Drugs

For the medical items, see Medicine (disambiguation).

Drugs are substances that alter the body and mind. While they can give mood- and stat- related boosts, most drugs come with a risk to addiction, overdose, or both.

Summary

When taken, a drug will have 2 major types of effects:

Effects that happen once, on taking the drug - such as wake-up immediately fulfilling Rest. Most drugs increase Recreation.
Effects that happen as long as the "high" is active - such as go-juice's increase to Moving. Most drugs increase mood directly. The effect is sustained so long as the "severity" is greater than 0.

However, drugs come with multiple downsides. A majority of drugs can cause addiction, creating a demand for a drug. An addict without the drug will undergo a harmful withdrawal. Stronger drugs have stronger withdrawals, and always have a risk of overdose, which can rarely lead to death. And, there can be health issues that arise, either from being overly tolerant to the drug (from taking it too much), or from being high at all.

Impulsive drug use

Even if you never order colonists to take a drug, having them in your colony allows access to the drug binge mental break. Social drug binges happen as a major break, and hard drug binges are an extreme break. Colonists in a mental break will ignore allowed areas and forbidden items.

Drugs are desired for pawns with chemical interest and chemical fascination, who will be upset (−6 and −12 mood, respectively) if their Chemical need is unmet. They will take drugs for recreation and for addiction, regardless of drug assignment. However, they will never go on random drug binges and will respect both allowed areas and item forbidding.

Medical drugs (penoxycyline and luciferium) will never be taken as part of drug binges or the chemical need traits.

List of drugs

Drugs can be grouped into 3 major categories:

Social drugs:
Drugs that have a safe dose interval. They never cause overdoses, and won't cause addiction or permanent health problems unless taken too often.

Drug	Mood	Rec.^[1]	Rest^[2]	Stat effects
Ambrosia	+5	+50%	-	Acts as food. (+0.20 nutrition)
Beer	+10 (Tipsy) +24 (Hammered)	+17%	-	Dependent on how drunk (how many beers taken). More beer: + Mood, − Consciousness, − Moving, + Social fights Acts as food (+0.08 nutrition).
Psychite tea	+12	+40%	+10%	×80% Rest Fall Rate, x90% Pain
Smokeleaf	+13	+80%	−10%	−30% Consciousness, −10% Moving, +30% Hunger, -20% Pain

Hard drugs:
Drugs that always have a chance for addiction and major overdose when a regular human takes the drug. These drugs also increase overdose severity; taking multiple gives a chance of starting a minor overdose.

Drug	Mood	Rec.^[1]	Rest^[2]	Stat effects
Flake	+35	+70%	+20%	×33% Rest Fall Rate, x50% Pain
Yayo	+35	+80%	+40%	×33% Rest Fall Rate, +15% Moving, x50% Pain
Go-juice	+5	+40%	+40%	+20% Consciousness, +50% Moving, +35% Sight, x10% Pain
Wake-up	+5	+40%	+100%	×80% Rest Fall Rate, +10% Consciousness, +10% Moving, +50% Global Work Speed MTB 120 days high for heart attack

Medical drugs:
Special purpose. They don't increase mood, don't follow the trends of other drugs, and treat some form of ailment. Penoxycyline contributes to overdoses, while luciferium doesn't. These drugs will never be taken for recreation and will never be taken as a drug binge.

Drug	Mood	Rec.^[1]	Rest^[2]	Stat effects
Penoxycyline	-	-	-	Prevents Malaria, Plague, Sleeping sickness.
Luciferium	-	-	-	+10% Consciousness, +5% Moving, +15% Sight, x80% Pain +70% Blood Filtration, +20% Metabolism, +15% Blood Pumping Cures 1 scar or chronic illness every 15 - 30 days

¹ Immediate Recreation gain from a single dose of the drug. Counts as chemical recreation; reduced by recreation tolerance.

² Immediate Rest need gain from a single dose of the drug. Does not account for Rest Fall Rate while high on drug.

