Berserk!

[Dread Zep]

i cull all pyromaniacs and harvest their organs. filthy savages, the lot o them.

[gmillar]

The berserk feature is patently ridiculous and honestly feels completely out of place in what is otherwise a really well thought-out game. Not only does it have little to no basis in reality, it also procs at an incredible rate, even on really easy difficulties. I'm talking three separate people in the first hour. Come on, harden up a bit people.

edit: Seriously, that's like six times in a row now. Berserk from being totally joy-deprived, or eating without a table. PEOPLE DON'T DO THAT. I get that Rimworld isn't supposed to be fair, it's supposed to be a story generator, but a story in which everyone just goes berserk all the time is a terrible story. Has anyone made a mod that removes berserk from the game? I haven't been able to find one.

[SpaceDorf]

Yes I am with the general notion that Berserks happen to often and are way out of line.

And I like the Idea that it should be a accumulation of stuff, not a bar that goes down.
Also the severity and especially duration of those debuffs needs a serious rebalancing. ( But there are threads about that out there )

Also there should be ingame ways for the Colony to defuse these situations ..
The lvl 20 Socializer could act as Shrink and reliev some stress.
The lvl 20 Melee Dude should be able to subdue someone without harming them ( I mean we are talking Bruce Lee Lvl of Competence here )
The Shellshocked Pawn should be guided to her room and locked in, then talk with the socializer and doc. Not that the player should micromanage rescue pawn and wait until she collapses somewhere on the edge of the map before she can be rescued ..
Well yeah +10 for the First Post .. this should be worked on.

[Dread Zep]

The berserk feature is patently ridiculous and honestly feels completely out of place in what is otherwise a really well thought-out game. Not only does it have little to no basis in reality, it also procs at an incredible rate, even on really easy difficulties. I'm talking three separate people in the first hour. Come on, harden up a bit people.

edit: Seriously, that's like six times in a row now. Berserk from being totally joy-deprived, or eating without a table. PEOPLE DON'T DO THAT. I get that Rimworld isn't supposed to be fair, it's supposed to be a story generator, but a story in which everyone just goes berserk all the time is a terrible story. Has anyone made a mod that removes berserk from the game? I haven't been able to find one.

honestly without the berserk thing, this game would be way too easy

[b0rsuk]

edit: Seriously, that's like six times in a row now. Berserk from being totally joy-deprived, or eating without a table. PEOPLE DON'T DO THAT.

Guess what - Rimworld colonists don't do that either.

You don't understand how Rimworld mood system works. You have been misled by the pop-up message. (Colonist went berserk. Reason: ate without a table). I know because *I* proposed the pop-up message, only with different wording:
(Colonist had a mental_break. The final straw was: most_recently_acquired_negative_mood)

The bottom line is that colonists in Rimworld don't berserk from eating without a table or from being joy deprived. Eating without a table is -4, totally joy deprived is -10. That's not enough to push a colonist below the treshold. It's the total mood level that matters, not some minor negative thought that's really just a flavor message. Your colonist broke because of a combination of negative moods.

[Shurp]

Exactly what b0rusk said.  One addition: you get the "eating without a table" as the final insult because eating is something colonists do a lot of.

BTW, have you considered building a table?  And a stool to sit on?  If you put it in your freezer your colonists don't have to walk far to get food and eat.

[Boston]

You guys that are such detractors of the system do realize that the various mental breakdowns the pawns can have in game fit the bill almost exactly for real-life psychotic breaks, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotic_break

Symptoms can range from delusions, catatonia, to outbreaks of depression, to violent outbursts. They can be caused by many things, but accumulated stress is one of them.

The pawns aren't having a breakdown from not eating at a table, they are having a breakdown from all of the other super-sucky shit you are making them do

"........ So, I am living in a hole carved out of the side of a mountain, on some uncivilized dirtball in the middle of nowhere. I am not going to see my friends, family, or even my homeworld again. We are constantly hungry, get attacked by the locals (that hate us), sleep on the floor, and I work 8+ hours a day chipping out a tunnel in the rock. I haven't seen the sun in weeks. I am pretty sure that we are eating human flesh and wearing their skins. And I can't even eat on a fucking table. All this work, all this blood, sweat and tears, and we can't even make a goddamn table and some stools to sit down at. You know what, I am SICK AND TIRED OF THIS! FUCK THIS, AND FUCK YOU! NO DON'T TELL ME TO CALM DOWN!"

