Yayo

Yayo is potent mood enhancing hard drug that significantly improves the mood of a pawn and provides additional bonuses, at the risk of addiction and overdose. It is also used in the manufacturing of go-juice.

Aquisition

Yayo can be synthesized at a Drug lab once the Psychite refining research project has been completed. Each dose requires 8 Psychoid leaves and 350 ticks (5.83 secs) of work. Its synthesis speed is dependent on the [[Skills#|]] skill.

It can also be found on raiders and purchased.

Summary

Yayo is a highly potent mood enhancing drug that has a variety of effects. These can be broken into effects that occur:

Instantaneously and one time upon using the drug.
While high on the drug.
While having a built-up tolerance to the drug.
While addicted to the drug.
While withdrawing from the drug.

Note that psychite tolerance, addiction and withdrawal are shared by psychite tea, flake and yayo.

Upon snorting

A pawn taking yayo will do so right where it stands without looking for a place to sit first. Yayo is taken nasally, taking 150 ticks (2.5 secs). It has the following one time effects:

+80% Chemical recreation
+40% Rest
1% Chance for a major overdose
+18% to +35% Overdose severity (same across all hard drugs)
+18.75% to +75% Yayo high severity, depending on tolerance (see "Yayo high" below)
+4% Psychite tolerance severity, divided by body size (see "Psychite tolerance" below)
1% Psychite addiction chance (see "Psychite addiction" below)
If the pawn has an addiction already:
- +90% Psychite need (see "Psychite addiction" below)
- −20% Addiction progress (see "Psychite withdrawal" below)

Yayo high

"Active yayo in the bloodstream. Generates an intense euphoric high."
— High on yayo description

Each yayo increases the yayo high severity by the following formula:

Increase in severity = 0.75 * (100 - (tolerance * 75 round 0))

Therefore with 0% tolerance the severity increases by 75%, with 100% tolerance by 18.75%. It decreases by 150% per day again, meaning that the high of a single dose lasts between 3 and 12 hours. The maximum severity of a yayo high is 100% which is reached with 1.3 to 5.3 yayo. Regardless of the yayo high severity, the effects are always the same. Only their duration changes accordingly:

+35 Mood ("Feeling pumped! Let's do this!")
+15% Moving
×50% Pain
×33% Rest fall factor

Psychite tolerance

Main article: Tolerance

"A built-up tolerance to psychite. The more severe this tolerance is, the more psychite-based drugs like yayo or flake it takes to get the same effect."
— Tolerance description

Each yayo consumed increases the psychite tolerance of the pawn by 4%, divided by the body size of the pawn. Thus smaller or not fully grown pawns gain more tolerance per drug use then bigger or fully grown ones. A Human has a body size of 1. Psychite tolerance decreases at a rate of 1.5% per day.

See sections "Psychite tea high" for how psychite tolerance affects psychite tea high severity.

If the psychite tolerance is above a certain thresholds it imposes a chance over time to gain the following ailment:

Chemical damage (severe)
Tolerance above 45% imposes a chance proportional to the tolerance held to get chemical damage (severe). Chemical damage (severe) gained this way will affect only kidneys and only one kidney at a time.

Tolerance Chemical damage (severe)
average interval Graph

45% 99999 Days

50% 180 Days

100% 135 Days

Psychite addiction

"A chemical addiction to psychite. Long-term presence of psychite has caused neurological adaptations at the cellular level, so the brain can no longer function properly without the drug. Without regular doses of psychite from drugs like flake or yayo, withdrawal symptoms will begin. However, extended abstinence will force the brain to adapt back to its normal state, resolving the addiction."
— Addiction description

Each dose of yayo carries a 1% chance of a psychite addiction regardless of tolerance. There is therefore no safe dose interval.

The addiction progresses by 3.33% per day from the initial 50%. Once it reaches 100% the addiction is healed, meaning it takes about 15 days to overcome the addiction. Consuming yayo during a psychite addiction will reduce the addiction progress by 20% again (see "Upon snorting" above).

