Correction: with Alpha 7‘s release, the space magic continues.  Or, uh, the starving frontier space magic, beset by violent thugs and now diseases.  But let’s look on the bright side of things: even as Ludeon has introduced plague, it has also given us the prosthetics and organ harvesting and transplantation, in addition to a welter of other neat new features.

The introduction of prosthetics is far more important than you might realize.  The last version, Alpha 6, introduced a complex medical system which tracks injury and debility by location, though perhaps without quite the same granularity as Dwarf Fortress‘:

My Alpha 6 colony had a slowly growing number of people who’d lost appendages to chronic cases of gunfire and explosions.  I was forever terrified of having my wonderful and productive citizens maimed horribly while defending the colony.  Now, it looks like we can give our debilitated friends a leg up, so to speak, by building prostheses for them to replace whatever they’ve lost.  Given the constant scarcity of more advanced medical supplies, I foresee specifically targeting raiders with cybernetic prosthetics so that I can strip the things I want from their cold, dead bodies.  Or from their warm and unconscious bodies, if they somehow survive the fusillade of bullets and seem like they aren’t worth rehabilitating.

This is Rimworld, after all, and I already do my best to hunt down fleeing raiders when they’re wearing or carrying things I find especially desirable.  It’s hard to come by powered combat armor without taking it off the body of an erstwhile attacker.  Traits have already made a meaningful entry into the game, affecting everything from move- and work-speed to mental stability and opinions of cannibalism, and there’s nothing quite like having a murder-happy speed demon ready to hunt down your fleeing enemies.  You just have to make sure that they never suffer a mental break or suddenly decide to betray you.

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