-cue mental break-

On a related note, it is actually pretty easy to prevent mental breaks among colonists, so long as you don't treat them like shit. Strange concept, I know.

Now, don't get me wrong, I have many issues with the various mental aspects of the game ("I want a private room!"? Fuck off, cotton-candy-panties, you just crash-landed on a hyperviolent, ass-backwards frontier-world, you should be glad to be alive, much less have a bed.), but mental breaks are actually one of the aspects I have the least amount of trouble with.

Don't overwork your colonists, give them nice, tasty food and comfortable surroundings, and prevent/limit trauma.

Yes, people can be "comfortable" killing people when their lives are threatened, but react with remorse and horror when the adrenaline wears off. It is called "killing in hot blood", and happens in real life.

[brcruchairman]

Uh, Boston? You realize that the article you cited is actually a very poor fit for your argument, right? It lists many other symptoms, and specifies explicitly that symptoms vary greatly. Berserk has an almost uniform presentation, while a psychotic break has an extremely wide range of presentation. I'd also note that psychosis is losing touch with reality, while a berserk state is characterized by a singular emotion (e.g., rage) and violent behavior. Psychotic break no more fits the bill for berserk state than cerebral edema fits the bill for food poisoning, despite both having a symptom of nausea.

All the above said, I feel that your interpretation of events leading up to the berserk state is correct; it's not one little thing that puts them over the edge, it's an accumulation of a lot of things. I don't believe that the problem is people are playing the game wrong, but rather I think people are upset with this particular method of presentation because it doesn't mimic reality. Psychotic breaks are extraordinarily rare, while simple frayed tempers and irritability are quite common. I believe at least some in this thread are advocating a system which allows for a broader breadth of gameplay without reducing the difficulty. Toothyp1cks put it quite nicely:

If your colonists die before they manage to kill themselves then oh well, but I don't think that the entire mental health system should suffer so that the players whose colonists live fast can be forced to suffer through the mental break system like those who keep their colonists alive for months.

[Kashipoi]

I think some of this could be resolved by adding more ways people break other than dazed or berserk... And maybe limit dazed and berserk to hard mental breaks and have soft ones be something else.

[123nick]

i LOVE this suggestion. it promotes progress, from being without potted plants and TVs too potted plants and TVs and chairs and food and etc.

[gmillar]

honestly without the berserk thing, this game would be way too easy

Surely you have more imagination than that. Berserk is not the only difficult thing in the game. Adjust a couple numbers on a couple other events and boom, it's just as hard again. Besides, I'm specifically talking about easy difficulty.

Guess what - Rimworld colonists don't do that either.

You don't understand how Rimworld mood system works. You have been misled by the pop-up message. (Colonist went berserk. Reason: ate without a table). I know because *I* proposed the pop-up message, only with different wording:
(Colonist had a mental_break. The final straw was: most_recently_acquired_negative_mood)

The bottom line is that colonists in Rimworld don't berserk from eating without a table or from being joy deprived. Eating without a table is -4, totally joy deprived is -10. That's not enough to push a colonist below the treshold. It's the total mood level that matters, not some minor negative thought that's really just a flavor message. Your colonist broke because of a combination of negative moods.

Yeah actually I do get how it works, thanks. Doesn't really affect my point. None of the things that happened in the game would realistically contribute to someone going violently insane. If a bunch of minor things really added up to a wanton murder spree like that, the world would be a much more dangerous place.

Exactly what b0rusk said.  One addition: you get the "eating without a table" as the final insult because eating is something colonists do a lot of.

BTW, have you considered building a table?  And a stool to sit on?  If you put it in your freezer your colonists don't have to walk far to get food and eat.

BTW, I probably eat at a table about once a week. The rest of the time, I'm sitting in front of a computer, standing at a desk, or maybe walking somewhere while I eat. It really doesn't bother me at all.

And yes, I did consider building a table, but it seemed like a lower priority than aquiring food, building some way to preserve it, building somewhere to sleep, and fending off raiders and mechanoids, all within the first few days. I'm literally talking about a matter of days, on Phoebe Chillax/Basebuilder.

I also get why Tynan made not eating at a table affect mood. I don't actually have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is the quantum leap to berserk, and the overbearing effect that moods seem to have on the game at this time.

