Skip to main content

Medical Systems & Surgery

RimWorld's medical system dictates the line between life and death. Understanding how tending, diseases, and surgeries work is critical. A bad doctor in a dirty room is worse than no doctor at all.

Tend Quality and Diseases​

When a pawn catches a disease or suffers an injury, they need to be tended to by a doctor. The quality of this tend directly impacts how fast they heal or build immunity.

Tend quality is calculated dynamically based on:

  1. Base Medicine Potency: Herbal medicine has low potency, industrial medicine is standard, and glitterworld medicine provides massive boosts.
  2. Doctor Skill Factor: The medical skill level of the pawn performing the tend.
  3. Room Cleanliness: A dirty room severely drags down the final tend quality.

When fighting diseases (like Malaria or Plague), it is a literal race between the disease progression and the pawn's immunity gain. High tend quality accelerates immunity gain. To win this race, use your best medicine and make sure the pawn stays in a clean medical bed for the duration.

Surgery Success Rates​

Installing bionics or harvesting organs involves surgery. Surgery has hard caps and catastrophic failure states. A minor failure wastes the medicine. A catastrophic failure can instantly kill the patient or destroy the body part.

To maximize your success rate:

  • Use glitterworld medicine for critical surgeries.
  • Build a dedicated hospital room using sterile tiles for maximum cleanliness.
  • Make sure the room is well-lit.
  • Use a high-quality medical bed.

Operating in a standard, slightly dirty bedroom with herbal medicine is a guaranteed recipe for surgical disaster. Do not risk expensive bionics without preparing a proper sterile environment first.

Bionic Efficiency Limits​

Replacing biological parts with advanced bionics provides massive stat boosts, but there are diminishing returns.

Biological part efficiency scales up, but global stats have hard caps. For example, a bionic arm possesses 125% efficiency compared to a natural arm. This boosts the pawn's manipulation stat. However, global manipulation is also hard-capped by the brain's functional capacity. If a pawn has brain damage, installing two bionic arms will not fully restore their manipulation to superhuman levels. You must budget for these diminishing returns before investing thousands of silver in full-body modifications.