Tolerance

Many drugs have some form of tolerance, which increases as you take more of the drug. Tolerance decreases the duration of a drug high, as well as addiction need gain. Tolerance does not decrease the effects of the high while it lasts. The multiplier on high duration is calculated as follows:

Duration Tolerance Multiplier = 100 - (Tolerance (%) * 0.75 round 0)

In game, tolerance is displayed using the duration multiplier.

Higher tolerance also increases chance for addiction: Social drugs requires a minimum % tolerance before addiction can happen and tolerance itself makes addiction more likely:

Tolerance	Multiplier	Graph
0%	×100%
50%	×500%
80%	×1500%

Certain tolerances can directly cause chronic health problems. Smokeleaf tolerance (>36%) causes asthma and lung carcinoma, beer (>?%) can cause liver cirrhosis, and psychite (>45%) causes chemical damage to the kidney. Tolerance to ambrosia has no special ill effect, while the other drugs have no tolerances.

Tolerance gain per dose scales inversely with body size. Children and small animals can get addicted much easier than an adult would.

Addiction

Addiction is a reality when using extreme drugs. When taking hard drugs, there is always a chance to cause addiction, and taking enough of any non-Penoxycyline drug can eventually get a pawn addicted. As they take the drug, a pawn's tolerance increases, which decreases a drug's effect while increasing the chance of addiction. Some drugs require a minimum tolerance (i.e. minimum drugs taken/time) before addiction is possible at all. Uniquely, getting an addiction to psychite has an immediate 15% chance of causing chemical damage to the kidneys.

The following table is a summary of each drug's addiction potential:

Drug	High duration (0% tol.)	Safe dose interval (adult)	Tolerance gain/dose	Tolerance fall rate	New addiction min tolerance	New addiction chance	Safe doses at 0 tolerance
Ambrosia	16.7 h	1.6 Days	3.2%	2% / Day	15%	1%	4
Psychite tea	7.2 h	2 Days	3%	1.5% / Day	10%	2%	3
Beer	4.8 h	1 Day	1.6%	1.6% / Day	25%	1%	15
Smokeleaf	12 h	2 Days	3%	1.5% /Day	15%	2%	5
Flake	7.2 h	Never	4%	1.5% / Day	0%	5%	0
Yayo	12 h	Never	4%	1.5% / Day	0%	1%	0
Wake-up	12 h	Never	N/A	N/A	0%	2%	0
Go-juice	16.7 h	Never	N/A	N/A	0%	2.6%	0

Notes:

These safe dose intervals do not apply to humans under 18 including, but not limited to, babies and children. These pawns gain more tolerance per dose due to their smaller body size.
Luciferium always causes an addiction when taken. Penoxycyline never does.
Psychite tea, flake, and yayo all contribute toward psychite addiction and tolerance.
- Go-juice doesn't, despite costing yayo to create.

Addiction need

When addicted, pawns gain a need for that specific drug. This is displayed in the Needs window of a pawn. When it hits 0, they receive the effects of withdrawal. Each drug type has their own separate need. By default, pawns will automatically take drugs to satisfy this need, even if the default "No Drugs" drug policy is selected. You can disable this in the drug policy menu (under the Assign tab).

Taking a non-Luciferium drug increases the addict's drug need by a base of +90%, but this is reduced by a pawn's tolerance to that drug. Need fall rate depends on the drug itself:

Beer, smokeleaf, ambrosia, and psychite needs fall by 50% per day.
Wake-up and go-juice needs fall by 33.3% per day.
Luciferium need falls by 15% per day, so that it must be taken every 6.667 days.

This is separate from the addiction (%) in the Health tab, which is the progress towards overcoming an addiction. See Addiction progress for that.

