[1.0] Children and Pregnancy - v0.5b (2019/Feb/25)

[Snowie]

Hi! I've been playing with this mod for a little while now, along with a LOT of other mods. So, first some mod compatibility notes:
Rim Disorders and Rumours and Deception recognize babies the same way as regular pawns. So, babies will get upset about the other colonists telling lies about them, and develop disorders like PTSD from being downed. (What is it about the babies getting downed constantly, anyway?) These aren't exactly incompatibilities, since both mods involved work the way they're supposed to, just something interesting to note.

Ok, now some suggestions. I think the main issue with this mod (other than the detours used, making it incompatible with several mods) is that it takes an overly long time for the babies born to grow into useful pawns. Growth vats are an option, but I think tackling this issue in a Sims-esque way would also work. Infants in Sims 4 grow up after 3 days, toddlers grow after 7, and children grow after 11. In RimWorld I think those numbers are pretty low, but altering the growth times to be unrealistic might be your best option. Something like babies grow after 20 days, toddlers grow after 40, and children grow after 1-2 years. It would be even better if they actually aged quickly during this time, so by the time they grow into teenagers their age actually displays 14, not 3. I have no idea how you would do that, of course, but speeding up the growth times until they're teenagers would alleviate the problem of them being useless for too long. You could shorten the pregnancy time too, which could benefit from some sort of indicator of how much time is left until they give birth (like pregnant animals have a day counter).

I understand not everyone is going to agree with me, and will prefer the more realistic age lengths that the mod has now. That's just my thoughts on a way to "fix" the useless baby problem. You could implement it as a setting for the mod, or just a permanent world event that doesn't happen normally and we just add it to the scenario when starting a game. Another way could be to make a pill that the mother takes during her pregnancy, and babies born while their mother is under the influence of the pill grow faster.

Some other ideas I had were the idea of adding child furniture, and a nursery room type. Nurseries wouldn't have the shared room or barrack debuff, and babies/toddlers would be taken here when they were downed instead of to hospital beds. I think the ideas of different mood effects from things like abortions and defending family members would be great--though there should always be a negative effect from having an abortion, not just in late term pregnancies. Earlier term abortions could just have less impact and not last as long as one in the latest term. Nobody I've ever met whose had an abortion isn't affected by it, even if they had never planned to keep the pregnancy. Contraception was a bit of a disappointment to me, since neutroamine is so hard to find in the early game unless you get really lucky. Could you possibly make a second version of it that is like a wash-out fluid of some sort? Using herbal medicine and beer, perhaps? It would have the same effect but you could make it not last as long, so your pawns have to use more materials to keep themselves from getting pregnant.

Anyway, those were just my thoughts and ideas on how the mod could be improved. Thanks for the great mod, and all your hard work.

[Thirite]

Thanks for the feedback. Timescale absolutely is a fair issue that I need to address. Aiming for realism would be misguided as gameplay trumps realism, but otoh babies aren't just supposed to be a nice and easy way to pump out colonists. So yeah, some happy medium will have to be found between providing difficulty and providing interesting gameplay. As for mods' mechanics conflicting with children, it's the onus on those modders to put in a simple "curLifeStageIndex > 2" check to ensure the Pawn is at least a teenager. There's not a lot I could do to ensure their mods' mechanics make sense with children in mind when I'm not designing them.

For the repeated downed state of babies, it's a temporary solution that will be replaced with a better mechanic; I left it as is temporarily because there were more important game breaking issues to fix which seem to be resolved now. Cribs will be added soon; thanks to Harmony it should be easy enough to solve the issue I was having adding them. You're probably right about abortions- I'm just designing by what I've read, but I assume a fairly early pregnancy (less than a week in reality) wouldn't be much of an issue if they never wanted it/hate kids etc.

Contraceptive's cost being too high is also fair; I've been planning to simply change its ingredients to one or two herbal medicine. It's supposed to be easily produced after all, and neutroamine in vanilla is typically very frustrating to acquire (I personally always use the Chemical Extraction & Neutroamine Crafting mod to alleviate this).

I'll likely get some hours to work on the mod again the next couple days; I've been recently focusing on fixing the biggest problems of Simple Slavery so I could leave it in a stable state before I start hammering out more work on this mod- which is stable, but still has a lot of mechanically unfinished parts (breastfeeding, cribs, learning/teaching mechanics, growthvats, etc).

[Rimrue]

If you decide to go with a faster aging mechanic, could you please allow a realistic aging option for those of us who like it as it currently is?

