Diseases difficulty levels: Benign-Dangerous-Deadly

[johninbaltimore]

Diseases Restored is a fairly popular mod, but aggressive diseases make the game very much not fun for many players.  One issue I've encountered with the game as-is is people agreeing that duplicants who are focused on medical skills are worthless, that hospitals are useless, and that the appropriate way to deal with disease is to ignore it.  That means an entire facet of the gameplay is either simply not fun for players because it's too hard, or simply useless and not adding any fun to the game.

Why not make disease levels part of the base game's difficulty settings?  You can set how sensitive duplicants are to contracting disease and how radiation-resistant they are, why not disease effects?  I'm thinking a Benign, Dangerous, and Deadly setting for each individual disease—because the effects can be quite annoying and difficult to control, and jumping off the deep end for all diseases at once may not be a good thing for players who want to venture into disease management.

Food poisoning, for example:

• Benign: Same as current
• Dangerous:  Basically like Diseases Restored, causes vomiting and large bathroom use speed decrease.  Tablet stops vomiting and speeds up recovery.
• Deadly:  At nominal exposure to food poisoning, it's dangerous.  At higher exposures to food poisoning germs, duplicants simply flop down on the floor and vomit a lot.  If they can't go get food, they can die.  If there's a triage cot, someone will carry them there as if incapacitated (at risk of getting food poisoning themselves if they eat before cleaning themselves up).  A doctor will bring food; the type of food is limited to something easy on the stomach, like meal lice or mush bars, so your duplicant might die and will hate hospital food.  While duplicants can self-administer curative tablets, a duplicant exposed to major food poisoning needs the tablet administered by a doctor; it stops the vomiting, but they're still very sick and need to stay in bed, except now they're not puking a lot and can get up and walk to the fridge (in the hospital room they're in, not outside) to get their own curative tablets and mild food.  Major food poisoning in real life is absolutely deadly, and I've seen people laid up in the hospital for weeks, so a longer stay (maybe 3-5 cycles depending on how much exposure) is reasonable; a new curative tablet must be consumed frequently (every cycle or half a cycle) or else puking starts again.  Let's not forget puking eventually kills your duplicant by rapidly depleting calories, and it gets other duplicants covered in food poisoning germs, so while food poisoning is easy to control and decently easy to treat, major food poisoning without the proper medical facilities, medicine, and sanitization (including sinks and showers) can murder your entire colony.

Slimelung:

• Benign:  Same as current, again.
• Dangerous:  As in Diseases Restored, brings shortness of breath and lasts 6 cycles.  Adds coughing that can be suppressed with a curative tablet; this won't address shortness of breath.  Medical pack increases recovery speed by 200%(?).  Coughing can spread slimelung so this is very bad. Non-lethal.
• Deadly:  See Diseases Restored.  Slime lung will kill you if not treated with a medical pack.  Rather than just ticking breath down over time, decrease the maximum breath, with the duplicant panting more frequently until it reaches zero after six days and the duplicant suffocates to death.  This progressive degradation of health is halted with the medical pack, but it doesn't get any better right away; maximum breath starts recovering at the same rate as it decays until 100%, at which point the slime lung is cured.  This means treating a duplicant early on results in a speedy recovery, while treating them later on results in a slower recovery from worse symptoms.  A lower max breath can be deadly in itself.  Likewise, coughing and the spread of slimelung by a sick duplicant can murder your entire colony.

I pretty much ignore radiation sickness as-is now.  Radiation sickness is a disease and will weaken a person's immune system, making them more susceptible to other disease, and making other disease more intense.  Vomiting can be dangerous.  There's already a radiation resistance setting; I don't know what you could do to make the actual diseases more "dangerous" or "deadly," but rad pills are the only treatment for radiation itself and they're preventative.  It would be useful to have a "rad pill dispenser" that can be set to be bidirectional or unidirectional, like the sink and wash basin, so that duplicants that aren't radpilled will take one when passing; said dispenser could also be set to "this room" to indicate the duplicant should take a rad pill if in this room, and if it's empty the duplicant will leave and go find a rad pill somewhere else before entering that room.  Curative tablets cure vomiting, but for radiation sickness this could be made less-effective at Dangerous and Deadly levels, and the radiation sickness more aggressively dangerous (like food poisoning's deadly excessive vomiting and incapacitation) to make it a very good idea to make use of those rad pill dispensers.  This has implications for maps with crashed satellites or other buried radiation sources, and makes coal a more critical resource.

