Overdose

Drug overdoses are caused by consuming an excess amount of drugs in a short time period, before the body has the time to deal with it.
There's also a random chance of getting an overdose from just one dose.

The severity of a Drug Overdose is determined by what drugs are consumed; with social drugs (i.e. Beer, Smokeleaf) and Luciferium not contributing to overdoses, hard drugs (i.e. Go-juice, Flake, Yayo, Wake-up) increasing the severity by 0.18-0.35 per drug consumed, and medical drugs (i.e. Penoxycyline) increasing severity by 0.08-0.14 per dose.

Stages

There are four stages of Drug Overdose in RimWorld:

• Hidden (severity: <0.50)
  • No effect, within tolerable levels of hard drug consumption
  • Doesn't show on the health tab of colonists
• Minor (severity: 0.5—<0.75)
  • Reduces the affected pawn's consciousness by 50%
  • Frequent vomiting
    • Every 0.3 days (4.8h) on average
• Major (severity: 0.75—0.99)
  • Pawn will lose consciousness (Consciousness max: 10%)
  • Chemical damage to the brain on average 2.5 days in this state
  • Death on average 3 days in this state
• Fatal/Extreme (severity: 1)
  • Overdosing pawn's body is unable to handle extreme drug levels, and succumbs
  • Still shows up as 'Major' in health tab

Drug overdose severity reduces by 1 per day, meaning that the pawn will fully recover in up to 1 day (0.5 days until no symptoms are shown).

How to Cure Addictions

Taking the patient in

Colonists can have fatal fates when Overdosed with hard drugs. To rehabilitate such individuals, the player must build a hospital and drag the sick character to it. Using force can have a negative social influence on the patient and increased mood debuffs that will make recovery even harder, specially if such measure was performed with weapons (healing will take longer and could severe the body badly). So its best to wait until the pawn is "downed" / collapses due to exhaustion or starvation, and then rescue the person without physical intervention.

Recovery

File:Medicine.png

Two aspects to take into account: the character`s mood will have a "psychite withdrawal" of -35 that will make the person hard to control, attempting escape while restrained. Re-capture is easy if the player reacts fast enough and the hospital isn't at the colony`s border. The other factor will be the health overview tab which will display a counter with withdrawal percentage. The higher it gets, the closer to complete recovery (101%).