The RTSC Guide to Startopia
Part 8Medicine

It goes without saying that a Station without a Sick Bay is a disaster in the making: a working infirmary should be an early priority in your game. Sick Bays provide medicine for all walks of Peep and are the major source of Body (a.k.a. Health) point replenishment for your population. Properly equipped, you can cure and stop plagues, heal the injured and successfully treat medical emergencies for those lucrative bonuses. Sick Bays are built exclusively on the Engineering Deck and are manned only by the Greys.

The effectiveness of a Sick Bay boils down to the current staffing levels and employee ratings. Expert medics will earn for the Station lucrative tips while poorly qualified Greys can actually harm patients, in extreme cases causing death from malpractice. I've found it wise to only hire Greys with two star Skill levels or more. Criminal Greys can also be a problem, surreptitiously using your facilities if there are long queues of patients and not enough doctors on the job. Illegal medicine is expensive for your patients and generally harms them, plus the illegal doctors pocket any fees for themselves. Again, try to keep your Sick Bays manned around the clock, especially on bigger stations. The number of doctors that can work in a Sick Bay is determined by the number of Diagnosis Machines set up in it. Ideally, you want a nice balance between Diagnosis, waiting patients and medical equipment to administer cures to.

In essence: prevention is better than the cure. You may never ever see a plague victim in a game if your medical facilities are up to scratch, except from passing emergencies. If you start seeing funny textures beginning to appear in your general population then your Station's medical services are not keeping up and disease is starting to spread through the population.

The equipment in a Sick Bay can determine how well it performs. Early on you can get by with basic Diagnosis Machines and Dispensers, but eventually you may need a Medi-Bed for serious cases and Z-Ray Scanners to spot inbound travelers infected with deadly Skrasher eggs. There doesn't seem to be any direct correlation using a specific medical widget for any specific illness. Again, its all done by feel. Its just that if your Sick Bays lack expensive hardware then its more likely that patients with nasty diseases may have to return for repeat treatments - a bad situation all around both for the patients and their opinion of your Station. If an advanced medical item isn't available, a badly ill Peep may have to undergo several treatments with the basic equipment before they they can be cured.

Injuries

See Combat

Eeek! P L A G U E !

Know your plagues! With a bit of luck you'll hardly ever see them, but if the Station's medical services isn't keeping up then things can spiral out of hand. Startopian diseases really aren't all the same you know; some are more severe than others. Naturally occurring diseases seem to be fairly rare in a game, unless you're playing a custom mission that makes a point of them. Infectious diseases tend to become noticeable with minimal medical facilities and huge Station populations that have little to do except hold conversations with each other. With the higher population rates those low infection rates and incubation times start to bear a bitter fruit...

There's something like ten different ailments in Startopia (outside of injuries, battle wounds and Skrasher induced cranial traumas), each with its own distinct way of affecting Peeps. Some species succumb more readily than others to specific diseases. Many of the diseases are the med, and affect a particular character attribute like hunger (Gutworm) or Love (Nymphitus). These aren't obvious until symptoms become really severe and the Peep starts to develop some curious texturing on their bodies. Disease degrades Peep health until the sufferer eventually dies. Timely intervention by a Sick Bay can avert this unhappy state of affairs, and you'll know you have proper medical coverage when the only diseases you see are coming from Medical Emergencies called in via your Comsensors. Naturally occurring diseases seem to be fairly rare, unless your population starts to rise sharply and you can't keep up with your medical services. Then those low infection rates and incubation times start to take their toll...

	Notes Every conversation with a Vermin always results in the Peep getting sick. The Vermin Ratio shows you the chances of what disease it will be out of all the possible illnesses in the game. As a Sandbox default, 5% of all Peeps emerging through your Port will carry a disease of some kind. The game then randomly decides what disease it will be using a "Port ratio" which I've translated into a percentage. Some diseases are more prevalent than others, like the Common Cold. The Port Ratio shows the likelihood a particular disease that that 5% is going to carry. Contagion shows the percentage chance of a disease being transmitted via a Conversation between two Peeps.