a day.   Then one by one, they started overdosing.  One died of overdose, another went berserk while trying to heal her.  So I sold the whole stash to make them go clean.  The others, of course, all went berserk. 

So ended Flint. 

[ShadowTani]

So in other words, overdoses only becomes a concern at the moment if you set up drug policies for the higher drugs and it evolves into higher tolerance levels and snowballs from there. Well, at least that's something.

[MikeLemmer]

I had 2 colonists with massive tolerance to Psychite and both only overdosed on it while binging, though. In both cases, it was minor. Was there something else affecting yours?