Rimworld is a colony based story generator. In this game anything can (and will) happen. One of the main features is randomized events that effect your colony. These events can be good or bad, but most of the time are bad. One of these events is the Muscle Parasites event. This disease can plague any number of your colonists when it happens. In this guide I’ll talk about what this event does and how you can cure muscle parasites.
What Are Muscle Parasites in Rimworld?
As aforementioned muscle parasites is a random event that can happen in Rimworld. When this occurs you will see a notification appear at the side of your screen. Muscle Parasites is a disease which will affect a few of your colonists. The in-game description for muscle parasites reads “Parasitic creatures in the muscles. These cause weakness and a lack of coordination.
To view which of your colonists are affected by the muscle parasites you can view their health tab. Select the colonist and press the Health menu in their mini UI menu. You can then see the effects of muscle parasites and what they are doing to your colonists.
How Do Muscle Parasites Affect The Colonists?
Muscle parasites only have negative effects on your colonists. There is absolutely no positive to having them at all. While these parasites are not lethal by any means to your colonists directly, they will give them a huge mood debuff. Die to the pain that the muscle parasites cause, this may result in your colonists lashing out at each other or experiencing mental breaks. You basically still want to get rid of muscle parasites as soon as possible.
Muscle Parasites come with the following negative health implications:
- Pain: +20% – This causes your pawns mood to be lowered
- Manipulation: -30% – This governs your pawns overall work speed when crafting or doing similar tasks
- Moving: -30% – The speed at which your colonists move around the map
- Rest Fall Rate: +100% – The speed at which your colonist must rest after they have woken up. In simple terms your colonists will get tired twice as fast with muscle parasites
- Mood: -10 (Serious Pain) – The pain from the muscle parasites gives your colonists a rather large mood debuff bringing them that much closer to a mental break
Obviously trying to get rid of the muscle parasites as quickly as possible is beneficial. You won’t want a bunch of workers only being around for half their usual day an moving around slowly. Luckily, this isn’t as bad as other diseases. This one is non-lethal. Still, a mental break at the wrong time can spell the end of a game in Rimworld.
How to Cure Muscle Parasites
Luckily there is a cure for muscle parasites! As with infections and other diseased in Rimworld, Muscle parasites can be treated. Every 2 days you will get a chance to treat the muscle parasites. Every time you can a colonist treat muscle parasites they will get a quality score depending on a few factors. These include; medical skill, light level in the room, bed quality and medicine quality to name a few. In total to fully cure muscle parasites you will need to treat them 300%. For example, if your average tend quality is 30% every time, you will need to tend to the affected colonists 10 times before they are fully cured.
In the best case, a treatment will be 100% quality. This means that the quickest time that muscle parasites can be cured is in 3 treatments. Always make sure you are providing the best treatment quality when you are treating muscle parasites. You will not get another chance to treat the patient for another 2 days. In the absolute best case you will have the muscle parasites cured in 4 in-game days. This is because you can treat them as soon as they happen, then once every 2 days following this treatment. The only thing is they are just kind of annoying. A lot of players think that muscle parasites shouldn’t have even been included as an event int he game. To them, I have created the following guide.
How to Disable Muscle Parasites in Rimworld
You know when sometimes you wish you could just remove a feature of a game? Luckily for haters of muscle parasites, you can! When you are first starting the game you have some customization options. I personally use this to disable infestations. First, begin a new game. Here, the first thing you must do is pick a scenario. Pick one of the templates to begin with that you want to play. Then navigate to the bottom of the UI and select the option Scenario Editor. Here, you can customize your starting scenario. Now, press the Edit Mode menu and you can customize the scenario before you start. (The terribly edited image below shows these three steps.)
Now, select the button on the left of the UI which reads Add part. Here you can add a multiplier or another option to your scenario. We are looking for the Disable Incident part in this drop-down menu. This will have added the Disable incident part to your scenario on the right-hand side. For now, it will just disable a random incident. To change that, select the part that displays the incident. This will open up a menu where you can decide which incident to disable. Select the Muscle Parasites incident and this will no longer take place in your game.
You can now rest easy knowing that your colonists won’t be getting any Muscle Parasites anymore!