You guys that are such detractors of the system do realize that the various mental breakdowns the pawns can have in game fit the bill almost exactly for real-life psychotic breaks, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotic_break

Symptoms can range from delusions, catatonia, to outbreaks of depression, to violent outbursts. They can be caused by many things, but accumulated stress is one of them.

The pawns aren't having a breakdown from not eating at a table, they are having a breakdown from all of the other super-sucky shit you are making them do

"........ So, I am living in a hole carved out of the side of a mountain, on some uncivilized dirtball in the middle of nowhere. I am not going to see my friends, family, or even my homeworld again. We are constantly hungry, get attacked by the locals (that hate us), sleep on the floor, and I work 8+ hours a day chipping out a tunnel in the rock. I haven't seen the sun in weeks. I am pretty sure that we are eating human flesh and wearing their skins. And I can't even eat on a fucking table. All this work, all this blood, sweat and tears, and we can't even make a goddamn table and some stools to sit down at. You know what, I am SICK AND TIRED OF THIS! FUCK THIS, AND FUCK YOU! NO DON'T TELL ME TO CALM DOWN!"

-cue mental break-

On a related note, it is actually pretty easy to prevent mental breaks among colonists, so long as you don't treat them like shit. Strange concept, I know.

Now, don't get me wrong, I have many issues with the various mental aspects of the game ("I want a private room!"? Fuck off, cotton-candy-panties, you just crash-landed on a hyperviolent, ass-backwards frontier-world, you should be glad to be alive, much less have a bed.), but mental breaks are actually one of the aspects I have the least amount of trouble with.

Don't overwork your colonists, give them nice, tasty food and comfortable surroundings, and prevent/limit trauma.

Yes, people can be "comfortable" killing people when their lives are threatened, but react with remorse and horror when the adrenaline wears off. It is called "killing in hot blood", and happens in real life.

I don't really disagree with any of that. It also doesn't really address my point that the berserk effect specifically is unrealistic and incredibly annoying. Like brcruchairman said, there are a whole bunch of different things that can happen to a person under stress, but mindless bloodlust is incredibly uncommon. As has been mentioned already, there are countless examples of people stuck in horrible situations who never go berserk in any way.

[b0rsuk]

If you watch game messages closely, you will see that psychotic breaks are indeed an inspiration. "NAME is no longer wandering in a psychotic rage."

I would simply like to have more possible effects for mental breaks. Minor mental breaks have variety. Major mental break is wandering. Extreme mental break is berserk.

A colonist walking around, throwing dishes and other items at walls DF-style. Scratching a sculpture of the person he hates. Kicking a plant or a chair pot over. That would be a major break, not extreme break.

Hopefully major and extreme breaks are next for expanding.

[jimutt]

Just wanted to drop by and say that I fully support those who think the Berserk feature is broken and really improperly implemented. I agree with toothyp1cks about the unrealistic and frustrating nature of this behaviour state.

I got especially upset about it when I recently played a custom tribal scenario where I started out with a couple of tribesmen and very limited supplies. The game actually played out well and I managed to fight of most threats pretty good. Well, until my tribe started going berserk... And let me tell you the reasons of this:

* Someone watched outsiders die (well that's reasonable, could probably make people feel bad)
* Almost all my tribesmen felt they lived in an ugly environment. REALLY? If I choose to start the game as a tribe (which is an official feature introduced in the last patch) I don't expect my "tribe" to come from some kind of utopian super city with all the luxury items you can imagine. Still I had a lot of flowers etc. and in general I believe the environment for my tribemen was more pleasant than how most tribes with the same technology level would live in IRL.
* People was sleeping in the same room. Yeah, sure. I know this has been a basic characteristic that has been in the game for a long time. But well... If you look at most both recent and prehistoric tribes you will find something that's pretty common: Tribesmen do/did not have a separate room only for themselves. And guess what? It doesn't make them sad! Wierd? No, don't think so.
* Someone's dog got attacked by a cobra and died. Yes, this is a sad event. But I'm pretty sure the nature of this tragic loss still would not contribute to someone going nuts and trying to kill the whole tribe. No, there are many more important things to focus on.

I don't know, perhaps I could have prevented some of the above by tweaking the scenario settings (haven't been looking into those that much yet) and make the game behave a little more realistic. Though I realised I've perhapsed ranted more about the lack of adaptation for the "tribe" feature than the actual berserk mode. I still believe that the Berserk mode is a misaligned and strange behaviour for normal "colony" game play as well though.