Addiction progress

In an addict's Health tab, there will be either Addiction (%) or Withdrawal (%), depending on if the drug need is fulfilled. The percentage is the progress towards overcoming an addiction. Each drug has different stats on addiction gain. In general, progress increases as time passes and decreases as drugs are taken. Progress does not immediately restart after taking a new drug. New addicts will always start at 50%, so immediate action is best if you want to fix an addiction.

Luciferium is special. The need for luciferium can never be cured, and trying to withdraw can and will eventually result in death.

Withdrawal

When trying to overcome an addiction, withdrawal is inevitable. Ambrosia has the lightest withdrawal, consisting only of a −10 moodlet. Every other (non-luciferium) drug withdrawal follows these trends:

At least a −20 moodlet.
Large reduction to Consciousness and other stats.
Chance of forced mental breaks, such as psychotic wandering, even if mood is high.
Chance of forced hard drug binges, even for social drugs.

As with addiction, each drug has a different form of withdrawal - see their page for details.

Overdose

Overdose is an ailment that can occur when taking hard drugs (flake, yayo, go-juice, wake-up), though penoxycyline can also add to an overdose.

There is a 0.5% to 1.5% chance to immediately gain a Major-level overdose upon taking a hard drug (dependent on the drug).
Taking any hard drug always increases severity from 0.18 to 0.35 per dose.
Taking penoxycyline always increases severity from 0.08 to 0.14 per dose.

Effects

Severity is translated to overdose effects, as follows:

Hidden: Severity < 0.50

No effect, within tolerable levels of hard drug consumption
Doesn't show on the health tab of colonists

Minor: Severity 0.5 — 0.749

×50% Consciousness
Frequent vomiting - Every 0.3 days (4.8h) on average

Major: Severity 0.75 — 0.999

Consciousness 10% max (immediate down).
Chemical damage to the brain on average 2.5 days in this state
Death on average 3 days in this state

Fatal: Severity 1

Overdosing pawn's body is unable to handle extreme drug levels, and succumbs

Severity decreases at a rate of 1 per game day. This means it takes up to 24 hours for a full recovery, or 12 hours if no overdose is visible.

Interaction with DLC

The Drug use: Essential precept desires drugs. Their mood shifts from +3 to −10 depending on the time since a drug has been taken, but the ideoligion does not force drug use beyond the mood penalty. This precept increases drug plant harvest yield by +50%, synthesis speed by +50%, and adds +10% Trade Price Improvement when selling drugs.

Genes can impact drug addiction. For all drug genes, alcohol and smokeleaf have the smaller impact to metabolism.

<Drug>-impervious eliminates all addiction and tolerance, and reduces the random overdose chance by 50%, for −3 or −5 metabolic efficiency.
<Drug>-resistant reduces addiction, tolerance, and random overdose chance by 50%, for −1 or −2 metabolic efficiency.
<Drug>-dependency requires the drug every 5 days to avoid large penalties, puts in a coma in 30 days, and kills in 60 days. However, it gives immunity to addiction and random overdose. This gene instead adds +3 or +4 metabolic efficiency.

Trade

Drugs are highly profitable and very lightweight source of money. They are a valid and powerful source of income if you are in a temperate/warm biome, or have a greenhouse to make them in. There is absolutely no penalty towards selling any drug to any faction. Factions are even happy about gifted drugs. This is true even if a faction's ideoligion forbids drugs.

Drug synthesis relies on Plants (to grow hops, smokeleaf leaves, and psychoid leaves), and one of Cooking (smokeleaf, beer, psychite tea) or Intellectual (other drugs). It is considered a Crafting work, despite it not using the Crafting skill.

Comparisons

Flake is usually the most profitable drug that your colony can produce on its own. Note that growing the psychoid plant requires a Plants skill of 6, and creating flake requires the Psychite refining research.

Smokeleaf is flake's biggest competitor. Compared to flake, smokeleaf only gives 88% the silver per unit of planter work (+12.5% more drug/plant, but −21.5% value/drug). In addition, joints themselves take longer to create - with equal skill, they take +80% more work. However, smokeleaf relies on Cooking skill, so can be better when you have a great Cook idle. Also, smokeleaf plants give a higher yield per plant growth day, especially in hydroponics. Therefore, smokeleaf can be superior when work time isn't an issue.

