Colonist need treatment alert not shown if in medical bed

[Duncan]

If a colonist needs medical treatment an alert is shown (Alert_ColonistNeedsTend)

If a colonist lies down in a medical bed the alert is no longer shown

The player still needs to know about medical needs, regardless of beds. I would expect this alert to show regardless of bed status.

Reproduction:
1. There needs to be a colonist with an untreated wound or illness, and a medical bed. This can easily be achieved with cheats in dev mode.
2. When the colonist is not in the bed, observe that the alert is shown
3. Send the colonist to the medical bed
4. Observe that the alert is no longer shown to the player

Due to this situation being common and easily repeatable I have ommitted the log and savegame. If either of these are required please let me know and I will gladly add them to the report.

Note: At first I thought this was an intentional feature, and maybe it is. I find it counterintuitive though and it causes a lot of problems because an illness or wound can become life-threatening very fast if the doctor is busy, and medical beds are a useful way to locate the sick in a specific room and ensure that they have a good bed. The result is that if the player wishes to use medical beds they must constantly monitor the health screen of any pawn in the bed and mouse over any illnesses to check if treatment is required so that doctors can be interrupted and sent to treat the patient.

I originally intended to simply make a mod to rectify this but the decompiler cant seem to correctly decompile the section of code that deals with this.

[ison]

I think the problem here is not the lack of alert, but how doctors behave. When someone has a life-threatening disease they should probably stop their job immediately and try to help, otherwise it requires you to micromanage your doctors. There's not much else you can do other than micromanage pawns when someone is already in a medical bed so I'm not sure the alert should appear.

Tynan, could you please comment on this issue?

[Duncan]

I am definitely in favour of doctors automatically cancelling work to tend to patients. Having said that illnesses often happen to a number of colonists at the same time so I think the alert is still useful to have even if the doctors are on the case. It enables the player to prioritise which patients get care first if they wish. A player may also wish to modify the patients care settings (i.e give them better or worse medicine). A patient may have a long term illness and the player may want them getting high quality medicine, but patients also often tantrum and can get cuts and bruises. Player awareness of the care, and some micromanagement seem unavoidable.

It is also worth noting that a doctor should probably not cancel a job if he/she has a lower job priority on patient care than the current task.

Another complication is prisoners and guests, whether doctors should cancel jobs for those is questionable and may depend on the player.

[Tynan]

It's an interesting idea, but pushed-behaviors like this would be quite a new thing. This is more of an AI suggestion now than a bug, so I'll just thank you for that and close it.