Teen Tribal Mothers

[KalkiKrosah]

Has anyone played a game where they run a colony where all the starting colonists are pregnant teenagers just to see how effective/efficient that kind of colony would be?

Child rearing in this game makes the mother waste a lot of time feeding and playing with the kid, especially if she has to travel between her kid and the task she is currently doing. It is realistic but it really bogs down the colony as a whole when you don't have many colonists yet and every hand not working impacts the colony's overall health greatly.

[Steelfleece]

This topic really takes me back to my High School days.

[KalkiKrosah]

Originally posted by Steelfleece:

This topic really takes me back to my High School days.

Was 16 and Pregnant the favorite tv show back in the day for your school too?

[whatamidoing]

What exactly does the "teen" part add?

[KalkiKrosah]

Originally posted by whatamidoing:

What exactly does the "teen" part add?

Immersion.

[SakuraKoi]

Originally posted by KalkiKrosah:

It is realistic

No, it's not. Havn't we all been taught that anyone can be a single mother, career woman and activist. It's a sci-fi game, so why are there no social media platforms to exploit?

[Astasia]

Dealing with babies for the first time it definitely feels like a large waste of colonist time and that they can't get anything done. After you get used to it and play a few colonies and raise a few dozen kids in them, you get used to it and realize it's not that much of an issue. They feed the baby like once a day, and they play with them every couple days. 95% of the time the baby is just laying in the crib being ignored and things progress in the colony as usual. The last run I did started with the normal 3 colonists, almost instantly 2 of them got pregnant, raised the babies, as soon as they stopped lactating it happened again, then again, they popped out 4 sets of kids each over the playthrough, never felt like a problem.

I think pregnancies and kids in RimWorld carry that same first impression as like the Dubs Bad Hygiene mod does. Where at first it seems like such a huge waste of time and colonists can never get anything done because of the extra tasks they need to take care of, but then you get used to it and it feels normal and stuff gets done as usual.

[Malthar]

Originally posted by whatamidoing:

What exactly does the "teen" part add?

they wont be adults and therefore wont have access to adult backgrounds for more skills. admittedly not that important

[KalkiKrosah]

Originally posted by Malthar:

Originally posted by whatamidoing:

What exactly does the "teen" part add?

they wont be adults and therefore wont have access to adult backgrounds for more skills. admittedly not that important

They also have a lowered carrying capacity and their melee damage is reduced from when they become an adult. But they recover from disease faster than the adults so that's the positive bonus from being that young.

[schnappkatze]

I did a naked brutality run with a pregnant colonist twice. Both times it ended due to a raider visiting at an inconvenient time, like being passed out after labor, so both colonies lasted rather shortly. Should have put up more traps.

It is doable, but due to the higher food need both as a pregnant colonist and as a mother, you spend even more colonist time on the time consuming search for food in the beginning.

[KalkiKrosah]

Originally posted by schnappkatze:

I did a naked brutality run with a pregnant colonist twice. Both times it ended due to a raider visiting at an inconvenient time, like being passed out after labor, so both colonies lasted rather shortly. Should have put up more traps.

It is doable, but due to the higher food need both as a pregnant colonist and as a mother, you spend even more colonist time on the time consuming search for food in the beginning.

Just a comment on the higher food need: Do you think that the time it takes a mother to breast feed her is balanced right now? I noticed that if you milk an animal you can reduce the time it takes to feed a baby but its still not exactly fast.

[ChewBacaWaka]

It's possible just not plausible. As you stated the babies require attention and this reduces colonies production. I had a colony of 4 couples who kept getting pregnant. On the 2nd round of babies my colony started falling apart as the time the pawns spent teaching, feeding and taking care of the children increases to the point they are no longer cooking, growing or performing other tasks. I tried taking in more colonist to offset this but being an advanced colony by this point they didnt perform at the levels my colonist use to (before kids) and starvation creeped in. First all the pen animals died and then the toddlers to mood breaks (wandering in freezer or outside + hunted by cougar/raid).

It's a fun playthrough but I wouldn't expect to get to endgame on harder threat levels.

[Astasia]

"Teaching" is one of 6 learning tasks children want to do, none of the other learning tasks involve colonist effort, they will want to do 1-2 tasks at a time, so about 70-80% of the time they will have no interest in lessons and will not use any colonist time. You can also just not build desks and the child will do the other learning activity instead.

A colonist gets like 10% less productivity while pregnant depending on the job because of the reduced movespeed. Then probably 5-10% less productivity when taking care of a baby since feeding and playing happen so rarely. As soon as the baby hits 3 it becomes a hauler/cleaner and starts helping out, even if you set it to full recreation for max learning it's still increasing colony productivity rather than decreasing it. Children also have basically no effect on raid sizes until they hit 12. All the while they provide a colony wide mood buff.

Spitting out babies is an easy colony boost, additional free labor every year. If your colony is falling apart it's not due to taking care of kids, unless you get them killed and suffer mood bombs.

[eMYNOCK]

there is a neat tick box that forbids females to feed their children and only allows a caretaker to actually feed them... thats ONE single dedicated caretaker and involves a tiny ammount of work on a stove to prep some baby food for the day, while literally every other adult can and will do their normal schedule...

all it takes is literally ONE single caretaker to tame a full kindergarten of baby colonists... though, poor fellow won't have much time to do anything else, beside some light cleaning... but will be planetary reknown social master once every kid turns 13.