Blindsight
Blindsight Is one of the memes added with the Ideology DLC.
It elevates the status of blind pawns and improves the psypowers of blind psycasts.
Advantages
- Blindsight gives up to +15 mood boost to blinded pawns and +30 opinion from other pawns.
- Increases blinded pawns psypower by increasing their psychic sensitivity.
- Allows crafting blindfolds, which provides protection, cold insulation and +2 mood boost.
- Blind pawns stats are unaffected by light and darkness.
- Blind pawns ignore other pawns beauty status.
- Blinding decreases the pawn value.
- Unlocks Medical specialists.
Disavantages
- Blindsight gives up to -6 mood boost to non-blinded pawns and -5 opinion from other pawns.
- Blinded and blindfolded pawns are severely limited on the number of activities they can perform effectively.
- Blind pawns ignore rooms beauty status.
- Disables the Darkness meme.
Blind psysense: Strong
This precept increases the user psychic sensitivity:
- Wearing blindfold: +30% psychic sensitivity.
- Blind: +80% psychic sensitivity.
Blinding ritual
If satisfying, in this ritual the pawn will get a psylink upgrade or unlock new psychic powers.
You can repeat the ritual by recovering the pawn sight, that means you can effectively trade Bionic eyes, Healer mech serums and Resurrector mech serums for psychic powers. You can also heal your eyes in a Biosculpter pod if you convert the pawn to another non-Blindsight ideoligion first.
Affected activities
Before blinding a pawn, it is important to consider what activities are affected by sight.
Activities that are not affected by blindness:
Activities that are slower with blindness:
Activities that result in losses or failure with blindness:
- Hunting, Construction, Mining, Butchering, Plants, Animal and Medical.
Social pawns that spend most of their day either socializing or mediating are the ideal pawns to blind.
If you are only taming and not milking or shearing anything then animal handlers are also a good option to blind.
Cooks, crafters, artists and researchers can be blinded without resource losses.
Doctors are the worse option to blind since they can result in losing expensive bionics and precious lifes.
Strategies
Since blinding is not ideal for a lot of pawns, Blindsight is better used together with another Ideoligion. That way you can have a few blinded pawns enjoying the benefits of their blindness without affecting much their activities while the rest follows another ideoligion that doesn't includes Blindsight and therefore are not sad for not being blind. For example, you can have sighted medical specialists, blinded crafters, blinded artists and everyone else following another Ideoligion.
Blind pawns are unaffected by light and darkness, so ideally you should fight in darkness so your enemies get a move penalty and you don't. It might be worth it keeping a Smoke Spewer or Sun Blocker active for a permanent fight advantage if it doesn't hurts your food production.
Blind pawns ignore other pawns beauty status, so you can give them Stoneskin glands without penalty to opnion.
Blind pawns ignore rooms beauty status, so you won't get negative mood buffs for dirty rooms, but you also won't get positive mood buffs for beautiful rooms.
Blinding overall provides more benefits than wearing a blindfold but compromises the pawn fighting abilities while a blindfold can be taken out during a raid. Therefore, full blindness is better suited for pure psycasters or pawns carring weapons with forced miss radio such as EMP grenades. Alternatively, careful shooters pawns, shooting specialists and Gunlinks can help overcome the accuracy lost.
It is not a good ideia to blind medical specialists, but they can still wear blindfolds while not doctoring and act as psycasters during combat. Unlike pawns incapable of violence, medical specialists can equip a Eltex staff if you give them before assigning the role.
Blindsight is more beneficial on cold biomes since the bindfolds provide considerable cold insulation.
Blinding your pawns effectively decreases raid size by removing wealth in form of pawn value.
Even if you don't want to blind anyone, Blindsight is still a useful meme that give access to medical specialists and the blinding ritual which can be used to farm psychic powers