Malaria
Overview
Malaria is a disease in RimWorld that can be contracted by colonists in any biome, but it's easier to contract in the jungle. General symptoms include impaired consciousness, blood filtration - and eventually pain, vomiting, and impaired manipulation. Advanced symptoms include frequent vomiting along with a loss of consciousness, and death.
As there's no reliable way to calculate the time to develop immunity due to Malaria's nature, the figures are calculated assuming 91.35% blood filtration (the 'average' blood filtration throughout all stages of the disease), giving the closest possible to a perfectly accurate result.
If left untreated, Malaria can kill the affected person in 2.701 days from discovery.
It takes around 3.106 days to develop immunity to Malaria; assuming the affected colonist is rested in an ordinary bed for the whole time, has nothing else affecting blood filtration, is well-fed, and under the age of 40.
Penoxycyline prevents colonists from catching the disease, but does nothing to stop a malaria infection already in progress.
Stages
Minor - Severity: 0.0 - 0.77
- -10% Blood Filtration
- -5% Consciousness
Major - Severity: 0.78 - 0.9
- Vomiting every 1.5 days (36 hours) on average.
- +30% Pain
- -20% Blood Filtration
- -12% Consciousness
- -8% Manipulation
Extreme - Severity: 0.91 - 0.99
- Vomiting every 0.75 days (18 hours) on average.
- Loss of Consciousness
- +30% Pain
- -22% Blood Filtration
- -10% Manipulation
Extreme - Severity: 1
- Death
Progression
- When not immune, severity increases by 0.3702 per day.
- When immune, severity decreases by 0.7297 per day.
- Immunity increases by 0.3145 per day when sick.
- Treatment slows progression by a maximum of 0.232 per day.
Overcoming Malaria
It's especially important that affected colonists are rested while they fight off Malaria due to its effect on Blood Filtration, and that you have plenty of medicine and a skilled doctor in hand. As with any other disease, you'll also want to make sure that the patient is well fed, and that they're promptly treated.
Treatment is administered once every 12 hours.
Normal people
You will need at least 7% average treatment quality in order to sufficiently slow down Malaria's progress to the point where it doesn't kill the patient.
Alternatively, resting in a hospital bed with vitals monitor connected allows colonists to survive without treatment; this is not recommended, however.
Extremely vulnerable
For those with a base immunity gain rate of 37% or less, there is no chance that they will be able to survive malaria normally, even with 100% treatment quality for all treatments and rest in a hospital bed with vitals monitor connected. This includes some people with kidney and liver damage (physical or chemical).
To save the colonist you can do the following:
- Administer healer mech serum - instantly treats the disease
- Administer luciferium - if pawn has 22% or more immunity gain speed remaining initially, this gives pawn a chance to survive
- An organ transplant (for damaged liver or kidneys) is possible, though whether a patient will be strong enough with the malaria is unknown. Also, there are limited artificial replacements for these organs, so you will have to acquire a "donor".
- Place the patient in a cryptosleep casket until you have one of the above.
Version history
In an earlier version (Alpha 17?) sufficiently good treatment could cause malaria to regress. This combined with the fact that malaria had a hidden stage back then meant that the disease could be "cured" and subsequently reappear several times, until the pawn finally gains immunity.
- Deadly diseases
- Flu • Infection • Lung rot • Malaria • Plague • Sleeping sickness • Organ decay • Blood rot
• Infant illness
- Non-fatal diseases
- Fibrous mechanites • Gut worms • Muscle parasites • Sensory mechanites • Paralytic abasia
- Animal diseases
- Scaria