Rewrite Devlog #16

You're reading the May's devlog now, showing new features you can expect in the proper version of Alien Horizon that's being rewritten from scratch and is planned for the end of summer (no promises). Today we're gonna look at colonist behavior and healthcare.

Friends and family

As was mentioned in previous devlogs, colonists can become acquaintances and later friends whenever they meet in a building. Friends and family members care about each other, so their well-being affects the people around them. This means that if some colonists are not doing well, they're going to worsen the mood of their friends. This makes it important to ensure all colonists are doing well, or alternatively, make sure the ones who aren't don't meet the ones who are.

Some players have been asking for a way to "deal with" retired colonists who aren't productive anymore, and while there isn't any direct way to get rid of them, I'm sure players will get creative and achieve this somehow. But there are now consequences to this: when a colonist dies, their friends and family members will grieve, which negatively affects them. How intensely and long depends on their relationship and how the colonist died - when their parent dies of old age, they get over it relatively quickly - it is the circle of life, after all - but less natural deaths like injuries or stress carry heavier penalty. And then there are preventable deaths, like suffocation and starvation - when their spouse dies of suffocation, a colonist may be completely paralyzed by grief for years.

Emergencies

Speaking of suffocation, colonists are now far better at reacting to life-threatening situations. When a building's life support shuts down for any reason, they immediately start looking for other places they can go to not suffocate. Same with dangerous temperatures. If there are no other buildings they can take shelter in (because the problem is colony-wide), they carry on with their duties, however. Eventually, I'd like to add a system to mark a workplace as critical during an emergency, so its workers will attempt to work even during dangerous situations, for example so that construction workers can fix a malfunctioning utility line, but this is unlikely to make it into the initial version of the rewrite. But all in all, situations where colonists actually die because of a local malfunction should be much rarer.

Construction workers

Construction offices are far better at distributing their workers, taking other offices into account and reserving spots in advance. This should prevent situations where a worker comes to a construction office in one part of the colony and gets assigned a high priority construction site on the other side of the colony, because the closer construction office's workers haven't arrived yet. Also, all workers, not just in construction, know when they are supposed to arrive at work and make sure to finish doing whatever they're doing in time to get to their job on time.

Once construction office workers are in the field and finish their project, they don't follow priorities as strictly as at the beginning of the shift, prioritizing more by distance. This is supposed to prevent workers from wasting their time by going to a construction site that may be close to their office, but is far from their current position.

Healthcare

There are a couple of important changes to healthcare. Just like in other services, a clinic's capacity is no longer dependent on productivity. Instead, a clinic's service quality determines how well a colonist's health issue is treated. There is no longer any hard distinction between mild and severe injuries - severity scales gradually. What bothered me in the alpha is that a severe injury stayed severe until it was healed. Here the severity gradually falls over time until it disappears. Treatment at a clinic takes off a few points of severity, depending on service quality and whether medicine is used, speeding up recovery.

However, if a colonist's health issue is life-threatening (their health is negative, so they have a chance of dying from it) the colonist will become hospitalized. That's where the clinic's ward capacity comes into effect. When hospitalized, a colonist can't work or visit other services, but they get a bonus to health, which should help keep death chance in check. Also, when a colonist comes to a clinic with a health issue so severe, they need to be hospitalized, they get to skip ahead in the queue.

When you think about this system, you may realize that old colonists whose health is negative even without an injury because of aging may be hospitalized even with a very minor injury. While this is an unintended consequence, I'd say it mirrors real world rather well, so I've decided to keep it in. Your wards are mostly going to be filled with older people just like in real life.

Because there isn't a clear distinction between mild and severe injuries, the clinic's toggles for what they can treat (mild, severe or medical checks) are gone. The Doctor's office used to be limited to just mild injuries, but now can treat everything like a clinic. However, it still comes with the disadvantage of not having a ward, so to get hospitalized, colonists still need to move to a clinic after treatment. The ship's core module does have a ward to get started.

Aside from injuries, colonists can also develop illnesses. Not contagious, because a strict quarantine ensured no such illnesses were brought along on the ship, but those that can develop on their own - stuff like migraines, diabetes or cancer. The lower a colonist's health is, the higher the chance they develop an illness, so it's important to keep colonists' health high even when it's already in the positive area. An illness doesn't affect colonist's stats as much as an injury, but it takes much longer to recover from.

Versatile airlock

And as a treat, because there weren't many pictures in this devlog, I'd like to share with you a new feature that was hotly requested - the airlock that connects streets with outside world is much more versatile in the rewrite, allowing curved entrances or even having multiple entrances and exits. And just like roads, streets can be elevated and their new model doesn't obscure the interior as much. I hope these changes will encourage more colonies to use streets.

And that concludes today's devlog. Next one is coming in June, but if you want more, hop on the official Discord server to see extra teasers. I hope you've enjoyed this devlog and see you in a month.