Is harvesting organs from prisoners worth it?

[deadsea]

Title says it all. Im kinda new to this game (~20hrs+50 on cracked) and I've never tried harvesting organs from prisoners. I know that it causes a debuff to mood (if the pawns arent pschycopaths) and the organs themselves are only in ~300 silver. Is it worth it? Or is it just a waste of time?

[Glerk]

Just make an organ harvesting camp filled with psychopaths.
I've heard of price changes in 1.0 but it shouldn't be that big of a deal.

[FredDie]

The mood debuff is quite sever (especially on higher difficulties). Only time its "worth" is when you need organ for your good pawn.

[Astasia]

You can get multiple organs from every downed enemy, then butcher them after you remove the heart. It's a ton of "free" silver, that snowballs your wealth pretty quickly.

[Benzin]

I once tried using the corpses of dead enemies to make kibble to feed my chickens and biofuel. Technically, it worked, but all the namby pampy colonists got utterly depressed because "we slaughtered humans!! ooohhh!".
It got so bad, i started having mental breakdowns and serious trouble. So much so i had to dismantle the whole operation.

And those were dead corpses. I can only imagine, how "depressed" these weaklings would get if you had them actually killing prisoners and tearing their guts out.
I dont think its gonna be worth it.

[Watereaters]

It’s -5 per harvested organ, win anyone healthy you can get a kidney, lung and either a heart or liver

Not sure about debuffs from someone harvesting an organ though

EDIT: Just going to add that there is also a debuff for execution, but I’m not sure if you could avoid debuffs using prosthetics

[Watereaters]

Originally posted by Benzin:

I once tried using the corpses of dead enemies to make kibble to feed my chickens and biofuel. Technically, it worked, but all the namby pampy colonists got utterly depressed because "we slaughtered humans!! ooohhh!".
It got so bad, i started having mental breakdowns and serious trouble. So much so i had to dismantle the whole operation.

And those were dead corpses. I can only imagine, how "depressed" these weaklings would get if you had them actually killing prisoners and tearing their guts out.
I dont think its gonna be worth it.

Well the butchering debuff doesn’t stack, and if your facilities are nice enough then your colonists won’t mind

[Tarshaid]

Originally posted by Benzin:

I once tried using the corpses of dead enemies to make kibble to feed my chickens and biofuel. Technically, it worked, but all the namby pampy colonists got utterly depressed because "we slaughtered humans!! ooohhh!".
It got so bad, i started having mental breakdowns and serious trouble. So much so i had to dismantle the whole operation.

And those were dead corpses. I can only imagine, how "depressed" these weaklings would get if you had them actually killing prisoners and tearing their guts out.
I dont think its gonna be worth it.

See, making the effort to turn prisoners into kibble was a great mistake, while you could just have put the corpses in a freezer your colonists never usually go to, and let your dogs have a snack whenever they want. Obviously kibble feeds a greater variety of animals, but herbivores are going to be a pain anyway if grazing isn't already an option for you.

To get back on harvesting organs, yes, on regular colonists, this proves to be quite a strong mood malus. So either you run full psychopaths, or you wait until your mood management is good enough to know when you can afford to take a kidney or a lung and nobody will complain (I generally leave it at that, as harvesting more vital organs would cause additionnal debuffs, but you could try to see what combination gives you the most silver for the least discontentment). If you provide enough for your pawns, they might just ignore that their own son got shot to death, so what's hostile stranger losing a kidney after all?

Remember also that selling your prisoners to slavery is another option to convert them into silver, that is overall less taxing on people's mood. It's easier if you can just send trade caravans to other outposts though, since most caravans that visit you won't want slaves and it's quite costly to request caravans to come to you.

[Azrael]

Simple solution to these problems mentioned are mods.

Grim Reality rescales the mood influencers, so people act more realistically (Like getting married gives your pawn + 50 mood and the wife/husband dying only gives -25 mood in vanilla, the mod fixes that).

And there is a mod, Harvest Everything, that adds an autopsy table, so you can get random organs via autopsy from just recently deceased humans.

[M.K.]

How about making a caravan , going outside fro a day trip while the one guy butchers all the dead enemies, and then returning?
The "butchered humanlike" debuff seems to not have an effect if your pawn was not a member of the group in the location where the atrocity was committed.
The "banished someone" "euthanized/executed" and "harvested organ" debuffs apply to all pawns, regardless of their location.

[Benzin]

Originally posted by Tarshaid:

See, making the effort to turn prisoners into kibble was a great mistake, while you could just have put the corpses in a freezer your colonists never usually go to, and let your dogs have a snack whenever they want. Obviously kibble feeds a greater variety of animals, but herbivores are going to be a pain anyway if grazing isn't already an option for you.