As for abortions, I think even if women hate kids they would still have a negative mood as they would still have had to go through the unpleasantness of having the procedure done. I don't think anyone enjoys having an abortion. :/

Maybe -5 for early stage, -10 for middle-stage, and -15 for late stage?

Also, yes, please add somewhere how many days left until birth like pregnant animals have in the animal tab. I've wanted that info more than a few times. Lol

For the contraceptives, could there be an easily craftable, but less effective herbal version in addition to the current version made from neutroamine? I just can't see herbal contraceptives being equally effective. I mean they have already been around a long time. If they were equally as effective, there'd never have been need for modern hormonal contraceptives to begin with.

Thanks again for such a great mod.

[SpaceDorf]

If you decide to go with a faster aging mechanic, could you please allow a realistic aging option for those of us who like it as it currently is?

As for abortions, I think even if women hate kids they would still have a negative mood as they would still have had to go through the unpleasantness of having the procedure done. I don't think anyone enjoys having an abortion. :/

Maybe -5 for early stage, -10 for middle-stage, and -15 for late stage?

Also, yes, please add somewhere how many days left until birth like pregnant animals have in the animal tab. I've wanted that info more than a few times. Lol

For the contraceptives, could there be an easily craftable, but less effective herbal version in addition to the current version made from neutroamine? I just can't see herbal contraceptives being equally effective. I mean they have already been around a long time. If they were equally as effective, there'd never have been need for modern hormonal contraceptives to begin with.

Thanks again for such a great mod.

You allready made every single point, I wanted to make
What I read about herbal contraceptives sounds more like a herbal way of early abortion instead of really preventing the fertilisation.
But having a "modern" only method of contraceptive would also bug out the tribal fans.

And I don't want to be the morale police, but I feel really uncomfortable with the late-state abortion since the Child is theoretically complete and could survive outside of the womb. But hey .. thats player decission. I am adult enough to decide on my own if I want to do something in this game or not.

This leads me to another thing I noticed. A miscariage should have a mood debuff.

Finally :  DAMN YOU THIRITE. I played once with the mod and now I am hooked.
I deactivated it for my next playthrough but I allready miss the feature. I think the mod is great proof for a great feature.

[Thirite]

Regarding contraceptives, like I said about gameplay trumping realism in my last post, I think that really applies here. Contraceptives shouldn't be difficult to produce, and I think having a "less effective" version would just be extraneous. And yeah, I might have to make a mod setting to allow the player to choose "realistic timeframes". But first I'll be trying to find balanced times that are neither ridiculously long nor too short to provide story/challenge. I'll have to take a look at the vanilla pregnancy code to emulate the "days remaining" I suppose.

@SpaceDorf
Heh heh, this was the goal of this mod. People could have argued about whether or not children are a good idea until they all died of old age, but actually seeing it in action gives you some facts to settle the endless debates.

[SpaceDorf]

Thanks, Thirite,

I think you really nailed the timeframe for children. Not to long, the become a real burden,
but still long enough to feel somehow fitting to the game.
And as DF player I know how cool it is to build my own generation vault.
( great .. new playthrough Idea )

What bugs me more is that raids contain so many small children. My main problem with this is, that the children are considerable weaker than adult raiders. Could you do something against this ?

Regarding tribal play .. the idea of having no options for contraceptives or at least only dangerous ones sounds like rather appealing to me.
This could improve the darker vibes of the stone-age / western feeling.
Mixed with complications during birth and welcome to the middle ages 

Leaves you only with the catholic version of birth control. Seperate Beds.

[Thirite]

Yeah, I've noticed the overabundance of child raiders too. I'm not against including child soldiers but there seem to be far more than is reasonable.

On an unrelated note, I've started implementing cribs thanks to Harmony. Running into some weird bug where a pawn can sleep in a bed too small for them if it's marked as Medical, but otherwise progressing smoothly.

[Orpheus]

In reality, there are herbal treatments for preemptive contraception (rather than immediate or early abortion).  They typically work the same way the modern hormonal version does, by suspending the menstrual cycle, so there's no reason why they should be different in-game.  HOWEVER, they were superceded in the developed world by synthetic hormones, not because the modern form is more effective, but because herbal contraceptives are typically toxic in the long term.  So if realism is required, you could have a contraceptive made from herbal meds, with a slow, minor Toxic Buildup effect attached.
Herbal abortifacients also exist and so are equally plausible in-game, BUT again have serious risks associated with them.  Most effective abortifacients (both organic and synthetic) carry a high risk of serious birth abnormalities if the foetus survives, and many are also carcinogenic.  In addition, ALL abortion drugs are toxic to some degree (that's how they work - I won't spell it out, for the sake of more sensitive readers, but the toxicity is necessary).

