How Do I Heal/Stop Bleeding/Treat Injuries for My Characters?

[((Satan Chosen))=((Endless War))]

I have had to keep restarting, because I can not seem to be able to keep anyone from dying from their injuries, and I do not know what to do to keep this from happening. I have a bed designated for medical-use, and any advice would be greatly-appreciated.

[Monoxide]

Your pawn needs to be in the bed, then a doctor will take to bandaging them.

Your most likely issue is that your priorities are set poorly. I usually have bed rest set to 1 for a top priority. This way, if someone gets injured, they go to the hospital/medical area. Then, once they are in bed, you need a doctor to help them. I also usually have at least one pawn set to 1 on doctoring. This means the two things will happen during an injury; the pawn will go to the bed, then the doctor will help them.

You can also force any doctor to bandage someone in a pinch by selecting the doctor, right clicking the hurt pawn, then telling them to bandage wounds.

[Stormsong]

A designated (medical) resting place -- even the "Sleeping Spots" which are essentially twig lines on the ground, a doctor, and a patient resting in the aforementioned spot are all you require to forcibly treat injuries.

At what point, specifically, between getting stabbed in the chest and the pawn dying is your medical system falling apart?

Do they never go lay down/get carried to a med spot? Be sure to make a med spot.

Is the med spot too far and they die en route? In emergencies you can throw down a sleeping spot, quickly switch it to medical and turn the patient to treat without medication, higher chance of infections, but you'll stop the bleeding.

Do the doctors simply find everything else more important? Use the numbered priority system and make sure doctors are at 1.

Are infections getting the best of the treated patients? Train your doctors and/or use better meds, and cleaner facilities.

[Preechr]

Use space bar to pause before, during and after any battle. Use it a lot. Pay close attention to what is going on. The best healing you can do is killing the enemy before they cause any injuries to your guys. If you do take damage, immediate treatment with appropriate medicines is important. If you have a colonist with very bad injuries, you may need to start their treatment before they are moved to your medical bed. You can do this by setting down a sleeping spot and marking it as medical. You may need to mark your medical beds as normal temporarily if your rescue pawns ignore it.

As Monoxide said, make sure you have your priorities set up correctly. Your best Doctor should be at priority one for fixing injured people. When your priorities are set perfectly, treating injuries should happen more or less automatically, but you should also be well aware of what is going on and ready to intervene with direct orders if you want to make 100% sure your pawns aren't dying when they could be saved.

Also, are you a beginner player that is playing on commitment mode, meaning no saves? Might want to reconsider that. Reloading and trying again is much less frustrating than resatring a whole new colony when stuff goes sideways.

[((Satan Chosen))=((Endless War))]

How do I travel on the world-map, to complete quests? I do not see any way to send a Character to go to the location on the world-map, like where there are other objects on the map, showing "enemy locations" or whatever.

[Praeceptorem Poloniae]

You need to form a caravan by selecting your settlement with at least one pawn and choose where you want to travel

[TwoTonGamer]

Travelling on the world map requires some preparations to ensure safety. A simple oversight can be the death of the entire caravan and your base can be left vulnerable without enough people while they are away.

A new player can disregard that aspect for quite a while and focus on your colony survival.


If you feel you really need to caravan, select the 'World' tab, select your colony and then 'Form Caravan'.

Make sure you bring enough people on the caravan to be able to take care of whatever you are going to do. Make sure you leave enough people at base to defend and operate it.

Bring a medic, medicine, packaged survival meals, bedrolls and pack animals if necessary. Be prepared for combat and injuries. Be mindful of cold weather and bring parkas if needed.


Sending out a caravan is not trivial and can have bad results if attempted without preparations. If you are a new player you can disregard caravanning until you get colony survival down.

[((Satan Chosen))=((Endless War))]

Thank you for your advice, particularly about how to make a caravan, and move on the world-map; HOWEVER, I, STILL, am not able to get my doctor(s) to do what they are supposed to do!!! I just do not know what I am doing wrongly, and need your help, Folks.

Let me give you an example: a Character or, ESPECIALLY, an attacker, gets injured, and I send him/her to the medical-bed. OK. That is done. I, then, check-off the boxes saying indicating what needs "Just a doctor; no medicine", and/or "Use best medicine", and that should be it, right?! NOTHING HAPPENS. I have my doctor-character's priority-for-doctor-skill at 1, and the other choices at 2 or higher, meaning lower-priority, WHICH MEANS THAT HE SHOULD BE ACTING AS A DOCTOR, BUT THAT IS NOT HAPPENING. Anyway, I go to "Bills" for the victim, and all that I see are choices to amputate-and-replace, euthanize, anesthetize, and give various drugs, BUT NOT FOR GIVING MEDICINE!!!

INEVITABLY, with severe injuries, the victim is going to die, every time, because there are ZERO clear instructions about what to do, because I have done everything that I know to do, and I can not be the only person absolutely frustrated about this.

I just do not know what to do.

