How's the disease balance?

[Snowpig]

So I'm trying to figure out if diseases need rebalancing.

How would you say the disease balance is right now?

Do you see diseases sometimes but not overwhelmingly frequently?

What about in the jungle? Disease is supposed to be a much bigger problem here.

Diseases come sometimes and that is ok. The colonist who catches the disease is usually tied to his bed to raise his survival chances.

There are several points on diseases though, which annoy me:
- no self-medication allowed - if you have only one colonist (left) and he catches a flu, he will die - no matter how many medpacks he has stockpiled
- complete randomness: it is -almost- ok with stuff like flu, but plague or malaria should have some weight depending on stuff the colonists do or not do. i will try to explain it below:

Especially for jugle, but not limited to, dieseases should not have a flat chance to break out, but rather depending on the location, time and season.
Lets take malaria for example: Malaria risk raises in hot, wet climates, especially in jungles during/after rain season. In addition the chance to get stung by a mosquito is higher:
- during the darker hours
- when there are enough plants around who cover from the sun
- near lakes or other open water sources

In game terms it would be like: if your colonists walks in the evening, after some rain event in an area near a lake with some vegetation around, his chance to get malaria should be significant higher than walking during the day in an open space which has no vegetation around.

Similar for diseases which are being spread by:
- animals
- eating raw food (especially raw meat)
- touching stuff a diseased person touched/coughed at

[Snownova]

I understand the desire for spreading disease, and it makes sense. I just can't think of a way to make gameplay around that.

If you're gonna add a problem into a game, you also have to add a solution. Spreading disease is easy to code. But how do players fight it? Quarantine? Special doctor garments? All this adds a lot of complexity.

My suggestions would be:
- If disease spreading is added, make the notification say they caught the disease from colonist x
- Hospital beds/Quarantine, either add to hospital beds that they stop the colonist from spreading their disease (thus adding another reason for upgrading regular beds set to medical to hospital beds), or add a "Quarantine pod" that isolates a patient but still allows for food to be delivered.
- Disease spreading would add an interesting gameplay choice, do I make a bunch of tiny hospital rooms to prevent epidemics, or do I go the cheap route and stuff m all in a big hall and pray for the best.
-Biohazard suits or other special doctor gear would be very cool, but I'd rather see that as part of a larger update involving tools and room-specific gear (pawns discarding parka's when going inside, equipping a spatula when starting cook job, etc etc)

[Noobshock]

Diseases overall:

I find they don't happen quite enough. Not that I'd turn up the dial too much, but they still seem relatively few and far in between. I'd definitely say rare outside of the jungle biome.

When you do catch one, it seems to take a long time to cure, and IF you don't actively choose to make the pawn stay in bed the whole time so he receives treatment right on the spot every time, MOST diseases seem to turn into major. It would be nice if some colonists recovered relatively well without just staying in bed until 100% immunity.

If it was up to me, I'd make them a little more common across the board, maybe a little more than that still in the jungle, and make them a little bit easier to cure/manage - perhaps by slightly increasing how quick pawns develop immunity while resting. Of course, some room for rarer but serious diseases would be great too.

Edit: some low intensity (aka pawns develop immunity significantly faster than current average) but highly contagious diseases would be cool too, although I realize it may complexify things too much, but I think there are ways to do it while keeping things relatively simple.

[Anduin1357]

Diseases all have a source, right? You cannot get sick from eating cooked meals, right? You will not be exposed to sickness inside a cave right? Yet my colonists are getting sick intermittently in the bunker which had the doors locked and eating cooked food. No meat/veg rotting and all in walk-in fridge room, frozen. No raids for 5 days at all.
Now don't talk stock with me, I have zero mods that deal with sickness and zero mods dealing with food.
What then?
I think the location where you can catch the sickness is OP.

[JonoRig]

Diseases all have a source, right? You cannot get sick from eating cooked meals, right? You will not be exposed to sickness inside a cave right? Yet my colonists are getting sick intermittently in the bunker which had the doors locked and eating cooked food. No meat/veg rotting and all in walk-in fridge room, frozen. No raids for 5 days at all.
Now don't talk stock with me, I have zero mods that deal with sickness and zero mods dealing with food.
What then?
I think the location where you can catch the sickness is OP.

Well, actually, there are plenty of diseases you can catch from cooked foods, not to mention improperly cooked and stored foods; neither even to begin to describe what can and cannot be caught in caves... sure a rock wall isn't going to give you malaria, and your hardly going to catch the plague from cooked spuds; but sterility is not, you know, really present in RimWorld, there is a myriad of Fungi, parasites, bacteria, viruses and toxins in the real world that you are exposed to daily. Now you can take this thought further by suggesting, that at least some, of your pawns are from glitter worlds, the assumption i would have from said fluff is that they would also be excessively "clean" and so not able to develop immunities, not to mention all the diseases that use your immune system against you, so really, its a question of how in depth you want to go. Lets face it, you grow some herbs in a garden, squish them together, and stick that in a gunshot wound the to stomach? Yeah thats not gonna do anything for the prevention of infection, you have enough commensal and opportunistic bacteria present on your body to kill you a few times over, when you think about the fact you're 3 crashed random survivors in a not so pleasant environment, on a planet most likely you have not visited before; in addition to the fact that Malaria, Plague and Flu are "umbrella" names, and each has many of its own species, you can make the assumption each have evolved in the environment from terraforming, and grown rapidly to take advantage of anyone careless or stupid enough to lay about without mossie, or other insect, repellants.

