Scaria

Scaria is a disease that turns humans and animals feral. It does not occur through normal disease events, but manhunter packs can arrive with scaria and infect pawns with attacks.

Occurence

Scaria can be introduced to the map through a manhunter pack. In the scarlands, half of wild animals will enter the map with scaria.

In addition, bite and scratch attacks made by scaria infected pawns have a chance to inflict scaria infection instead of regular infection. The chance of scaria infection is identical to regular infection. If the scaria infection progresses to 100%, then proper scaria is inflicted.

Overview

Scaria has different effects depending on if the pawn is an animal or human.

• Animals cannot be tamed and have a +50% chance to become manhunter when attacked. In addition, if an animal is manhunter, it causes manhunting to never expire. Manhunter packs, as their name suggests, already start manhunter.
• Humans are turned permanently berserk.

In both cases, the pawn's mental break will be suppressed if it is downed, but resumes if they regain movement.

Both humans and animals will die in 5 days if not cured. Also, upon death, pawns with scaria have a chance of instantly rotting, preventing any butchering products from being obtained. This chance is dependent on difficulty.

Scaria infection

Scaria spreads through bites and scratches inflicted by an animal or a human with scaria. As long as these wounds don't become infected - in the usual manner -, the injured pawn is safe from scaria. If they do get infected, it will manifest as a scaria infection instead of a regular infection. Other types of wounds do not spread scaria.

Most animal attacks are bites^{[Check special bites]} and scratches, which makes them the main spreaders of scaria.

Humans can technically inflict bites, but due to the melee verb selection mechanic, will only do so when they can't use their hands or a weapon. They do not have natural scratch attacks, but attacks made from a power claw, hand talon, thrumbo horn, elephant tusk, mastodon tusk, or alpha thrumbo horn will spread scaria.

A scaria infection progresses at the same speed and has the same immunization properties as a regular infection, but increases mental break threshold in addition to pain, and causes scaria instead of death. The effects on breathing and consciousness seen in the late stages of regular infections are absent (apart from the effect of pain on consciousness).

Stages

Stage	Severity	Symptoms
Infection (minor)	0% - 32%	Pain: +5% Mental break threshold: +2%
Infection (major)	33% - 77%	Pain: +8% Mental break threshold: +4%
Infection (extreme)	78% - 99%	Pain: +12% Mental break threshold: +8%
Infection (extreme)	100%	Scaria

Treatment

Scaria infections may be treated in the same manner as an ordinary infection. If this fails, the infection will be replaced by scaria.

On a downed pawn, scaria can be treated with an operation requiring both:

• 3 medicine of industrial quality or better; and
• A doctor with a medical skill of 8 or higher.

Analysis

Scaria was added to balance out manhunter packs, from being a huge wealth boost from the corpse butchering. Now most of the manhunter animals end up as useless rotten corpses.

Financially, it is almost never worth it to cure an animal's scaria, with the exception of thrumbos or any other high value animals. In that case, if the manhunter Thrumbo is downed, curing the scaria then slaughtering it guarantees a useful corpse for butchering.

In addition to the risk of wound infections, pawns engaged in melee with scaria manhunters will be exposed to corpse gas from instant rot, which will cause lung rot very rapidly. Detoxifier lungs will defend against this danger.

The same techniques that defend against normal wound infections also apply to scaria infection. If beating the infection is in doubt, the pawn should be disarmed before the disease drives them berserk. Afterwards, treatment may be applied if the requirements are available and the victim is unable to walk.

Gallery

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  Scaria infected panthers

Version history

• 1.1.2647 - Added.
• 1.2.2719 - Fixed a bug where curing scaria would not remove manhunting.
• 1.6.4518 - Now causes scaria infections when attacking, allowing it to infect humans. Animals with scaria are no longer manhunters by default. However, once they become manhunters, they remain manhunters until they die or are cured of scaria. Animals with scaria cannot be tamed, and are more likely to become manhunters when attacked.

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Disease

Deadly diseases

Flu • Infection • Lung rot • Malaria • Plague • Sleeping sickness • Organ decay • Blood rot • Infant illness

Non-fatal diseases

Fibrous mechanites • Gut worms • Muscle parasites • Sensory mechanites • Paralytic abasia

Animal diseases

Scaria