Ship part (psychic droner)
Ship part (psychic droner)
An ancient ship part, torn off of a craft of unknown origin. It might be thousands of years old.
This one contains a psychic disturbance device. Using incomprehensible archotechnologies, it generates a psychic signal that drives people and animals mad within a wide radius around itself.
Base Stats
Building
- Size
- 6 × 3
- Cover Effectiveness
- 75%
- Blocks Wind
- True
- Terrain Affordance
- Light
Creation
- Deconstruct yield
- nothing
- Destroy yield
4 + 
60 + 
1 + 
10 + 
1
Psychic droner ship parts drop as part of a map Event. A crashed ship part, accompanied by small fires and mechanoids, lands at a random unroofed location when the event triggers. This ship part carries a psychic device that influences organic beings' minds.
Summary[edit]
This ship part contains a hostile psychic device that emits a psychic drone that negatively affects the mood of all humans on the map of a gender chosen at random. This drone begins at a "low" −12, but grows progressively stronger the longer the ship part remains, therefore it is advisable to destroy the part as quickly as possible. A pawn's individual psychic sensitivity will modify the effect of the drone. If multiple psychic droner parts are present, the target gender of the active drone will be the one from the most recent droner or the one that last increased its intensity.
The psychic device is also capable of emitting concentrated bursts of psychic energy, driving all animals in the immediate vicinity insane.[Detail needed]
Psychic drone stages[edit]
| Psychic drone (level) | Onset | Mood effect | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low | Initial | −12 | It's like a scratching at the back of my mind. A voice, whispering. I can only make out a few words, and I don't like them. |
| Medium | 2.5 days | −22 | I feel like someone is always just out of sight, speaking to me. The voice changes but the message doesn't. I'm supposed to hurt people. Make it go away! |
| High | 5 days | −30 | The voice is unbearably loud. It's hard to concentrate. I find myself talking back to it, yelling at it. But it just keeps shouting! |
| Extreme | 7.5 days | −40 | My heart pounds and I'm sweating. All I can think of is hurting and suffering and all these enemies around me. They're my nightmare, my nightmare, my nightmare... |
Analysis[edit]
The urgency of destroying the psychic droner will depend on the effect it has over colonists, which depends on their individual traits and genes
, but specially on their psychic sensitivity. A colony with high sensitivity pawns (highmates, sanguophages, good psycasters
...) will want to get rid of it as soon as possible, while a hussar-only colony can ignore it indefinitely other than the occasional animal insanity wave. Generally speaking, unmodified baseliners will want to remove it sooner rather than later, as the starting low drone is already significant and it will only get worse.
In order to control mood while planning and dealing with the threat, lavish meals and mood boosting drugs can prove useful. For highly sensitive pawns, or just about anyone how may be at risk of mental breaks, having psychic foil helmets may be a good treatment while the droner is active. Mind-numb serum
can make the mood threat much more manageable without reducing the psychic sensitivity of psycasters.
The dropped advanced component is a notable reward early on. Since crashed ship part incidents are likely to have happened by the point the colony is researching advanced industrial projects, the looted components are helpful and may save a trade trip or at least some money when aiming to build things like ground-penetrating scanners before Advanced fabrication is researched.
Gallery[edit]
Crashed psychic ship part with some scythers, generated at 500 threat points.
Trivia[edit]
Crashed ship parts not only have a Flammability of 0%, but also take no damage from attacks with the Flame damage type. This is in contrast to, for example, a stone wall which will not be ignited by molotov cocktails but will take the 10 flame damage from the initial attack.
Version history[edit]
- Beta 18 - AI persona cores can no longer be salvaged by destroying a psychic ship.
- 1.1.0 - Mechanoids now immediately spawn in a dormant state around the ship, as opposed to previously when they would spawn only as a result of the ship taking fire. Other than triggering a "Flee" response in your (non-drafted) colonists if they get too close, everything else, including previous strategies for combating them, appears to remain the same since the Mechanoids stay in that dormant state until provoked. It is likely in this update that the no build area was changed - previously the mechs would attack if building or placing an item within bulged rectangle around the ship part, with a base size of {14 wide × 9 high} plus an extra 1×6-tile row along the top/bottom of the ship part and an extra 1×3 column along each side.
- ? Prior to 2/08/22 - Description changed from "A mysterious crashed piece of a spaceship. It may contain exotic materials, computers, even AI personas. This kind of technology can be dangerous" -> "An ancient ship part, torn off of a craft of unknown origin. It might be thousands of years old. This one contains a psychic disturbance device. Using incomprehensible archotechnologies, it generates a psychic signal that drives people and animals mad within a wide radius around itself."
- After 1.6 (undocumented, likely 1.6.4566) - Awoken mechs now sometimes stand on the right side of the ship instead of always standing on the left.