Radiation Sickness rebalance suggestions

[Nebbie]

Put simply, it's too hard to get, and once dupes have it, it's just a long period of annoyance with very little you can actually do without a ton of hassle. Here are my suggestions:

1. Halve all the thresholds and lower how many rads using the toilet removes.
2. Put vomiting as a one-time thing on Minor Radiation Sickness.
3. Reduce vomiting on Major/Extreme to a third of what it is so it's less of an annoyance.
4. Make vomiting reduce calories more so it's more impactful to a dupe's actual survival.
5. Add large bladder rate increases on Major/Extreme to keep rad purge rate almost okay.
6. Remove bathroom use speed penalty (seriously, what is this for? All it does is make them end up leaving the toilet to do a round of vomiting.)
7. Give dupes some wounds on reaching Major, and more on Extreme, so they're eligible for hospitalization (confining them so they aren't vomiting in random spots in the base).
8. Add a basic treatment with the Triage Cot to speed recovery, and something further with the Sick Bay, so we aren't reliant on rad bleedoff with Basic Rad Pills alone.

[Sasza22]

First off they need some kind of treatment other than basic radiation removal through peeing. Some sort of medicine useful either in the sick bay or the advanced medical capsule thingy (forgot the name). Anyway i made a thread about that recently:

The consensus was that symptoms should start lower than 100 rads, more like 50 and dupes should remove around 10-20 per cycle.

[Nebbie]

10-20 per cycle is way too low, it would mean dupes need treatment from rocket flight, which is horrifically counter to basic gameplay of the DLC. Right now they remove 60, which is just ridiculous. Something like 35 would be more reasonable.

[blakemw]

Honestly I think it'd be kind of appropriate if dupes at least didn't recover from radiation during space flight, i.e. the daily recovery = about the same as the radiation getting through the steel roof of the rocket. Might also be a good factor to have a difficulty setting for, like I could imagine some kind of recovery scale like this working well for radiation difficulty:

• Easiest: No radiation accumulates.
• Easy: 100/cycle
• Default: 50/cycle
• Hard: 20/cycle
• Hardest: 10/cycle

So default, is really no serious worries unless a dupe is heavily exposed to radiation. Hard dupes don't recover much during space travel but they do recover a little each cycle. Hardest dupes actually get sick from space travel unless you add extra shielding or give them extra radiation protection.

[evilcat19xx]

Rn we can ignore radiation, germs, natural gas, chlorine, and cold temperature exposer without much concern. 

[Sasza22]

3 hours ago, evilcat19xx said:

chlorine

I`d watch out for that one actually. I once had a fresh dupe sent to the radioactive swamp planetoid and exposed to chlorine. They don`t recover in polluted oxygen and that -4 athletics was a pain. Actually i wish more exposure would halt recovery for stuff like hypothermia or food poisoning. It already does for stinging eyes and sunburn.

[babba]

I expected the radiation to be more of an hazard in the game - I think the problem can be that radiation can also generate "good things" for the player. Making things "too radiated" gives players perhaps to much "good things" ( generating rad bolts etc. ) . As a first design iteration I find radiation good, but it would be great if there would be some form of true "hazard radiation" which can be deadly very fast and maybe does not permit that the player can benefit from such "true harzard radiation".

Perhaps this could be a new type of radiation: Microwaves. Could be deadly implemented in the game...but thinking of it, maybe it can be good to connect some positive things to a radiation type - For example heating up food/bio material with microwaves or transmitting energy over long distances with it.

So many things to consider design wise, on lots of things and topics in this game for the designer(s). One can do so...or one can do so.

[Dovahkick]

Radiation exposure is far from being threatening indeed. I've made some tests in sandbox with the radioactive materials (uranium, depleted uranium, enriched uranium, nuclear waste, etc...) and the radioactivity for a few hundreds of kilos per tile is deceivingly low. I use the radbolt engine for my rocket since it's one of the fastest engines available, and from what I've experienced with it, I consider the nuclear fallout from the radbolt engine to be an actual radioactive threat...but only because it's filled with radioactive contaminants, and yet it's only temporary because the contaminants don't survive in anything. Cobalt is also an isotope (which means it should be slightly radioactive), but in the game it doesn't give out any radiations ever. Buildings made out of depleted uranium don't produce any radiations either.

I've looked up as well for the Research Reactor, and it outputs a lot of radiations on a large radius as well, which actually makes it threatening.

I'd suggest that the nuclear waste, the nuclear fallout and the uranium (wether it's depleted, enriched or normal) have a much higher radioactivity, that cobalt becomes a small source of radioactivity like for the other radioactive materials (albeit it would produce the least), that buildings made out of depleted uranium or cobalt still produce radioactivity around them depending on their mass, and that radioactive contaminants die out slightly less quickly.

[Sasza22]

2 hours ago, Dovahkick said:

Radiation exposure is far from being threatening indeed.

It feels like it should be threatening before it gets useful yet it`s the other way around. At least uranium ore and enriched should be threatening. Contaminants should survive longer and be a bigger threat when dupes are covered in them and when consumed.

2 hours ago, Dovahkick said:

Cobalt is also an isotope

More like cobalt has radioactive isotopes in nature. Could get some radioactivity but so could granite. Natural granite radiaiton is pretty low but might be noticable with high amounts around.

As for nuclear waste it should "offgas" slowly changing mass into contaminants so it remains radioactive for a long while.