Barkskin

Barkskin are a caste of Dryads, a type of animal added by the Ideology DLC. Slow but tough, the barkskin soaks hits for your other fighters.

Summary

All dryads, including the barkskin, are produced by a gauranlen tree. They have no need to eat, are immune to disease events, and have 100% Toxic Resistance, rendering them immune to Toxic fallout and Toxic buildup. Dryads cannot die from blood loss, so in practice will survive virtually any damage that doesn't immediately kill them. Dryads can retreat to a healing pod in order to regenerate wounds; this takes 3 days and heals all permanent injuries and bad conditions.

Attacks

Barkskin dryads are fairly weak combatants. Even with their amazing armor, they are roughly on par with most dogs as individual fighters.

Melee Attacks	Damage Amount	Cooldown
Scratch	8	2.0 sec
Bite	9	2.0 sec
Blunt	4	2.0 sec

Armor

Armor

Barkskins have similar armor to a thrumbo (with more Sharp armor), but they don't quite compare - dryads have a health scale of 0.9, similar to a human and over 8x less than a proper thrumbo.

Compared to the more common grizzly bear, barkskins have 36% as much raw health. Considering that even a standard steel knife has around 18% armor penetration, armor boosts this by much less than you'd expect. Against such mediocre weapons a barkskin can be expected to have about 42% as much health as a grizzly, with this figure only getting worse against stronger foes and weapons.

Analysis

Barkskins do one thing well: tank hits for your colonists. While your pawns fire from a distance, barkskins can face enemy attacks. Thanks to the unique properties of dryads, they can heal up permanent injuries in 3 days, and don't need immediate tending, making them very cheap blocking animals. Barkskins will also engage enemies in melee, which means that they won't be firing their gun. Friendly fire is a possibility, but barkskins are small (avoiding melee hits and having a 67% modifier to shooting accuracy), and they can be used as direct cover.

As far as blocking animals go, however, the biggest detriment of barkskins is that they lack advanced training and cannot be zoned to specific tiles; they can only be assigned to a handler and released to generally charge towards and attack an enemy. This significantly lessens their value for taking on infestations and other close-quarters combat situations where you want something to reliably stand between hostiles and your own colonists, like at a chokepoint. Mediocre DPS results in long fights and also means that your average barkskin takes a *lot* of damage before it can take out something hostile. While they can be great disposable distractions to buy time for the cavalry to arrive, barkskins are not primary colony defense material.

Training

This animal can be trained as follows:

Guard:
Attack:
Rescue:
Haul:

*As of version 1.1.2610, all animals can be tamed. The percentage of likelihood of success depends on factors such as the Animals Wildness Percentage, Pawn Handling Skill, and others. More information can be found on the animals page.

Barkskins spawn fully trained in Guard and Attack and have no training decay.

Health

Body part	Health
Head	23
Skull	23
Brain	9
Nose	9
Neck	23
Jaw	18
Eye ^[1] (left, right)	9
Ear (left, right)	9
Body	36
Kidney^[2] (left, right)	14
Lung^[2] (left, right)	14
Liver^[2]	18
Heart^[2]	14
Spine^[2]	23
Stomach^[2]	18
Limbs (left, right, fore, hind)	27
Appendage (left, right, fore, hind)	18

↑ Located inside of Head.
↑ ^2.0 ^2.1 ^2.2 ^2.3 ^2.4 ^2.5 Located inside of Body.

Version history

Ideology DLC Release - Added.
1.3.3076 - Fix: Dryads are affected by disease incidents.
1.3.3101 - Blunt armor increased from 30% to 40%, sharp armor increased from 60% to 70%.

Animals