[litlbear]

I believe it's fine the way it is until you can add some sort of quarantine area or HAZMAT suits.  I also wish there were fast acting diseases that could affect those that siege you, or some sort of chemical way to disease them.  Once enemy factions are tracked, having a pirate return home with a disease that you gave him could cause an epidemic.

[Darth Fool]

I think disease spreading would actually significantly help make infections interesting.  In particular, different diseases being spread in different ways (airborne, blood(wounds), food, touch, dust, insects, rotting corpses, etc...) Combine this with furniture to stop spreading (hospital bed, mosquito netting, hand washing station, bio containment fields, bio scanner doors) as well as gear (face masks, gloves, bio-hazard suits, personal bio containment fields), the player will be faced with new interesting choices.  Currently, the only choices for infected individuals are "do I use medicine?" and "do I let them get out of bed?"

[Alitaria]

Recently I've been having problems with infections. After just about every battle, no matter how quickly i get medical treatment and what quality treatment it is, almost every person who was injured gets an infection somewhere, sometimes many.

[Fruit loops]

Add a option for only doctors to go in a Quarantined marked room.

or an option for doors, to where only doctors can go in.

[MikhailBoho]

Recently I've been having problems with infections. After just about every battle, no matter how quickly i get medical treatment and what quality treatment it is, almost every person who was injured gets an infection somewhere, sometimes many.

Do you have a reasonably skilled doctor and medicine/hospital beds? If not, infections are quite common (realistically so). I would advise you to prioritize the construction of a few hospital beds as they are insanely helpful in preventing infection and working on getting a nice stockpile of meds (herbal meds in the meantime if you cannot afford it).

If the quality of treatment is good, then there shouldn't be an infection at all. At least, I've never had a good quality treatment turn into an infection.

[tuver]

I have had my share of both disease and infection. I lost a prisoner to infection, before I understood how to deal with it. I had moments of held breath as my pawn had the plague and it was about to kill her and her immunity was 99%, its happen more than once too. But honestly, I think that is what makes it the most interesting.


I do like the idea of doctor cloths. not only could it give better chance for not spreading disease, but also reduce chance for infection.  Have doctor cloths and even doctors bag.

[Drahkon]

One possible way of handling spreading illness.. same way conversations between colonists are handled I suppose. Throw in a short 'window' between when they are infected and when the player finds out about it. The logistics of handling other methods of transfer both for the programming and the player trying to respond would get.. messy.

As far as the player handling the issue. hmm..

1. all the more reason to have the ill rest until fully recovered.
2. more cause for individual colonist rooms, medical wards.
3. make med skill reduce chance of catching/passing infection. (the docs take all the needed precautions)
4. allow colonists to be assigned to medical beds, they stay there till cleared by the doc. (no longer contagious)

Ideally quarantined colonists would be able to operate normally, just limited to the room the med bed they are assigned to is in. Feeding themselves, keeping the room tidy, etc as long as they are healthy enough. Keeping other colonists out of the room shouldn't be too much issue actually, just treat it like a prison room in some respects.  Unless you're a doc or assigned there, all items/jobs in that location are treated as forbidden. Of course this would only apply when there was someone assigned to the room.

While diseases are rather on the easy side right now, if this was enabled they might have to be toned back a bit since now you can have half you colony infected from the initial event. I imagine it would take a bit of tuning to get right though.

[Utherix]

My first game was on jungle, and I didn't have any troubles dealing with disease at all. It may have killed everyone if I ever ran out of medicine, though. I always grow herbal medicine from day 1 and forbid my medpacks for when I really need them, so it's never an issue.

Disease balance is good right now IMO. If it hits at a bad time, it can be a problem, otherwise it's just the method by which the game kills old people.

[MikhailBoho]

Another observation I had about treatments/diseases.

I've noticed that if a colonist's immunity cycle ends up in a way that their new treatments are required at night, doctors won't treat them until the morning, as they prioritize sleeping over their doctoring duties. This can result in a night's worth of opportunity for the infection to increase in severity needlessly. If you wind up on this cycle and you absolutely don't want to risk losing the colonist, micromanage both the patient and the doctor to ensure that the colonist receives proper treatment in a timely manner in a medical bed (if they que up their going to bed before the need treatment timer ticks, they'll sleep in their normal bed instead of a hospital one, although I'm not sure how this changes their immunity progress).

This issue is most apparent when dealing with prisoners, as the only time that the doctors can treat those patients are when they are asleep by choice. I have noticed that wardens will sometimes put them in bed so that doctors can begin treatment, but they don't seem to do so all the time and I have yet to see an outcome of 'wardening' end up with them putting them to bed-rest. It's even more difficult as there is no pop-up for "A prisoner needs treatment" like there is for colonists.

Because of this, you usually need to micromanage your prisoners treatments (at least the ones you care about), or else there's a fairly high chance that their infection will become extreme and if you're not observant enough, a few will die.

[The_Haminator]

Disease rates have seemed reasonable for me in all my playthroughs, never been frustratingly often or anything. The one thing I would like to see is the diseases not all hitting together at a colony. I had one time where I think 6 colonists out of 13 got the plague. It's more annoying to deal with trying to micro the docs to treat them ASAP.

I just think it's a bit more real feeling if say one colonist get the plague and if left untreated starts spreading it around the colony rather then just 4 getting it all in the exact same hour. Also maybe even make it possible for the plague to spread while a colonist is treated, Making the option to keep the infected colonist quarantined a good choice to contain the disease from spreading.