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Rimworldis a game filled with niche problems with difficult solutions. Two of the largest issues to late-game players are the permanent injuries to pawns that can reduce body part functionality, including the brain, and the aging of pawns introducing age-related illnesses, such as bad back and dementia.
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With the introduction of Biosculpter Pods, all of these issues can be fixedwithout expensive quest-exclusive items or potentially deadly luciferium. This guide will break down and explain how to use Biosculpter Pods to their full potential, and how they work.
What Is The Biosculpter Pod?
Biosculpter Pods offer a way to heal permanent injuries, reverse aging, and save a pawn seconds from death, while only costing five nutrition per cycle, some medicine, and a moderate construction cost.
The pod is found under the ‘Ideology’ section of the build menu.
Making a Biosculpter Pod requires four components, 120 steel, and the ‘Biosculpting’ research project. It consumes 200W of energy while running a cycle, and 50W of energy on standby. If the Biosculpter Pod loses power while a cycle is active, it will pause and eventually cancel the cycle if power is not restored within a day.
The Biosculpter Pod hasfour cycles: bioregeration, age-reversal, medic, and pleasure cycles. Each cycle takes a different amount of time but the same amount of five nutrition. The pod is filled with nutrition, raw or cooked, by characters able to haul, like most pawns or lifter bots. Pawns can then enter the pod on their own, or be loaded in by other pawns or bots if they are incapable of walking.
How To Use The Bioregeneration Cycle
Perhaps of the most interest to late-game players,the bioregeneration cycle heals all fresh injuries and one random permanent injuryat the cost of the standard five nutrition and also two Glitterworld Medicine. Unfortunately, it has the longest base cycle time, at 25 days. This can be as little as 8.7 days if optimized (more on that later).
It is always faster to run a ‘Pleasure Cycle’ before a Bioregeneration Cycle if the Biosculpter Pod is not bio-tuned. The savings can be as much as several days or as little as a few hours, but it is always faster.
A few permanent injuries, including ideology scarification, can be healed at the same time.Missing fingers and toes, fresh injuries, and the like are all healedin only one Bioregeneration cycle.
Permanent injuries likescars from combat cannot be healed all at once, only one will be removed at random. Chronic conditions such as bad back, frail, artery blockages, and hearing loss also can be fixed, buttheBioregeneration cycle cannot cure Alzheimer’s or dementia, which can only be healed with healer mech serums or luciferium (there’s also the decapitation and resurrector mech serum!).
This is particularly problematic for your late-game pawns, where a melee pawn may be covered in scars on whatever non-bionic parts remain.Trying to use the Biosculpter pod to heal a mangled brain injury, for example, may take several triesbefore your pawn can walk on their own again.
With a reasonable cycle time, and spare glitterworld medicine, healing the consecutive permanent injuries may actually be faster with Biosculpter Pods when compared to healer mech serums, as the serums can only be acquired as fast as they appear in quests, and heal injuries in a very different order. This implies the Biosculpter Pod’s Bioregeneration cycle is a must-have for late-game melee pawns, who may be facing down mechanoid enemies who can leave debilitating scars.
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How To Use The Age-Reversal Cycle
Part of the brutal life as a Rimworld pawn is the grim birthday presents they can receive every birthday after their 50th.Bad back, frail, dementia, cataracts, Alzheimer’s, and more can develop in a pawn over 50. While the Bioregeneration cycle can fix most issues with aging in Rimworld, the most problematic conditions cannot be cured.
However, they can be prevented with the Age-Reversal Cycle, which only uses the base five nutrition and eight days for a base cycle time.It reduces the age of a pawn by one year, and it is a requirement for transhumanist pawns, who can get the progressively worse negative moodlet ‘Horrific Aging.’ This depends on how long it has been since the last Age-Reversal Cycle and the age of the pawn.
How To Use The Medic Cycle
Perhaps one of the most situationally useful, the Medic Cycle can heal any and all fresh injuries a pawn has, as well as blood loss and at least one disease in a base time of eight days.Medical conditions do not progress inside the Biosculpter Pod. This is incredibly helpful for pawns who are so injured they would die from blood loss or a disease before they can be healed from tending.
For this reason,having a loaded and non-biotuned Biosculpter Pod on standby can be a life-or-death situation. If you are going the high-wealth transhumanist route, you’ll probably have a Biosculpter Pod for all of your pawns anyway.
How To Use The Pleasure Cycle
Of limited use, the Pleasure Cycle takes the least amount of time with a base time of four days, and itprovides a +15 moodlet for 12 days. This time is short enough that the Pleasure Cycle can be used to biotune a pod before using a Bioregeneration Cycle, and the reduction in time from the biotuning bonus will actually save more time than the Pleasure Cycle took.
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Biosculpter Pod Cycle Time Explained
There are three factors that affect cycle time, and they are applied on top of the base cycle time. The first two, 50 percent fromTranshumanismand 20 percent frombiotuning, are subtracted from the cycle time multiplier. The modified cycle time is then divided by the last factor,Room Cleanlinessor theBiosculpter Pod Speed Factor, which affects the speed at which the Biosculpter Pod works.
For example,Biosculpter Pods work faster or slower depending on room cleanliness, with a maximum of 115 percent and a minimum of 70 percent, with a completely clean room having the base 100 percent.
Biotuning reduces the length of the cycle by 20 percent, and as said above, the length of the Pleasure Cycle is 16 percent of the Bioregeneration Cycle, so doing a Pleasure Cycle first will save four percent of the total length of the cycle. Transhumanism, for all of its demanding features, does reduce the base cycle time by 50 percent,which can result in massive benefits when combined with sterile rooms and biotuning.
The difference between an optimized Biosculpter Pod at 8.7 days for a Bioregeneration Cycle, and the worst-case-scenario Biosculpter Pod at 35.7 days for the same cycle, shows thatsetting up your Biosculpter Pods correctly can confer huge benefits.
