Flesh tentacle

A flesh tentacle is a body part added by the Anomaly DLC that acts as a replacement for a pawn's natural arm, increasing Manipulation at the cost of beauty and mood.

Acquisition

The Twisted obelisk may give your pawn a flesh tentacle in place of an arm when interacted with or deliberately triggered. You initial pawns can spawn with one in the Anomaly starting scenario.

The unnatural healing ability from creepjoiners have a chance to give the recipient a flesh tentacle in place of an arm.

Horax cult pawns can also spawn with one

Summary

Flesh tentacles replace the user's organic arm up to, and including, the shoulder. They are universal and can replace either the left or right. The flesh tentacle has a part efficiency of 120%. This not only fully replaces the functionality of a normal arm - when coupled with the arm body part having a Manipulation importance of 50%, it results in an increase in manipulation of 10% over natural for each flesh tentacle. Manipulation, in turn, affects a great many stats. For a full list of affected stats, see Manipulation.

The tentacle also inflicts a −1 beauty.

Finally, each tentacle inflicts −6 Flesh tentacle mood on its bearer unless they are inhumanized, have the body modder trait, or Body modification: Approved precept.

Unlike bionic arms, they can bleed from wounds. But these wounds won't cause any pain.

Removal

Attempting to remove {PAWN_nameDef}'s tentacle has caused the twisting mass of flesh to attack. The fleshmass has detached from {PAWN_nameDef} and transformed into a fleshbeast!

Removing the part requires 2,000 ticks (33.33 secs) of work, 1x medicine of herbal quality or better, and has no Medical skill requirements.

When removing this part a flesh beast may be created. Spawns a fleshbeast when removed - the fleshbeast spawns stunned initially.

Analysis

While slightly inferior to the bionic arm, the flesh tentacle doesn't increase the wealth of the colony like bionic arms do. Unlike bionic arms, there is no mechanism to choose which side the flesh tentacle to replace, so replacing a lost arm with the flesh tentacle is harder than using bionic arms. For healthy pawns, the increased manipulation is best used for the Doctoring, Crafting, or Construction; doctors tend faster and with higher quality, while crafters and constructors make objects faster (quality is unaffected). Manipulation is one of the few ways to increase general labor speed, so it is also good for skill-less crafting tasks like stonecutting and smelting.

A single flesh tentacle will also increase the research, hacking speed, entity studying rate by the maximum amount manipulation can give. For combat, tentacles will increase Melee Hit Chance, but they only increase Shooting Accuracy if Manipulation is below 100%. While manipulation may go below 100% in combat, bionic eyes are superior and should be your main priority.

Unlike organic parts, flesh tentacles don't contain subparts - all damage is taken by the main, 30 HP shoulder. But since the base hit chance of the shoulder is 1.7%, 7 times less than the base hit chance of 12% of it and the subparts, flesh tentacles are unlikely to be damaged in combat. Flak vests also completely protects the tentacles. These facts mean that the devilstrand duster + flak vest combo may be more protective than the marine armor for pawns with 2 tentacles.

The main benefit of flesh tentacle against bionic arm is in wealth management. They don't increase the colony's wealth at all.