Other comparisons:

Compared to yayo, flake is worth 67% the silver, but requires only 71% of the Work To Make and 50% of the ingredient costs. Flake gives 33% more silver per psychoid leaf for 7% more work. Selling flake + raw leaves remains superior to selling yayo.
Psychite tea costs the same amount of psychoid leaves as flake, but is worth less and takes longer to make.
Brewing beer gives less drug per hop plant grown than psychoid (thus less drug/planter work), and each beer is worth less than 1 flake.
Ambrosia can only be found in the event, and it may grow in an inconvenient location. This makes ambrosia inconsistent at best. But ambrosia requires 0 work to synthesize, only harvest work - if it's nearby, then it's easy money.

Other drugs must be bought entirely, or require neutroamine, which cannot be produced by a colony. The colony trade disadvantage normally rules out selling any neutroamine product as profitable, unless you have an amazing trader. Even then, their production is limited by the supply of neutroamine.

Reasons to use drugs

RimWorld isn't real life. A drink a day won't really hurt anybody, though alcohol and smokeleaf do make colonists less productive. Psychite tea and ambrosia have purely positive effects when taken every 2 days (adult timing). Tea will even increase productivity by reducing the need for sleep. As long as you set a good drug schedule, using social drugs can be a safe way to boost mood.

Penoxycyline is completely safe to use, preventing diseases like malaria and sleeping sickness, which are common in tropical/swampy biomes.

Setting a drug schedule

In the Assign tab, you can click on Manage Drug Policies to alter when a colonist will take their drugs. The main settings to change are For Recreation, which should be turned off, and Scheduled, to be turned on.

A drug schedule consists of 3 parts:

Frequency: How long between taking each drug. This can be set to an integer day number (or X times per day, if you so want).
- Note that penoxycyline lasts for 5.55 days, and you can only set the drug interval to 5 or 6 days. Either some of its effect will be wasted, or there will be a short time where colonists are vulnerable to disease.
Mood: Maximum mood before being able to take the drug.
Recreation: Maximum Recreation before being able to take the drug.

All three requirements must be met in order for the drug to be taken. For example, setting Ambrosia to (2 days, 40% mood) will cause Ambrosia to be taken once every 2 days at most, and only when mood is below the threshold. If setting a mood threshold, it's best to keep it slightly above a mental break threshold, to account for walking time.

Of course, you can direct pawns to take drugs manually, and only manually. You can set colonists to carry drug at all times, and take it whenever needed; this is especially useful for combat drugs like go-juice.

Reasons for hard drugs

Hard drugs are never "safe" to use without the use of genes, but can be exceptionally useful even without them. Go-juice, wake-up, and yayo all help when you really need them. For example, go-juice can turn a desperate fight into a curb-stomp by your pawns, wake-up can get something done immediately, yayo helps a stray colonist run from a manhunter pack, and both yayo and flake give an instant and huge mood boost, which can prevent mental breaks in dire situations.

Yayo is better than flake as an actual taken drug (more effects, less addiction/overdose chance, as long as 2 doses of flake), but yayo and flake stack. If you don't care about a colonist at all, you can stack them up with available drugs until you run out, or they die of compound overdose.

For Luciferium, see its Analysis section. It gives many stat boosts, can cure a myriad of injuries and conditions that otherwise require healer mech serum, biosculpter pod, or the Scarless gene, but causes a permanent and costly need.

Risk of storage

The main risk of keeping drugs around at all are drug binges. These can cause addiction, despite your best scheduling and zoning tools. Social drug binges happen as a major mental break, and hard drug binges happen as an extreme one. However, you can arrest a binging pawn to stop the binge, at the cost of the −6 Was imprisoned moodlet for 12 days. Healthy colonists decent at Social have a 100% Arrest Success Chance, but unskilled pawns can fail arrest, which will cause the more dangerous berserk.

