That sounds good. With either base game or with VFE Power, you could leave it up to the player's choice with a mod option setting for how much power the MedPod uses when diagnosing/healing (yes, it's open to player abuse, but so is choosing to use the MedPod in the first place, in a way). It's tough for you to decide what a "significant" energy cost is, since a player using Rimatomics would laugh at a paltry cost of 20,000 energy, while a VFE-only player would grind so much to operate more than 1 MedPod.

I don't play with a lot of high-energy mods, so an advanced VFE large battery at 2000 energy is the largest storage building capacity I use. I think something like 2000 energy for diagnosis and 10,000 for actual healing would be an achievable, moderate amount. On my previous playthrough, I ended up trading my way into 1000s of plasteel, so 20 large advanced batteries wouldn't have been difficult.

But on my current playthrough, I'm struggling to find anyone who has plasteel (or even gold!) to trade, and have been stuck at no more than 200 plasteel total, so 5 large advanced batteries would be a tougher construction trade-off decision or unachievable so far. (both playthroughs were with Neceros's two No Mineable Plasteel/Components mods)

This will be similar to how some laser/railgun/energy turrets (like one of the energy towers in Rimatomics, I think?) quickly drain HUGE energy per shot, requiring huge energy storage.

I was considering making a patch for the mod also, but i will just use yours now. When considering the patch i thought it should use a ton of power also. Make it drain an entire batteries. Makes it necessary to invest in batteries, increases material costs depending on how much you use it, and now you have to deal with Zzzt events. This also makes it so even if you get one early game from real ruins or a trade ship you still cant use it a significant amount.

I did some testing on power consumption and battery discharge. I came across a setting that I want to use a a basis of reference for further discussion. The settings (standard MedPod) are as follows, default values in brackets:

tested settings
diagnosis time 8 seconds (5)
healing time 14 seconds (10)
diagnosis 8000 W (500)
healing 33000 W (2000)

With these settings I tested the following conditions, rounded percentages describe standard battery charge of 600Wd, brackets represent tested elements:

results
slightly injured pawn: ~25%
(1x bullet, 1x light bleeding, 5 dmg to part)

casually injured pawn: ~75%
(4x bullet, 3x light bleeding, 5 dmg to parts)

not dangerously yet heavily injured downed pawn: ~200%
(37% health remaining, 13 bruises, 75% dmg to parts)

critically injured downed pawn: ~300%
(20% health remaining, 4x cuts [2x legs, 1x foot, 1x arm], 4x heavy bleeding, 1x crack, cut parts red ~5 health each, cracked part less than 50% health)

one organ replacement - fast: ~50%
(eye, lung, stomach, pelvis, spine, heart, liver)

one organ replacement - moderate: ~200%
(hand, foot)

one organ replacement - long: ~350%
(leg, arm)

disease: ~10%
(dementia, sleepsicknes, bad back, plague minor)



I might even add these settings over the next week, to see how it goes. Additionally, with such a change I would add battery research as well as advanced battery and advanced power generation research (only VFE) as prerequisites.

Unfortunately, a mod settings window exceeds my skill at the present time. Might change though, because it would actually by the easiest way to let people adjust this to their liking. Regarding RimAtomics or Rimefeller, a higher patch setting could be an easy fix.

And thank you for your comments so far.

I really love this, I use RimAtomics and Rimefeller and power is just too easy to come by. I use RimsQOL to adjust the power output of most producers to be much lower to make vanilla power requirements make more sense but some things from mods are just silly easy with huge modlists like mine. I'd personally like to see the power requirement increased to a flat 10,000 for any usage as well as adding a brief but noticeable (3-6 hour) sleeping sickness to any pawn that has a major injury healed by MedPods.

Sounds good on your testing with the mod settings you found. It looks like the 8000 W and 33,000 W settings you chose are prorated for the actual length of time the machine runs.

For now, skipping a settings window for your patch, is it hard for you to detect other active mods? i.e. at game start-up, you run a one-time check for all energy-positive (energy producing) buildings, and then your mod will auto-scale the diagnosis and healing values to be a certain multiple of the highest energy production value. Perhaps similar could be done for the Replimat b/c I think its energy consumption spikes in use too?

e.g. A player running vanilla has the geothermal generator at 3600 W. Vanilla+VFE Power has the nuclear reactor at 20,000 W (up to 40,000 W with overloading).

You could set diagnosis/healing to cost 2x/4x the most expensive building, which in these two cases would be 7200 W or 20,000 W for diagnosis, 28,800 W or 80,000 W for healing. I assume the values would become ridiculous for a Rimatomics player, but then the MedPod and Replimat would finally scale properly to force a player into making logistics trade-offs.

I see mods detecting other mods and objects at start-up in the log, which is why I suggest this. Apologies if it's not easy or even possible!

@Sixdd Neceros wrote a patch mod that scales Rimefeller down towards vanilla levels, so that they make more sense together. I haven't run Rimefeller since I found the patch, so I can't comment on the balance, but maybe it will be useful to you.

A possible solution to all of this discussion of how to balance it across different scales of power producing mod packs, is to have the Medpod's actual operating time depend on how much power is pushed into it / it can draw at a time.

The power consumption of the Medpod can be scaled to Vanilla Power Expanded's output, and the Medpod can have a power level gizmo that toggles between its base level of power consumption and various multiples of that (2x, 3x, 5x, 10x, 20x, 50x, 100x, whatever). These additional levels of possible power consumption are only accessible if you have enough additional Medpod Transformers (or Voltage Regulators or whatever they'd be called lol), a secondary building, that must be placed within X tiles of your Medpods.

The Transformers each draw a static amount of power (fairly significant even in idle) and then also output a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amount of heat when they're actually being used to provide additional power to the Medpod(s). If they reach above like, 15 C while operating, they immediately cease to be effective and begin to meltdown, which will cause them to rapidly increase in temperature (starting fires nearby) for a random amount of time until they suddenly pop with EMP & fire explosions (ideal- uh, unfortunately leading to catastrophic meltdowns in your hospital-adjacent powerplant, and all the ensuing fun that entails).

Also, if a Medpod is consuming power at a level that can no longer be supported (not enough transformers, due to being cut off, too hot, all melting, etc) then it will backfire, breaking (requiring maintenance) and causing deeply unfortunate side-affects for whatever pawn was undergoing treatment. Permanent brain injuries, stable cancer in every limb, and hands insta-regrown as (0% manipulation) feet instead not covered by warranty, please see a professional, living doctor if side affects persist.

This suggestion implies that the default times for diagnosis and healing for the Medpod are DRASTICALLY reduced, which I think should happen anyway. Diagnosis should actually take long enough that you are compelled to use real doctors to stabilize and tend to potentially fatal immediate injuries, or even make use of cryptosleep caskets and/or Life Support mod where necessary, as the diagnosis time should not treat/freeze states and takes a really fairly long time, and if you NEED to diagnose and regenerate them faster you should be forced to redirect your entire nuclear reactor toward powering it at the expense of production or defences etc. Deciding between leaving them to regenerate in the background, or focussing all your power and resources into getting them on their feet faster (and potentially risking side affects if you aren't careful).

Maybe adding a hungerrate debuff for X amount of time depending on what was healed, makes sence to me atleast. I mean your body just regrew a organ where did it get the resources for that from.

Maybe an idea to also lock the tech behind organ crafting(if such a mod is on). Seems like a natural extention of that type of tech.

Thank you all for you suggestions.

Being back to Rimworld and having some time once more, I will strongly consider a power increase for heavy power generating mods. However, as of now I need some gaming experience again 😅 and experience all original Medpod changes.