Herbal medicine

Herbal medicine is an organic medicine used in doctoring to improve the results of medical treatment over not using medicine at all, but is significantly less effective than medicine and glitterworld medicine. In addition, herbal medicine will spoil in 150 days, or 2.5 years, if not refrigerated. See Temperature for details. It will also deteriorate when left outdoors, under the usual conditions.

Acquisition

Herbal medicine can be harvested from healroot and wild healroot, purchased from neolithic traders, or found on Tribal pawns.

Usage

Herbal medicine can also be used to make industrial medicine. This requires 3 Cloth, 1 Herbal medicine, 1 Neutroamine, and a crafter with at least 4 Intellectual and 4 Crafting in order to do.

Product	Ingredients	Type [ExpandCollapse]
Peg leg	1 + 2	Medical Items - Body Parts
Wooden foot	1 + 2	Medical Items - Body Parts
Wooden hand	1 + 2	Medical Items - Body Parts
Medicine	3 + 1 + 1	Medical Items - Medicine

Summary

Any form of medicine can be used whenever a doctor tends to an injury or disease. In most cases, medicine does not directly cause healing. Instead, using medicine and better types of medicine will increase tend quality, increasing the rate of healing for injuries, or slowing down progression of a disease. For gut worms and muscle parasites, tend quality is directly used to cure the disease.

With a Medical Potency of 60%, herbal medicine has a 60% multiplier on both tend quality and surgery success. Herbal medicine has a maximum tend quality of 70%.

Unlike other forms of medicine, herbal medicine will spoil in 2.5 years when left unrefrigerated.

Experience

The amount of XP gained from tending depends on the type of medicine used, and what it is used on (human or animal). The equation for this is:

XP = Patient XP Factor × Medicine XP Factor × Doctor's Learning Rate

Where:

Patient XP Factor is a multiplier from the patient type. ×175 for animal patients, and ×500 for human patients.
Medicine XP Factor is the medicine's potency multiplied by 0.7, and clamped in the range of 0.5 and 1.
Doctor's Learning Rate is the doctor's own multiplier on XP gained for the medicine skill. See "Improving Skills" for more details.

Medicine	Potency	XP Factor	Tend XP from patient
Medicine	Potency	XP Factor	Human	Animal
None	0.30	0.5	250	87.5
Herbal medicine	0.60	0.5	250	87.5
Medicine	1.00	0.7	350	122.5
Glitterworld medicine	1.60	1	500	175

Analysis

Herbal medicine is a cost-efficient choice for treating injuries and illnesses. With a good doctor, herbal medicine will be sufficient to treat almost all diseases, where its maximum tend quality of 70% will suffice. Even if you don't have a good doctor, if a patient is sufficiently far ahead of their disease, then herbal can be used to save industrial medicine.

It often isn't practical to use herbal medicine for surgery, as a 60% medical potency means surgery has a greater chance to fail. But in the right setup and significant investment, it is possible to reach the 98% surgery success chance cap, even with herbal medicine. For example, the following conditions give 98% success with herbal medicine:

Surgeon with 19 Medical skill, and with (at least) 125% Manipulation and 100% Sight
Sterile room (0.6 Cleanliness) that is well-lit
Hospital bed of excellent quality or higher

For reference, medicine would allow a skill 8, manipulation 100% surgeon to perform with the same failure chance.

Note that some surgeries, like carcinoma removal, are more difficult than usual. Others, like ovum extraction , are much easier and require less stringent conditions. It is also possible to use herbal medicine for prisoners and other pawns you don't care about, even if you don't reach the surgery success cap.

Version history

0.8.657 - Added
Beta 19/1.0 - now has a limit to maximum tend quality.