Regarding the 'issues' with Rumours and Deception and various other mods, as I understand it you can include sections of code which only trigger if another named mod is detected to be enabled (the anti-RimJobWorld logic bomb comes to mind...).  So in theory if other modders don't take the steps to make their mods play nicely with yours, you can do it for them to a certain extent, at least for specific, named mods with known issues.  Couldn't you, for instance, have a script which triggers only if Rumours is enabled, containing code derived from that mod, to suppress certain effects on pre-teen pawns?
I realize that this just adds more work for you, and I totally understand why you might not want to do it.  But it is at least an option, and one which could also be taken up by individual users of your mod, if you don't want to implement it yourself.

Oh and also, amazing work so far, and thank you for making this awesome mod!

[Thirite]

> Regarding the 'issues' with Rumours and Deception and various other mods...
The thing is, it's not my job to patch other people's code. I can make my mod compatible with other people's mods by ensuring it's coded properly- for example, if mod X is detected then do Y in my code instead of Z. But what you're saying is that if mod X is detected then do Y in their code, which is not my code and therefore not my responsibility. It's each mod creator's responsibility to code their own mods to play nicely with each other's- not to patch other people's code to play nice with their's. If you do it right, you should rarely even have to look at another mod author's code to ensure compatibility. Just knowing what they do ought to be enough. If this sounds like "Oh I just don't want to do it" then look at it like this. Imagine my mod and another mod both try to patch the same thing in a third mod for compatibility. What happens? Probably everything breaks, and then compatibility is lost anyways. The ideal solution is for each mod author to make their own mod as compatible as they can, to maintain their own code, and keep everything as self-contained and modular as possible.

For example, in my mod Nerve Stapling I programmed it to have three settings- vanilla, EPOE, and RBSE compatibility modes which it would dynamically choose at runtime. But it was modifying its own contents to play nice with EPOE and RBSE, not modifying EPOE and RBSE to play nicely with it. The alternative is an expedited ticket to horrifyingly bad spaghetti code.

[sidfu]

thirite isnt the main issue C&P have with other mods is that where they all using hugs/harmony children mod still using a hard detour?

[PixelBitZombie]

"Rumours and Deception and various other mods"

To be fair that guys mods don't play nicely with a lot of stuff which is why I dropped all of his mods. Even the psychology mod made by him (NOT linq) was ruining a lot of the game play either because of incompatibility or stuff progressed too fast and destroyed the characters. So essentially you're better off finding mods similar and running them to see if it has issues.

I realize R&D is a decent mod and adds some depth to characters, so all your colonists aren't buddy buddy every time of the day every day. But I'd say until then, you'd have to wait and see if another version pops up.

[Thirite]

@sidfu
That is indeed the case with a number of mods, bust the vast majority of mods still work fine with CnP- I've had CnP enabled since A15 and I've only had to pass on sparse few mods because of it. Certain mods that do not conflict with CnP at all exist but are not programmed to be "aware" of CnP. eg: Prepare Carefully only allows you to set min age to 15 I think, so you can only create a child colonist by randomly generating one below 15- Leadership and Teaching would require only a simple check to ensure a pawn is at least a teenager to attain full compatibility. etc. The hard detours are something I am working on adapting to Harmony patches, but that will only enable compatibility with a small number of mods in the end (Alien Races, Miscellaneous w MAI + Robots, any other of the few mods which modifies pawn drawing).

[PixelBitZombie]

Speaking of generating children. I've actually generated just a few, babies. Most babies I generated came with clothing thus making them look like an invisible character. it's interesting, I'm not sure if EDB can make babies off the bat, I imagine it's still RNG if you wanted one as a colonist.

You mentioned MAI, I haven't messed with that mod yet, it is installed. Is there an issue with it? Mainly something major? If not I won't worry about it.

[Thirite]

Regarding MAI, it just messes up the drawing of the robot. That's weird though about generating babies- that shouldn't happen. The cutoff age for Human race pawn generation is 4.

[PixelBitZombie]

I had babies before but I didn't take a picture at that time. I did get one of one that was 12, in the "kinda looks invisible" weird texture bug. Before this particular person it was 2 babies in a row and then a normal person, another child, baby and child "this one in the picture".