The Diseases Expanded mod takes this in a different direction by adding new germs and diseases.  The Benign-Dangerous-Deadly system may make it interesting to add some kind of new diseases; DE takes a somewhat different direction, but brings vaccines and amusing things like the flatulence disease that's incurable but can be treated to make your duplicant fart floral scent.  Players might not appreciate a plethora of new diseases, so perhaps disease's difficulty setting could be Disabled-Benign-Dangerous-Deadly just so individual diseases can be turned off.

Considering Diseases Expanded, Bog Bugs and the sleeping curse from spindly grub fruit seem in line with what I'm describing here.  A narcolepsy disease like Sleeping Curse (from whatever source, why is it spindly grub fruit?  Not that that's bad, just Bog Bugs have an obvious connection to Bog Buckets) gets deadly if excessive exposure leads to sleeping so much your dupe doesn't eat and dies of starvation, or if overexposure eventually paralyzes the lungs like some real-life plant-derived poisons.  The treatment could be derived from pincha pepper nuts, which are used to make espresso, but if the patient can't be woken up during the course of the disease (because you don't have the proper treatment) the doctor will need to stick them on a cot and feed them.

For some real kick, Food Poisoning and this imagining of the Sleeping Curse could literally require smoothies when incapacitating a duplicant (i.e. Deadly level only), which means a smoothie maker in the hospital or a nearby recreation hall or great hall is required, and the doctor has to go and get it.  This means access to dusk caps (which means a steady supply of slime, or wild dusk caps) is critical for medical reasons, and makes a deep freezer (AT-ST + chlorine + air locking + atmo suits) to stockpile dusk caps (meal lice and bristle berries are easy to farm) a serious consideration for reasons having nothing to do with starvation and everything to do with not washing your hands after swimming in polluted water.  This is, of course, why diseases need a difficulty level:  that's insanity for casual play and some people will want to turn that right off.

In conclusion, diseases have an enormous impact on gameplay, and cannot simply be implemented one-size-fits-all.  Weak diseases means the entire disease management mechanism is a waste of time and adds nothing to the game; strong diseases shifts a strong focus onto disease management and just makes the game not-fun for many players, especially new players.  The middle-ground "Dangerous" difficulty I described isn't a compromise position; it's a distinct style of providing meaningful diseases that aren't actively destructive, but nevertheless are too intense for some players and present too little of a challenge for others.  Each of these difficulties would have a target audience, rather than being an arbitrary difficulty adjustment to be "easier" or "harder."  Benign for players who don't want the added difficulty of effective diseases; Dangerous for players that want diseases to be meaningful and to possibly kill dupes, but not by being lethal in their own right; and Deadly for players who want disease management to be a core element of gameplay, with diseases capable of outright killing duplicants, and with sick duplicants creating a real risk of a fatal pandemic that can nevertheless be controlled and even entirely suppressed by having good sanitization and a good healthcare system with doctors, facilities, and medicine, no praying to RNGsus because you can make sure everything hums along quite fine but it's really on you to make sure disease doesn't creep in.

[Sasza22]

I think that`s a nice idea. But i`d like to see some more interaction with diseases rather than just meaking them more severe. Like what do you do when there is simelung in the air? Nothing. You lock the area off maybe clean polluted oxygen and wait. In SO you can use radiation to speed it up.

What i want is more germ clearing machines. Like an air sanitizer that causes massive negative decor but removes germs fast. A piped water sanitizer that does that to liquids. More countermeasures to fight the diseases in an active way. Maybe even vaccines at a higher level.

Then make the diseases more contagious. This way dupes would need to be quarantined (also this should be brought back). A coughing dupe should make dupes within 3 tiles "exposed to germs". Germs should move between phases more easily. Walking in germed water should cover a dupe in germs. Debris in germed water should be germed (unless it`s bleachstone). Zombie spores should cover atmo suits and be released into the air around them warranting a decontamination station. Also radtiation "germs" should multiply in both uranium ore and nuclear contaminants similar to how slimelung does in slime (minus the offgassing part) and produce a lot more radiation which would also warrant decontamination.

