The Ultimate Guide to - NARCOLEPTICS (Best trait in the game!)

[SpoonsOnMyElbows]

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By combining the findings of these 2 guides: (do check them out if you haven't already!)

 

as well as some great ideas by fellow players / testers, i'm pleased to bring you:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Ultimate Guide to - NARCOLEPTICS!

As you may know now, the narcoleptic trait is one of the best in the game.
Currently, once your narcoleptic dupe falls into narcoleptic sleep for the first time,
they gain the buff "Narcoleptic Sleep" which never goes away.



This buff gives you a permanent -0.033%/s to stress, and +3%/s (likely 3.33% but not tested) to stamina.
This essentially means that your dupes will be permanently at 100% stamina, and don't need to sleep at all.
(The narcoleptic sleeping is unavoidable, but is on average 3 times less sleep per cycle than a regular night cycle)
It also means they can counter most stress debuffs, unless they start to stack up.
But how can you best make use of these bonuses?

How to avoid regular night time sleep, without going into "Red Alert".

Currently, if you assign a cot to a narcoleptic dupe, and either entomb, submerge,
or just block it off from access completely, the narcotic dupe will not attempt to sleep at night time.



They will still randomly sleep on the floor from narcotic sleep on average once per cycle, but
this lasts for only 1/3rd of the duration of a night cycle.
As soon as you destroy/deconstruct the cot, the dupe will resume attempting to sleep at night.
If you destroy/deconstruct the cot during a night cycle, the dupe will drop to the floor, asleep.

What positive traits work best with Narcoleptic?

The obvious choice here is "Night Owl".
Night Owl gives you +3 to all skills (except creativity) for the duration of "Night".
And considering your dupes will most likely be awake at this time, it's a fairly big gain.
Another option would be Diver's Lungs (25% less oxygen consumption/CO2 production).

Why is Narcoleptic so good for stress management?

On it's own, there is the -0.033%/s to stress buff, which is already great.
In combination with the blocking of assigned cots, it also means that your narcoleptic dupes
can't get the "interrupted sleep" debuff.
It also means you don't need to use "Red Alert" to force them to stay awake at night,
which saves another 0.08%/s (although it's actually 0.075%/s) on stress.
You don't need to worry too much about the Full Bladder debuff either, as even without toilets,
the maximum duration it can last is 1/5th of a day (with a full cycle in between, or half a cycle for small bladder dupes).
This means even if the full bladder is happening at every possible opportunity, on average you are still losing stress overall.

The only real stress concerns are low decor (which is easy to combat), mourning a death, and stepped in contaminated water. Yet any one of these debuffs on it's own is still not enough to have your stress increase, and it takes a combination of 2 to start stressing out.

If, for example, you had a high decor rating, and never (or rarely) had a dupe die, that would be enough of an effort to keep stress at an average of 0%, even if they were living in contaminated water.

What are the downsides?

The obvious downside is that your narcoleptic dupes sleeping pattern is unpredictable.
Although to put this in perspective, it only lasts 1/3rd of the duration a regular dupe would
be sleeping at night. And it's also likely a regular dupe will experience more stress related down-time.

The other downside is the -1 to athletics for sleeping on the floor, however with the added up-time,
and the temp bonus of +30% speed to gain skills with the Night Owl trait, you would likely gain a point to
athletics in the first cycle or 2. not to mention to +3 athletics (and other skills) you would be gaining
for 12.5% of the entire day with the Night Owl trait.
 

[Automatonnn]

After reading this I flooded all my dupes cots and now they all are skipping their sleep. This inlcudes the non narcoleptics. They don't seem to care much about being at 0.0% stamina besides making the tired noise all the time.

[SpoonsOnMyElbows]

3 hours ago, Automatonnn said:

After reading this I flooded all my dupes cots and now they all are skipping their sleep. This inlcudes the non narcoleptics. They don't seem to care much about being at 0.0% stamina besides making the tired noise all the time.

