Death

Death is a certainly fatal state that can be inflicted to any pawn.

Summary

A dead pawn can no longer act, and creates a corpse if its body was not completely destroyed. No organs or artificial parts may be retrieved, and any apparel items they were wearing will become tainted. Death activates a death acidifier.

Colonist deaths cause various mood penalties. Pawns connected by family or relationship will be especially devastated. Animals bonded to a dead pawn may receive a mental break, while a bonded animal dying gives a mood penalty. A pawn's Ideoligion may change how they feel about various deaths.

Sources

• Loss of a vital body part. For humans, this is the torso, brain, head, neck, heart, and liver. Losing both kidneys or lungs is also fatal.
• Reaching 0% Consciousness, Blood Filtration, Blood Pumping, Breathing, or Metabolism.
• Taking over a total amount of damage across all body parts. For adult humans, this is 150 HP. For other pawns, this is (150 HP * health scale).

An elephant, with a health scale of 3.6, would take a maximum of (3.6 * 150) = 540 HP of damage. Note that pain will usually down humans and other organic pawns far below this HP threshold. An unmodified baseline human would be downed from 80 HP at the maximum.

• Having certain ailments reach 100% severity. These include:
  • Blood loss
  • Malnutrition
  • Fatal diseases
  • Hypothermia & Heatstroke
  • Artery blockage & Heart attack
  • Drug overdose
  • Toxic buildup
  • Resurrection psychosis
  • Biostarvation
• Randomly while majorly overdosing or under Luciferium withdrawal.
• Having collapsed rocks from overhead mountain fall on top of them.
• Chance to die when failing certain specific surgeries, such as installing a prosthetic heart (bionic hearts are safe to install) or carcinoma removal.
• Drug dependency gene, after 60 days without the drug.
• During human pregnancy.

Enemy pawns have an additional chance to die when downed from pain shock, even if their condition otherwise would not kill them. This chance is dependent on current population and the storyteller settings, and can be adjusted at any time. Other causes of downing, such as from blood loss or heatstroke, do not trigger this death chance.

In addition, enemy mechanoids will always die when downed.

Curing

A resurrector mech serum is the only way for to treat death for a colonist, at least without mods, developer tools, or reverting to a previous save. There must be a non-desiccated corpse in order to resurrect. It runs the risk of side effects, including resurrection psychosis, which will kill the pawn again in 100 days. The chance of all side effects is reduced by limiting the time the corpse spends unfrozen before application of the serum.

Death in Biotech

Mechanics that interact with death in the Biotech DLC.

Death and deathless

The deathless gene can prevent most causes of death. If the brain (or by corollary, head) is destroyed, then the pawn will actually die. Otherwise, a deathless pawn will enter into a comatose state:

• Pawns that are just deathless will enter into a regenerative coma. Once fatal aliments are cured, the coma lasts for 7 days.
• Pawns with deathless and the deathrest gene will enter deathrest. Once fatal aliments are cured, the pawn goes through ordinary deathrest, which lasts for 4 days by default.

In both cases, all fatal injuries or aliments must be healed. For example, diseases will disable the pawn until natural immunity kicks in. Except for the torso, no body parts are regenerated, so vital organs like the heart must be actively replaced before they can start to wake up.

Mechanoid resurrection

Allied mechanoids can be resurrected at a mech gestator or large mech gestator. This takes 1 gestation cycle (1.8 days by default) and a size-dependent amount of steel. You can't revive enemy mechanoids, even if they were once part of your faction.

The apocriton can revive enemy mechanoids.