Go-juice

Go-juice is a potent combat drug that almost completely blocks pain and significantly improves a pawn's capabilities, at the risk of addiction and overdose.

Gameplay Overview

Go-juice is a drug that can be purchased, found on raiders, or manufactured at a drug lab.

It acts as a potent stimulant and pain-killer, reducing pain by 90% and boosting consciousness, movement, and sight. It has a significant impact on combat performance due to the mobility improvement, along with the enhancement to sight and consciousness which are vital for shooting accuracy. The high for go-juice lasts 1.875 days from 75% severity (one injection), but can last as long as 2.5 days from 100% severity (multiple injections). Similar to the painstopper, its reduction of pain in turn reduces the penalties to combat stats that come with it while also keeping the pawn up for longer. This means an affected pawn does more damage while injured and is doing that damage for longer. Coupled with the direct buffs from the other effects of the drug, this makes affected pawn significantly deadlier, but also puts them at risk by not going into shock as quickly meaning they will fight until very close to death or made physically unable.

Go-juice's consciousness boost also improves the odds of a doctor successfully performing surgery. This is more useful for the surgeries with less chance to succeed such as carcinoma removal, though is less useful for regular surgeries.

One can get addicted to Go-juice even without any tolerance build up; no injection of Go-juice is without risk of addiction.

Assuming a healthy, but otherwise unaugmented pawn, these bonuses from consuming Go-juice translates to:

A +50% increase to Move Speed, equivalent to an increase of 2.3 c/s on a healthy, unencumbered pawn.
A +20% increase in General Labor Speed.
A +30% increase in Medical Tend Quality at Medical skill 10. At Medical 20, this is a 27% increase, at Medical 5, a 32% increase
A 1.2x multiplier to Medical Surgery Success Chance, equivalent to +6.6 extra levels of Medical.
An increase in Shooting Accuracy equivalent to +4.2 extra levels of Shooting.
An increase in Melee Hit Chance equivalent to +6.6 extra levels of Melee.
An increase in Melee Dodge Chance equivalent to +11.8 extra levels of Melee.

Detailed Effects

Instant - upon consumption

Satisfies rest need: +40%
Recreation (chemical): +40%
Restores psyfocus: +15%
Go-juice addiction chance: 2.6%, no minimum tolerance required.
Overdose chance: 0.5%

Go-juice high

Improved moving: +50%
Improved sight: +35%
Heightened consciousness: +20%. However, as consciousness also improves other stats, the following are also affected.
- Improved manipulation: +20%
- Improved talking: +20%
- Improved eating: +20%
Minimised pain: x10%
Improved mood: +5

Excessive consumption of go-juice within a short timespan, or consumption in combination with other hard drugs may result in a drug overdose. Furthermore, each dose has an unavoidable 0.5% chance of instantly causing a major overdose, regardless of previous drug consumption.

Tolerance

If a pawn develops at least a large tolerance to go-juice (50% severity), they will get chemical damage in the brain in a mean time of 120 in-game days. This results in a reduced brain function of 50% for that pawn, who will become significantly impaired in all jobs from combat to daily work. However, as of version 1.2.3005, go-juice no longer gives a pawn any tolerance at all when taken, despite the effects of tolerance still existing in-game. This has been confirmed as intended behavior. [1]

Addiction

"A chemical addiction to go-juice. Long-term presence of go-juice has caused neurological adaptations at the cellular level, so the brain can no longer function properly without the drug.
Without regular doses of go-juice, withdrawal symptoms will begin. However, extended abstinence will force the brain to adapt back to its normal state, resolving the addiction."

The need for go-juice falls by 33.3% per day, meaning the pawn will need to consume go-juice at least every three days to prevent withdrawal symptoms.

Withdrawal

The process of going through a go-juice withdrawal is nasty, but also shorter than most other withdrawals. The severity of the addiction falls by 4.5% per day, meaning it takes about 22.2 days to overcome the addiction. This is significantly less than the usual 30 days for other hard drugs.

The withdrawal symptoms for go-juice typically consist of significantly impaired movement, impaired consciousness, blood pumping, and sight, and slightly impaired manipulation. Other symptoms include increased hunger rate, fatigue, massively increased pain, binging, psychotic wandering, and very poor mood. The mood hit is so bad that, by the numbers, one would rather lose their spouse than their go-juice.

Detailed symptoms:

−22 Mood ("I'm all fuzzy and can't think straight. My limbs feel heavy, I'm tired and hungry, everything hurts. And why won't my eyes focus properly?")
×300% Pain (meaning all pain will be tripled)
−20% Consciousness
−50% Moving
−20% Sight
−20% Blood pumping
−10% Manipulation
−30% Rest fall factor (meaning the pawn will need to sleep about a third times longer than normal)
−50% Hunger rate factor (meaning the pawn will need to eat about twice as much as normal)

Possible mental states:

Hard drug binge: on average every 40 days.
Psychotic wandering: on average every 10 days.

Acquisition

go-juice is manufactured at a drug lab for 2 neutroamine and 1 Yayo. It requires go-juice production to be researched. Its synthesis speed is dependent on the Intellectual skill.

Version history

0.15.1279 - Added.
1.1.2647 - Rebalanced. Addiction risk and effects reduced, safe dose interval removed. Now instantly gives psyfocus when taken by psycasters.

Drugs