How do you actually stop Mental Issues?

[thekillergreece]

I was wondering how do you actually stop or prevent mental issues?I have seen most playthough videos and noticed most of them, show characters to have early mental issues...The cause could be the lack of food or what?

[CustodianV131]

Most I've seen were food related indeed. Giving those food would solve that, but that wasn't available often. Maybe in the future they'll try take a bite out of a fellow colonist? I haven't seen them go ragging mad yet destroying buildings and attacking people. I do feel like that could be in the cards.

[miah999]

Mental issues are caused by lack of food, sleep, a horrid environment, or spending too much time in the dark... oh and spending time with dead bodies, etc. The best way to prevent them is to make sure the colonist have a very nice room to sleep in, and a nice cafeteria. The current optimal bedroom is 5x6 with a bed, a light, carpet and at least on flower pot.

Should a colonist go mad, which they do, you can draft another colonist and arrest them to prevent further damage. They are now a prisoner, and basically have to re-recruited in to the colony. You can also arrest a colonist to prevent them from abandoning the colony, which they are actually more likely to do. Also the may just give up and begin wondering aimlessly, eventually starving to death. Again arrest and rehabilitate.

This is all from my experience with build 211.

[Spike]

This seems like a nice feature to merge in with any future medical upgrades; instead of arresting someone, your doctor might be able to treat them.  But you'd still have to take care of the underlying issues.

Nice to know about the optimal bedroom size.  That's a bit larger than I expected - I'd seen several playthroughs where people were using a 3x3 room, which is what I expected to be enough.

[SteveAdamo]

Should a colonist go mad, which they do, you can draft another colonist and arrest them to prevent further damage. They are now a prisoner, and basically have to re-recruited in to the colony.

oh, thats interesting... wasnt aware that was an option... good to know!

[Gazz]

How do you actually stop Mental Issues?

Take regular breaks when playing.
Don't play in a darkened room.

[AspenShadow]

How do you actually stop Mental Issues?

Take regular breaks when playing.
Don't play in a darkened room.

Glad to have you aboard Gazz 

[Gazz]

That's me. Always helpful. =P

[staffy50]

Its pretty easy to avoid, you just bury bodies, clean up blood and make sure there is enough food

[British]

An option is to have them go idle: disable all their actions in the Overview (keep Firefighting, just in case).
That may not increase their confidence, but at least they're kind of resting, and hopefully not in the dark nor near dead bodies.

I did that when I had 4 of my 6 colonists on "Mental Breakdown Imminent", because they were working during an eclipse which burned through my batteries, and they had back-to-back fights with the raiders (lots of bodies)...
TL;DR: They didn't feel so good.
I got them on idle, and they calmed down after a while.
No one went mad.

[Darker_tmp]

In the late game, most of in-comfortability comes from carrying dead bodies. My strategy was switch the order frequently and give those, who were near mental breakdown jobs inside a colony, where the environment was nice and food and rest at hand. This is actually better than idling, since idle colonist might easily approach nasty environment.
Best inside job is planting plants on hydroponics.