[johninbaltimore]

I've messed with slimelung by putting buddy buds at choke points.  The floral scent can suppress the slimelung in polluted O2, although I've had it get overpowering and had to put 3-5 buddy buds there in a desperate attempt to keep it contained.  Clean O2 (deodorizer) kills off slimelung over time; I've used a polluted O2 vent as my O2 source by cooling and deodorizing it with a single buddy bud in its box.  It takes a few cycles to clear out the slimelung coming out of the vent, but once the box is thoroughly saturated with floral scent every new packet of slimelung that pops out quickly goes away, even before the PO2 is cleaned—unless your buddy bud warms up above 40°.

You can already clean water by piping it through a series of three water reservoirs in a box of chlorine.  Simple enough, once you can vacuum out the box, and somehow get the chlorine there, oh and you need supercomputer research to have liquid reservoirs.  Sanitary water piped into a cooled SPOM with a buddy bud inside gets you floral-scented O2 that competes with slimelung; this will fail if the O2 heats up above 40° and wilts the buddy bud.  That's a lot of machinery to pump sanitizing air out around your base as a prophylactic.

That kind of germ cleaning is somewhat more challenging than "research the thing that removes the germs."  If you want to clean up stuff you found on the ground there's always the ore scrubber (or you can build your own with a chlorine box and a shipping rail).

The Diseases Restored mod I cited as prior art adds two symptoms to slimelung:  coughing and lethal.  Coughing spreads slimelung through the air (oops my buddy bud trick isn't perfect) but you can suppress it with curative tablets; lethal kills you if you don't use a medical pack.  Food poisoning gets vomiting (again needs a curative tablet every cycle to suppress this).  Coughing and puking everywhere will make your colony sick; this disease spread, in the Deadly difficulties I described above, can take your colony from happy and healthy to completely dead in short order, possibly before you can react if you aren't properly stockpiling medicine.

I'm not sure how this affects what you've suggested with spread and decontamination.  Radiation I am uncertain of, it's kind of harmless in the game and I'd like rad pills to be more relevant..

[Sasza22]

Well i guess we got buddy buds to block slimelung spread. It works as a natural solution. The thing i want is a bit more proactive though. It would actively remove germs from the area at a cost of a stress or decor penalty.

The reservoir trick is neat. But it always felt like an exploit for me. It`s something i fear might get removed at some point due to bugfixing and mechanics update. For now it fulfills the role of a pipe decontamination chamber.

Debris clearing is annoying for the same reason you need a washroom for each latrine. If it was updated to work like building decontamination so that you can set it to auto decontaminate debris above a certain germ amount it would be much less clunky to use. Also there isn`t much need to use it if germs don`t spread between debris and the surroundings.

Radiation is super powerful in killing germs atm but not that harmful to dupes most of the time. It has it`s "germs" called nuclear contaminants but they don`t really do much unless you build a nuclear reactor. If they multiplied inside uranium ore like slimelung dupes would get covered in large amounts of it and get irradiated a lot more when mining it. This would help make rad pills and protective suits more relevant.

[johninbaltimore]

Isn't the deodorizer -10 decor or something?  It also has a limited reach, something like 2 tiles away from it; and it doesn't remove the germs.  Could use an ozone generator, but ozone is poisonous too (although it decays quickly); that requires adding another type of germ that tends to spread into air tiles with other germs and neutralize those germs, similar to floral scent but more aggressive.

I think the reservoir trick is intended mechanics.  You can't disinfect water by leaving it in a pool in a chlorinated room or piping it; you need to store it in a reservoir that gets chlorine cleaned.  Contents of containers are programmed to be affected by atmosphere (food in refrigerators, for example).  Doesn't cause any negative effects once built though yeah, it's just harder to build than researching a machine.

None of this really matters with the diseases as-is since you just ignore them anyway.  I've had colonies that just live in the slime biome and have slimelung all the time, no big deal unless you're using DR and it kills everyone.

[Magheat2009]

On 1/11/2023 at 2:25 PM, johninbaltimore said:

Diseases Restored is a fairly popular mod, but aggressive diseases make the game very much not fun for many players.

