RimWorld

RimWorld

A mod that basically adds Cyberpsychosis
Reishe Dec 27, 2024 @ 1:52am
Suggestion for immunosuppresants
Thanks for the mod. This looks really fun.

Instead of making a new item for immunosuppressants it would be interesting if high bio-instability lowered immunity gain speed. Then if cyber psychosis acted like a disease, with infection and immunity, you could treat it using vanilla medicine and vanilla tend quality mechanics. You catch the cyber-psychosis disease more often as your bio-instability increases kinda like how high toxic buildup causes cancer, vomiting, etc. So you need good doctors and good medicine to keep your army of bionic commandos functional, which seems fun and manageable, but you still catch the cyber-psychosis randomly so it can still catch you off-guard and make fun tense scenarios.

I guess the inworld explanation would be that as you graft more things onto your body your immune system gets exhausted trying to reject it. Once the immune system is weakened, the now unmitigated intrusion of foreign material from the implants into the body and brain results in cyber psychosis. That's the opposite of how I understand it to work in cyberpunk, where the problem is that the implants agitate and upregulate the immune system, making cyber-psychosis the result of a sort of autoimmune disorder(?).

Comparing the two, I think keeping immunity gain speed generally good, having it treat cyber-psychosis instead of exacerbate it, keeps it simple for the average rimworld player. Though the inverse would be cool, making cyber-psychosis more dangerous when immunity gain speed is high, with separate immuno-supressants items that actually lower immunity gain speed to combat it. In the jungle, it would be fun to choose between going machine mad or just dying from malaria haha.

I've not coded in Rimworld before so I don't how difficult it would be to make the mental breaks occur when the cyber psychosis disease ramps up vs your current implementation. I am also biased because I prefer mods that use vanilla items/mechanics as much as possible before adding new ones. If you wanted immunosuppressants to be its own item with its own scarcity/mechanics I understand that as well.

Thanks for reading. The concept is interesting. I've not even played it yet and I sat down and wrote a novel. lol
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Showing 1-7 of 7 comments
MrKociak  [developer] Dec 27, 2024 @ 9:55am 
@Reishe messing around with the immunity gain speed is something I've been thinking about too!
Cuz yeah it'd make sense if drugs that mess with the immune system would affect that stat.
As for cybepsychosis being affected by that stat, I could add it as a toggle in the settings at some point.
I've been thinking of maybe also making it affect the "damage received multiplier", basically make the drug be the opposite of the Tought trait. Maybe the more of that drug is taken, the lesser the impact of implants is, but it also severely weakens the body...or something, idk lol

I'm trying to not to fully stick to Cyberpunk lore, cuz I think first and foremost this should fit Rimworld's gameplay, so I'm open to suggestions like these even if they don't follow that lore perfectly.
It's not like I can even check if they're lore accurate cuz I'm yet to play 2077 lel
Reishe Dec 27, 2024 @ 2:50pm 
Haha, great minds eh?

The toggle would be sick especially if you could also flip between immunity gain speed helping or hurting cyber-psychosis.

I like the idea that the drawbacks of implants and bionics are mental, contrasting the benefits, which are usually physical: i.e. more damage, speed, manipulation, etc. So you get either, a chance of cyber psychosis causing mental breaks, or, the constant effect of immunosuppressants causing slight pain or decreased consciousness, or something similar.

That way the downside would be relevant all the time, not just in combat, the same way there are a lot of bionics that are just generally useful all the time. Also, if it just affected incoming damage that would arguably be a bigger hit to melee bionic pawns over ranged bionic pawns, though, maybe that's cool.

I agree, and it's funny you say that; I haven't played the game either haha. I am just going off what I gleaned from the Edgerunners anime. It's pretty good. I would recommend it if you are into that.
Commie Jesus Dec 28, 2024 @ 12:00am 
How about this?
Biostability is not affected by installing/removing implants.
There's a base biostability gain rate.
Each implant adds a debuff to biostability gain rate, which scales with immunity gain speed and implants value.
After some number of implants are installed, biostability gain rate becomes negative.
Immunosuppressants add a stacking debuff to immunity gain rate, which lasts for a long time.
The more implants a pawn has, the more suppressant stacks are needed to flip biostability gain rate back to positive.
This would create a maintenance requirement for using too many bionics, and amount of immunosuppressant stacks could be managed by tweaking drug policies.

There's a problem of dealing with diseases and infections tho. Adam Smasher would die to a regular cold.
Some other drug world probably have to be added, which removes effects of immunosuppressants and allows a player to choose whether they want to keep their unstable cyborg anaesthesized or partially disassembled while recovering
Reishe Dec 28, 2024 @ 11:41am 
That's interesting. That's leaning more towards how its done in cyberpunk.

I think the installing/removing implants can still affect biostability. Its a cool incentive to space out the implant installations so your pawns can adapt the implants. If the installation hit to biostability also scales with immunity gain speed, you could still install multiple bionics at once by stacking immunosuppressants first.

The maintenance requirement is cool and I like the increased vulnerability to diseases and infections. Genies from Vanilla Expanded have very low immunity gain speed, so they need to take antibiotics to boost it. Something similar could work here. I think the simplest solution to an infection would be to chuck them in a biosculptor pod medic cycle; with the added advantage of being peak aesthetic xD.
Commie Jesus Dec 29, 2024 @ 12:45am 
That sounds great, it's always cool to give people multiple ways of dealing with a challenge.

@MrKociak do you have this mod on GitHub? It would be interesting to play around with different ideas
MrKociak  [developer] Dec 29, 2024 @ 4:32am 
@Commie Jesus I don't cuz...ok it's gonna sound very stupid, but I've never used GitHub so I'm not familiar with it.
I'll have to get around to it :U
Commie Jesus Dec 29, 2024 @ 11:57am 
No biggie, I was mostly just hoping to avoid doing basic work of setting up a rimworld mod, since I've never done it before C:
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