Some basic ideas to improve the system:
* Perhaps keep the berserk mood but make it extremely unlikely that it will ever occur.
* Introduce more types of mental breaks, which are more likely. As some people have already suggested.
* Make tribal gameplay make sense (doesn't really belong to this thread though).
* Tweak the mood system to make a little more sense. For example look at the IRL scenarios toothyp1cks described and try to realise how ridiculous the current in-game mental/mood system is.
* Allow us to fine-tune a lot more settings when creating a scenario, then you can maybe keep the current Berserk mode for those who like it. If there just would be an easy way to make the mental break-downs to behave a bit more realistic.

It's a great game in general though, but this is to me a big issue which (for me) ruins much of the immersion and gameplay experience. 

[noxLP]

Hi! I've just register here after playing some weeks, and i've seen this thread. I think my real life experience could help a bit, not that i've been a colonist in an alien world or an explorer lost months in a jungle, but well, several years ago one of my best friends had a psychotic break, me myself years after that fell into a deep depression with anxiety attacks and what not. Due to that events and other circunstamces, i've known several people(some of them relatives to me, like girlfriends and friends) with different mental problems, anorexia, OCD, schizophrenia, depression or just stress driven anxiety.

First, to be fair, i have to say that i've never seen any of that person get into some state similar to the game berserk state, but i have to say too that it's not as absurd as some people seems to think.
You know, people, generally speaking, can break for really tiny things. I think the most correct way of seeing it is like someone already wrote in this thread, little things build up, accumulate and sum one to another until you vent them all. You HAVE to vent that sum of things, if you don't do it at the proper time, lets just say that they do it for you, and that's how one thing that seems really tiny for one person makes another person to break down.

The night my friend had the psychotic break, he talked stupid things for hours, he got naked at the middle of his house in front of his mother, brother and other friends who was trying to help. He finally calmed down and we managed to convince him to take a tranquilizer, or that was what we thought... he didn't "eat" it, he did just pretend to eat it . So later at night, when we friends and brother wasn't there and he was only with his mother, he tried to escape from his house, someone thought he was trying to commit suicide because he tried to escape by the windows of the house , so the police came, and well, you can imagine what a mess.

First things first: yeah, some people get naked for no apparent reason when they "break down" (and he's not the only one i know that did it) , and yeah, people stop doing things they do all days and instead they speak stupid things.
So, that are two things that i can asure all of you, without any doubt, because i saw it irl, that is perfectly normal in a situation like that.
The berserk thing... that's other thing, i've not seen it, but it happens. I know a woman that lost her son because he and his cousin was simply arguing, the cousin got too much angry took a knife (again, things build up, obviously he didn't take the knife ONLY because the discussion with his cousin) and kill the son. The poor woman ended up with a son dead and a nephew in jail.
Back to my friend, do you really think that in that state, escaping from his home with the head full of paranoic ideas, if police would tried to catch him by brute force instead of speaking to him, he wouldn't tried to hit them, to defend himself?
Of course he'd tried it. You know, one or two days later at the hospital, he was still confuse and i had to convince him that i was not some sort of secret police/army agent with micros on my car

Therefore, and taking in mind that these things happened long ago, so i can be totally honest right now, i don't think the mental thing in the game is THAT bad. It remember me that situations from time to time, and i can TOTALLY see that type of things happening in a situation like the one the game shown us.

All that said, i think there are two things that are "too much", or viceversa:
- Berserk state happen just too much, it's too much common. Imo it's not an unplayable too much, but yeah, it's a game, something like between 1/2, 3/4 the current probability i think would be more playable and more realist.
- You have to fill that times that berserk doesn't happen, because i can assure you things WOULD HAPPEN in that situation, oh man, without any doubt. And i think dazed and alcoholic can fill the empty space. Also, dazed characters could run out the base into the wild from time to time

Well, sorry for the wall text and my english(i don't usually write that much! And i'm not a native english speaker), and for the "sad story" But well, i thougth it could help some irl experience.

[b0rsuk]

Berserk had been implemented before non-lethal fights were implemented. Maybe it should just be updated so raging colonists don't intend to kill others, but just hit them a few times ? Raging colonist would punch anyone who slights (or slighted recently) him. Once or twice.