[Astasia]

Work priorities only determine which work they do first, colonists needs are all a higher priority at certain thresholds and will be done first. So your doctor might be hungry, tired and need recreation after a battle, so they might go to the dining room and grab some food, then play chess, then go to bed, while your guys bleed out. That's normal. Generally speaking you don't want to depend on the priority system for medical care, you select your doctor and right click on a colonist (or prisoner) laying in bed and select prioritizing tending. This becomes less of an issue with higher colonist numbers and with multiple shifts, if you have multiple doctors on multiple sleep schedules you are much more likely to have patients treated right away, but it's still not a good idea to risk it with short bleed out times.

[BlackSmokeDMax]

Originally posted by (((YouALLKnow(((Who)))Did911))):

Thank you for your advice, particularly about how to make a caravan, and move on the world-map; HOWEVER, I, STILL, am not able to get my doctor(s) to do what they are supposed to do!!! I just do not know what I am doing wrongly, and need your help, Folks.

Let me give you an example: a Character or, ESPECIALLY, an attacker, gets injured, and I send him/her to the medical-bed. OK. That is done. I, then, check-off the boxes saying indicating what needs "Just a doctor; no medicine", and/or "Use best medicine", and that should be it, right?! NOTHING HAPPENS. I have my doctor-character's priority-for-doctor-skill at 1, and the other choices at 2 or higher, meaning lower-priority, WHICH MEANS THAT HE SHOULD BE ACTING AS A DOCTOR, BUT THAT IS NOT HAPPENING. Anyway, I go to "Bills" for the victim, and all that I see are choices to amputate-and-replace, euthanize, anesthetize, and give various drugs, BUT NOT FOR GIVING MEDICINE!!!

INEVITABLY, with severe injuries, the victim is going to die, every time, because there are ZERO clear instructions about what to do, because I have done everything that I know to do, and I can not be the only person absolutely frustrated about this.

I just do not know what to do.

What happens if you select your doctor character and then right click on the pawn you want treated? If there is a problem prioritizing giving the medical attention you'll likely see a message at this point that will lead you in the right direction.

[SoULLeSs]

Some tips for a better health system. Try to make your hospital in the middle or near the middle of your colony, same goes for the medicine. Set rest priority to 1, and let your docs self heal (there is a option for that) If everything goes fine, once a colonist gets hurt he will go to the hospital bed and wait for treatment. You have to set your doctors to 1 doctoring aswell to automate this system. Use sterile floor in your hospital and other gear that can help the quality of tending and lessen the risk of infection. Having that setup in the middle of your colony can sometimes be the difference of life and death

[GeneralVeers]

Having read this thread, and then noticing my lead doctor pawn tending to an injured pet (automatically!), I got it figgered out. The pet was NOT sleeping in any kind of bed. It had simply gone to sleep on the spot, as animals generally do. My doctor automatically fixed up the injury.

I did a couple of tests to confirm: the injured pawn needs to be sleeping or resting, a pawn with the Doctor job enabled needs to be able to path to the patient, and the doctor pawn needs to be able to path to medicine. So, sounds like OP simply needs to get the patient snoozing somewhere. Usually, giving the injured pawn a "rest until healed" command will do it. Once the patient is resting, if your Doctor pawns don't automatically treat the injury, you should be able to select a Doctor and give him a "prioritize tending to patient" command.

[TwoTonGamer]

Has anyone asked if you have modded the game? The game mechanics and behaviors are changed with mods and, also, a mod conflict can have any kind of broken behavior.

Vanilla:
Make sure your doctor is not drafted. Maybe you are thinking you need to take personal control to make tending happen and have them drafted.


Doctor tending is largely automatic but something is obviously preventing this for you. Here is a list of things to check (you have stated to having already done many of them, but I'm just making a list of everything I can think of).

1. Doctor has 'Doctoring' prioritized in the worktab, preferably a '1' priority.
2. Patient is in a bed in the home zone. (you didn't remove the home zone, right? I don't even know if home zone matters for tending, though, to be honest).
3. Doctor is not zoned out of the patient area or the medicine.
4. Doctor is not drafted. They tend automatically and by the priority level in the worktab.
5. Patient treatment type is set correctly, specifically that the 'no doctor care' option is not selected.


Important: If you select your undrafted doctor and right click the patient lying in bed it should give you an option to force-tend. If it does not, then double check the patient as there shouldn't be an injury that needs tending. If you see an injury with a bandage icon to the right of it then that means it has already been tended.
Force-tending like this is not normally necessary but you can test it out and see what it says.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by (((YouALLKnow(((Who)))Did911))):

...
I just do not know what to do.

Not running any mods, correct?

Some mods can cause bugs with normal healing/doctoring jobs.

Can the colonist assigned with Doctor as a high priority get access to Medicine? Is the colonist in question lying in a regular Bed or Sleeping Spot that has it's "Medical" use toggled on or a built Hospital Bed?

[kevinshow]

Change to Manual Priorities, and put the Doctor and Bed Rest as 1.

That way, a pawn that is hurt, will go lie down to rest. A pawn that can do doctoring, will then go fix him up, because they will do that as a high priority.

[((Satan Chosen))=((Endless War))]

It is apparent that mods are causing the conflict, because I do not have the options to treat, when right-clicking.

What do I do to ensure that mods are not conflicting?