Colonists with the chemical interest and chemical fascination traits will ignore their drug policy - they will take any non-medical drug as a form of Recreation. This can be avoided in the following ways:

They will respect allowed areas and forbidden items. You'll have to keep on top of these rules, but these restrictions are effective. In particular, watch out for caravans and the Drop on Floor bill setting. Pawns on a drug binge still ignore these, but chemical interest/fascination no longer force binges, nor do they increase the chance to binge.
They will only take the drug if they are assigned to Recreation or Anything in their schedule. Setting these pawns entirely to Sleep, Work, and Meditation will largely prevent unwanted drug taking. Meditation can satisfy the recreation need (though they'll get bored of it). Note that if a pawn has no available work, then they will "idle", and be able to take drugs.

In addition, animals can wander and take drugs. Most often, they will consume ambrosia and beer (which count as food items). Colony-owned animals will completely respect zone / pen rules.

Fighting addictions

Whenever a prisoner started with an addiction, or a colonist got unlucky drinking go-juice, addictions can and do happen. There are two main strategies to fighting one:

Keeping the pawn from drugs

Prison. Arresting an addict is the simplest way to prevent addiction, so long as somebody has a good Arrest Success Chance. As long as the prison cell is clear of drugs, there is no chance of relapse.
- Watch out for their mood, as withdrawal is difficult to go through. While mental breaks are easier to deal with in prison, berserk in particular can be harmful to both the addict and others.
Send them on a caravan. Mental breaks inside a caravan are much less impactful, only slowing the caravan down. Don't forget to remove the drug in question.
- As long as you are on top of a settlement, ambushes will not happen. Note that sending an addict alone to park on your colony is not safe if extreme breaks are possible.
Send them on a Pawn Lending quest. Lending a pawn will advance addiction and tolerance, but prevents all the negatives of addiction. As getting quests at all isn't reliable, this itself isn't reliable. Also note that a single quest is rarely enough to fix a full addiction.

Keeping drugs from reach

While allowed areas and drug policies won't work against binges, the following tactics can keep the drugs from the colonist:

Sell them. You'll gain some money out of it, which is always useful.
Load them in a transport pod. You don't have to launch it, though you can. Once loaded, the drugs will remain so long as the pod is not destroyed.
Load them inside other colonists. Note that colonists can only hold 3 drugs, each - this only works against a small amount of drugs.
Wall them in. Set a stockpile zone, haul the drugs in, and seal them off with walls. If there's no path to it, then it's out of mind.
Destroy them, with a campfire, electric crematorium, or controlled fire. Each method will destroy entire stacks at a time. Do this if you don't want the hassle of the other methods, or if you have no other choice.

During withdrawal, the addict will face a severe mood hit, and be less productive due to the stat increases. If you do decide to just get rid of drugs, watch out for any drugs held by raiders, and have some way to help the mood. You might want to use another social drug, or if you can afford the medicine cost, anesthetic.

Recipes

Drug	Ingredients	Work to Make	Minimum Skills	Market Value	Value/Work	Value/Ingredient
Wake-up	2	900 ticks (15 secs)	-	35	0.0389	17.5
Penoxycyline	2	600 ticks (10 secs)	-	18	0.03	9
Flake	4	250 ticks (4.17 secs)	-	14	0.056	3.5
Yayo	8	350 ticks (5.83 secs)	-	21	0.06	2.625
Psychite tea	4	400 ticks (6.67 secs)	Cooking 2	10	0.025	2.5
Smokeleaf joint	4	450 ticks (7.5 secs)	-	11	0.0244	2.75
Go-juice	2 + 1	600 ticks (10 secs)	-	53	0.0883	-
Beer	1	200 ticks (3.33 secs)^[B]	-	12	0.06 ^[B]	12