Oh? That's interesting. When they make tired noises, is there some kind of animation that stops them for a bit? Or is it just a sound?

[Mijae]

I'm trying this out in my current world.  A better solution I found to make the beds inaccessible is to just remove tiles underneath them.  While making each row of cots you can leave 1 tile to let them jump across and keep building until you're done with the row, then get rid of all the tiles and start the next row.  That way you can even stack rows on top of rows to save space.

EDIT: I thought i saw this work the first time, but looking at it now they still try to sleep at night, so this doesn't work.

 

[SpoonsOnMyElbows]

9 hours ago, Mijae said:

I'm trying this out in my current world.  A better solution I found to make the beds inaccessible is to just remove tiles underneath them.  While making each row of cots you can leave 1 tile to let them jump across and keep building until you're done with the row, then get rid of all the tiles and start the next row.  That way you can even stack rows on top of rows to save space.

EDIT: I thought i saw this work the first time, but looking at it now they still try to sleep at night, so this doesn't work.

 

I think you might have something there, as i noticed some inconsistent behavior with a similar test.
I can't remember exactly what it was, but i think it was something like i was removing 2 tiles underneath the beds, so they had the unstable or collapsing symbol (or whatever it is) under them, and sometimes it would work while other times they still tried to sleep in them.
I'll probably have to do more testing on it later, but for now, the above methods are guaranteed to work.
(At least until the new update!)

[DuraLex]

3 hours ago, SpoonsOnMyElbows said:

I think you might have something there, as i noticed some inconsistent behavior with a similar test.
I can't remember exactly what it was, but i think it was something like i was removing 2 tiles underneath the beds, so they had the unstable or collapsing symbol (or whatever it is) under them, and sometimes it would work while other times they still tried to sleep in them.
I'll probably have to do more testing on it later, but for now, the above methods are guaranteed to work.
(At least until the new update!)

I think I got this.

I don't remember where the original image is, but i clearly recall how it is composed. The only disfunctional bed is the one with a ladder on their right, uh, "bedfoot" (how do you even call that kind of support?).

Given this information, one can assume that the stability of the building is based on the two tiles NEXT to the right and the left of the building, or, since it does not make any sense, that it is wrongly took in consideration when calculating a building stability. Plus, I clearly remember that the two tiles accused of giving false stability in my interpretation have that "strange" enhanced corner that tiles like to have sometimes. This needs more investigation, and i need to get my work done ASAP  so i can get back to play.

 

Oh, and your posts are incredibly on point. Keep up the great work.

 

EDIT#2: while looking in the bug tracker, i found this one, which reproduce the stability bug I'm talking about. You can see that the tiles on the immediate right of the outhouse has the "strange-corner".

 

[Automatonnn]

They do not have an animation for it, only a bubble with a tired image above their heads and the noise they make. What also should be noted is that they only completely skip their sleep if they can find a valid path to their beds. When they cannot find a path to their beds they will sleep on the ground. In order to recreate this you will need to take this into account because dupes do not know how to path through long bodies of water.

[SpoonsOnMyElbows]

18 hours ago, Automatonnn said:

They do not have an animation for it, only a bubble with a tired image above their heads and the noise they make. What also should be noted is that they only completely skip their sleep if they can find a valid path to their beds. When they cannot find a path to their beds they will sleep on the ground. In order to recreate this you will need to take this into account because dupes do not know how to path through long bodies of water.

I don't think this is correct.
You can completely seal off the beds, like in the image at the top, and this works fine.
You can also have them hovering on a platform with no way to reach it, and it works too.
You can even (in debug mode) place a bed half way across the map, blocked by hundreds of materials.
 

[cptCalavera]

I found that the sealed off beds works fine, but after about cycle 80 or so. Random dupes started sleeping on the floor during night time, even though they had been staying awake for all the nights the entire game so far. I can't confirm it, but I think it has to do with them beeing idle when night time hits.