Medicine

Medicine, also called industrial-tech medicine in the Health tab, is an expendable item used in doctoring.

Acquisition

Medicine can either be purchased from traders, looted from raiders, or crafted at a drug lab using 3 cloth, 1 herbal medicine and 1 neutroamine (skill requirement: intellectual 4+ and crafting 4+). Crafting medicine requires the "Medicine production" research to have been completed. Its synthesis speed is dependent on the Intellectual skill.

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 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 100%, medicine has a 100% multiplier on both tend quality and surgery success.

Medicine does not spoil, but will deteriorate when left outside.

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

Superior to herbal medicine but inferior to glitterworld medicine.

Industrial medicine is best used for diseases and surgery, where Medical Potency has the greatest impact. A dose or two of medicine can save a colonist's life from the plague. So long as patients are constantly treated by a decent doctor, resting full-time, and well-fed, this medicine should be enough against any disease.

It is generally misused for bruises, cuts, and other injuries. These are usually too common to waste high-quality medicine on; use herbal medicine or no medicine instead. But if a colonist is bleeding out rapidly, you may want to use better medicine for its increased tend speed and quality. Note that colonists are set to use the best quality medicine by default. In the assign tab, you can set colonists and other pawns to herbal medicine or worse. You can also alter this in a colonist's Health tab.

Regular medicine is enough to reach the 98% surgery success chance cap, under the right circumstances. A healthy doctor with Medical 8 can reach the surgery cap (for most surgeries) in a lit, clean room, using a normal quality hospital bed. Without a hospital bed (or sterile tile), Medical 11 is required for the same thing. Note that many factors, such as a dirty room or a surgeon's damaged Manipulation, will quickly lower your success rates.

Gallery

One medicine
Partial stack
Full stack

Version history

1.0 - Received a new description.

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