I am sorry to be so blunt, but often those people are not playing the game properly. What diseases probably need is a better in-game tutorial as to how to deal with them. Keep in mind that we now have masks, so the earlier Catch-22 with slimelung does not exist anymore. I agree that hospitals are broken (they are actually broken, do not function under any circumstances). Just fixing hospitals to properly quarantining duplicants will go a long way. Duplicant gets ill with slimelung, coughs in hospital, not all over the base. No more radiation vomiting getting in every water source. I am not against an option for very little to no diseases, as long as I can set them to function properly.

However, given the hue and cry over the absolutely pathetic state of the disease mechanic, I am hopeful Klei have something amazing planned for us in that direction.

[johninbaltimore]

On 2/5/2023 at 12:59 PM, Magheat2009 said:

I am sorry to be so blunt, but often those people are not playing the game properly. What diseases probably need is a better in-game tutorial as to how to deal with them. Keep in mind that we now have masks, so the earlier Catch-22 with slimelung does not exist anymore.

I had one seed die in 10 cycles because a morb spawned (outhouse) and killed my base with slimelung.  Diseases Restored (and my recommended Deadly slimelung setting) makes slimelung fatal in 6 days; you need to research a disease clinic, get skill points for level two medic, find some balm lily flowers, and make some medical packs to be ready for this.  Until then, the only option is to hurry up and kill the morb, and don't dig any non-sterile slime.

On 2/5/2023 at 12:59 PM, Magheat2009 said:

Just fixing hospitals to properly quarantining duplicants will go a long way. Duplicant gets ill with slimelung, coughs in hospital, not all over the base.

This works if the duplicant's preferred food is in a refrigerator in the hospital.  They'll leave the hospital for yellow alert and for food, but come back and use the hospital's mess table and lavatory.

[Magheat2009]

12 hours ago, johninbaltimore said:

I had one seed die in 10 cycles because a morb spawned (outhouse) and killed my base with slimelung.

I agree that morb-outhouse mechanic is a bit brutal. I does not affect my suggestions for this game, as I do not recommend deadly slimelung.

On a side-note, somehow morb-outhouse remained, but dead body-morb was removed. How is that different? Just like you can use a dead body to generate morbs, you can use an dirty outhouse. Germy polluted oxygen is a nuisance to deal with, and morbs produce a puny amount. If someone wants to go those lengths to break the game, let them. Its far simpler to simply plop down a electrolyzer.

However, I will like to ask, why was your outhouse not cleaned for 2 cycles? Early game, I never run more than two outhouses and they are always set to a high priority. Not even a full cycle goes by without the outhouse being cleaned. I also build the compost early, as it requires no research, and does not involve me having to keep an eye if my storage bin is getting full.

12 hours ago, johninbaltimore said:

This works if the duplicant's preferred food is in a refrigerator in the hospital.  They'll leave the hospital for yellow alert and for food, but come back and use the hospital's mess table and lavatory.

It works with injuries, but not with diseases. Why will you quarantine duplicants with non-contagious injuries?

[Sasza22]

On 2/7/2023 at 6:49 AM, johninbaltimore said:

This works if the duplicant's preferred food is in a refrigerator in the hospital.  They'll leave the hospital for yellow alert and for food, but come back and use the hospital's mess table and lavatory.

Before the diseases were curable instantly it took something like 2 cycles for the dupe to get cured of slimelung. During that time the dupe was properly quarantined if there was a functional toilet and food provided in the hospital. Also dupes that didn`t recieve treatment yet would be there as well if you had free triage cots.

Now with diseases cured in a single errand quarantine doesn`t do much. The dupe will remain in the hospital only if there is a med bed supplied with the cure and toilets and food is provided as well. But then comes the doctor and dupe is healed instantly.

[johninbaltimore]

 

On 2/7/2023 at 1:36 PM, Magheat2009 said:

why was your outhouse not cleaned for 2 cycles?

I have no idea.  They were busy digging and building.

 

On 2/11/2023 at 7:41 PM, Sasza22 said:

Now with diseases cured in a single errand quarantine doesn`t do much. The dupe will remain in the hospital only if there is a med bed supplied with the cure and toilets and food is provided as well. But then comes the doctor and dupe is healed instantly.

Yeah, this should be a setting, which is what I've suggested.  Everything from easy to base-killing lethality, but with a knob to tweak which the player wants to deal with.