Penoxycyline

Penoxycyline is a drug that prevents users from catching a select following of diseases.

Acquisition[edit]

Penoxycyline can be crafted at a Drug lab once the Penoxycyline production research project has been completed. Each dose require 2 Neutroamine and 600 ticks (10 secs) of work. Its synthesis speed is dependent on the Intellectual skill, and crafting experience is attributed to Intellectual. Note that Neutroamine can only be obtained from traders or found in cargo pods.

It can also be bought from orbital, Outlander, or Empire traders, as well as Outlander and Empire faction bases.

Summary[edit]

Penoxycyline completely prevents users from catching any of the following diseases while its "high" is active:

Despite the wording of the description, it does nothing to prevent or treat infections, or any other diseases or ailments besides the three above.

When the Disease event occurs, pawns that were protected from getting the disease by penoxycyline will be specifically noted as such. Penoxycyline does nothing to treat pre-existing diseases.

Penoxycyline is not addictive and has no direct side effects. Penoxycyline can contribute to overdoses, increasing severity by 0.08-0.14 per dose consumed. This severity is not enough to cause any health effect on its own. However, it can cause minor overdoses when taken along with hard drugs.

Analysis[edit]

Diseases usually aren't a fatal problem by the time you can get a good supply of neutroamine and have the Penoxycyline production research. For an otherwise healthy colonist: a decent doctor, in a clean hospital, using herbal medicine or medicine is usually enough to treat the disease (so long as the colonist rests for the duration). However, this drug can still be helpful.

Penoxycyline can reduce the time spend resting in bed, especially in tropical biomes where disease is prevalent and sleeping sickness is possible. If you don't want to use penoxycyline on every colonist, you can reserve it for your doctors. This prevents your doctors from getting sick when a disease outbreak occurs. It can also be used on sickly pawns for obvious reasons. If you can afford the neutroamine cost (and won't be using it for medicine, wake-up, or go-juice), then this drug is a net positive.

While the in-game description says to "Take every five days", the effect actually lasts just over than a half-day longer. This gives pawns some leeway, in case colonists don't consume the pills promptly. Set a drug policy to tell the pawns to take one every 5 days and keep one in the inventory to take as soon as possible, or be cheap, set it to "6 days" and live dangerously.

Gallery[edit]

One penoxycyline
Stack of penoxycyline

Version history[edit]

0.15.1279 - Added as Malari-block, and only prevents Malaria
0.16.1393 - Reworked. Renamed from Malari-block to Penoxycyline and now prevents a wide variety of infections. Cost decreased from 5 neutroamine to 3.
Alpha 17 - Cost is further reduced from 3 to 2 neutroamine. It also received an overhaul, such that instead of instantly boosting disease immunity to 61%, it now provides true immunity and cannot reactively increase immunity against a disease that is already in progress.