On my current game (tundra) I did that at first. I just let my huskies and polar bear go eat the corpses off the dumpster (temp its below 0 most of the time so the corpses dont rot). And i kept a storage of hay for my mufalos.

However, once my animal population grew, there werent enough raiders to feed my animals. Plus i later adopted some chickens so now the hay was running out as well. I cant grow anymore hay because all my farming is done indoors due to weather.

Turning that flesh into kibble makes it more efficient, plus it simplifies feeding my animals as its one food for all of them.

So i built an aditional freezer set only for corpses & human meat, butcher table with make kibble and slaughter human jobs,. and assigned the only person i have with the "cannibal" trait to do it.
No one else besides him has even been inside those rooms. But still everyone got the "we slaughtered humans" debuff.

I did managed to compenstate for the debuff by adding carpets, art, etc. to the colony, but it just seems silly that everyone gets "sad" because of this, even though they never handle or even see the butchering going on.

[LYNX Scout]

I think there's a mod that changes what they can't see -- but if you think of your map as like a sci-fi drama series you know for a fact news like that would get around.

I mean, dinner-time / rec time rolls around, and everyone is chatting it up over the pool table about the comparsion between extraterrestrial life and the non-existence of god (or whatever random topics they chose via Psychology) and in walks Steroid. Steroid is wearing a muffalo-skin apron covered in dark smears. He sits down alone at the chess-table in the corner of the room. He's got a tinkercraft chef hat on, but he certainly doesn't cook in the *colony* kitchen. Everyone starts staring and tries not to stare. Steroid picks at his teeth idly with a fingernail then wipes it on that muffalo apron. He's got a butchery smell about him. There was a raid last night. No graves were dug, the incinerator chimney has been cold. The dogs sit at his feet wagging their tails in the goofy, loyal way of dogs everywhere.

No one needs to have ever been in that part of the colony. *They know what's going on*.

[Benzin]

... and then Joe comments about burning all those bloodstained clothes in the incinerator (wich Steroid gave to him). To wich Maggie adds how she was cleaning after the dogs, and found human teeth amongst the poop.
xD
Yes, i guess they would know. But i would expect someone to comment:
"heh, well at least they are not feeding it to us! If those raiders dont like becoming pet food, maybe they should leave us alone".

I think that would make more sense over:

"Ohhh God! What are we doing!? Those poor raiders are people too, they are just expressing their destructive creativity! we are awful human beings buaaaaaaa!!"

[Tarshaid]

Originally posted by Benzin:

... and then Joe comments about burning all those bloodstained clothes in the incinerator (wich Steroid gave to him). To wich Maggie adds how she was cleaning after the dogs, and found human teeth amongst the poop.
xD
Yes, i guess they would know. But i would expect someone to comment:
"heh, well at least they are not feeding it to us! If those raiders dont like becoming pet food, maybe they should leave us alone".

I think that would make more sense over:

"Ohhh God! What are we doing!? Those poor raiders are people too, they are just expressing their destructive creativity! we are awful human beings buaaaaaaa!!"

And I think it wouldn't make sense if they didn't care. In fact, "at least they are not feeding it to us" is a valid point, since your pawns don't get the additional penalty of eating humanlike. Still, as far as I am aware, the moral consensus is that actively chopping human beings for food isn't the commonly accepted way to dispose of criminals/enemy soldiers. I may be wrong, but if I'm not, it's perfectly normal that they do care.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Tarshaid:

Still, as far as I am aware, the moral consensus is that actively chopping human beings for food isn't the commonly accepted way to dispose of criminals/enemy soldiers. I may be wrong, but if I'm not, it's perfectly normal that they do care.

Depends on the society. For a long time in human history killing prisoners and feeding them to animals was considered entertainment. Even at the peak of great civilizations like the Roman empire huge crowds would cheer and laugh as men were torn to shreds by lions. If we are going by how widespread and for how long that lasted, that would be the norm. It's only in the last blink of an eye of humanity that people have become so squeamish, though they are still fine with the graphical representations of it in movies and TV, and I think outside of civilization such ideas would quickly fall away with nobody around to judge them.

But it's just a game, and the penalties were added as a balancing mechanic, not for realism.

[Benzin]

Originally posted by Tarshaid:

And I think it wouldn't make sense if they didn't care. In fact, "at least they are not feeding it to us" is a valid point, since your pawns don't get the additional penalty of eating humanlike. Still, as far as I am aware, the moral consensus is that actively chopping human beings for food isn't the commonly accepted way to dispose of criminals/enemy soldiers. I may be wrong, but if I'm not, it's perfectly normal that they do care.

In a normal, modern, "civilized" society? sure! But this is an extreme survival situation. Feeding those animals is important to the survival of the colony.

I think its like Astasia said, Its there more for balancing than for realism.