Developing a psychite addiction has the following one time effect:

15% Chemical damage (severe) chance

Developing an addiction also means a pawn has a psychite need. The need for psychite falls by 50% per day, consuming psychite satisfies the need by 90% (see "Upon snorting" above), meaning the pawn will need to consume yayo at least every 1.8 days to prevent withdrawal symptoms.

Psychite withdrawal

"Because of a psychite addiction, this person needs to regularly consume the drug to avoid withdrawal symptoms."
— Need description

As soon as the psychite need reaches 0%, the pawn suffers from the following withdrawal symptoms:

−35 Mood ("God I'm tired. Everything's so slow and boring. Especially me.")
−20% Consciousness
−20% Moving
−20% Manipulation
+30% Rest fall factor (meaning the pawn needs to sleep about a 30% sooner)
300% Social Fight Chance Factor (Note: This factor is not added or multiplied, but set.)
Mental break chances:
- Hard drug binge: on average every 40 days. This averages to 0.8 hard drug binges during each withdrawal.
- Psychotic wandering: on average every 10 days. This averages to 3 psychotic wanderings during each withdrawal.

Analysis

Yayo is one of three drugs that can be produced from psychoid leaves, the others being flake and psychite tea. Yayo can also be further refined into go-juice with the addition of 2 neutroamine.

Drug

Drug	Mood buff	Moving	Pain	Tiredness	Consciousness	Sight	Global working speed
Yayo	+35	+15%	×50%	×33%	-	-	-
Flake	+35	-	×50%	×33%	-	-	-
Go juice	+5	+50%	×10%	-	+20%	+35%	-
Wake-up	-	+10%	-	×80%	+10%	-	+50%

For use as a mood control drug, yayo is far preferable to flake, with stronger effects and only one fifth as addictive (1% vs 5% addictiveness). Psychite tea is considerably weaker, but it is much less addictive than either of the other two and, unlike them, has a safe usage interval. It is thus a significantly safer option than either. This makes tea far more useful for regular use, while yayo is more appropriate for mood emergencies. Though there is no minimum tolerance to get addicted to Yayo, it still contributes to tolerance to Psychite tea.

Trade

On the market, yayo is worth 50% more silver than flake, with a 20% increase in the Work To Make and a 100% increase in ingredient cost. The most economical option depends on which is the greater bottleneck: converting the leaves to the drug, or producing the leaves in the first place.

If converting the leaves into drugs is the bottleneck then there are two options. The psychoid leaves could be turned into yayo, however converting as much as possible to flake and then selling the remaining psychoid leaves themselves is even more efficient. For example, a pawn requires 35,000 ticks (9.72 mins) of work and 800 psychoid leaves to synthesize 100 yayo worth 2100. With the same amount of work, a pawn could craft 140 flake worth 1960 and consume 560 of the 800 psychoid leaves. The remaining 240 psychoid leaves are worth 456 for a total of 2416. This is not without its downsides however - fewer traders accept psychoid leaves than accept drugs and without refrigeration, the leaves will eventually rot away. Thus, if the player is likely to caravan to a settlement or receive a relevant trader before they rot entirely away, or can accommodate the refrigeration of leaves long term, converting to flake and selling the remainder of leaves is ideal. If they cannot, converting to yayo for storage may be necessary.

If psychoid leaf production is the bottleneck and there is insufficient leaf supply to fully occupy your drug synthesizers' time, producing flake is the optimum as it produces 33% more silver per leaf at the cost of 7% more work per silver.

If caravan weight is a limiting factor, yayo is worth more proportional to mass, however the low weight of all the options means this is unlikely to be relevant as a single muffalo can carry almost 20 stacks of flake worth over 20,000 silver.

Note that the third possible product for psychoid leaves, psychite tea, is economically inferior to both yayo and flake. Its primary advantage instead lies in ease of use by colonists. It is produced at a campfire or stove with the Cooking skill and requires only the Psychoid Brewing research, and thus may be a more accessible in the early game.

Trivia

Yayo is slang for Cocaine in Spanish derived from Santiago Luis Polanco Rodriguez, but it's more commonly known from the quote "Chichi, get the Yayo" from Scarface (1983).^[1]