Simple mind mutation

[bateau-de-coal]

Summary

Content "A mutation that reduces INT and removes psychology-related mutations"

Purpose of change

Bugs, snails, lobsters... simple creatures that remain functional when the world changes.

Plants. They feel. They grow. They don't think.

Describe the solution

Simple mind mutation: INT -1, removes mood-related mutations and kaluptic psychosis. It applies to insect, gastropod, crustacean, and plant.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Frogs might be also included. They're left out because they are vertebrate.

Testing

Game loads. Activate mood swings. Activate simple mind. INT lowered, mood swings gone.

Additional context

[fairyarmadillo]

Giving this ATTITUDE means that Plant will eternally flipflop between gaining and losing seasonal affective disorder, which they are meant to have due to their systems becoming depressed by seasonal dormancy. I don't think there's a strong reason for this trait to have both the INT and ATTITUDE types and cancel a few cherry-picked other traits.

The game also seems to avoid handing out big stat debuffs as traits like this, and for good reason. Characters often start with single-digit intelligence. If someone picked 6 at chargen, this puts them at a base of 3, and they're going to spend a lot of their time debuffed to 1 or 0 by pain or other common effects. At that point the game would be sort of unplayable.

And a -3 intelligence penalty with no upsides should probably not be a 0 point neutral mutation.

[Kamejeir]

You could opt to give the mentioned mutation lines Numb instead. Makes them care less about what the decaying world throws at them, similar to how you want them to have inner peace.

[fairyarmadillo]

If I could make a suggestion, maybe changing this to an enchantment that multiplies the character's intelligence by 0.8 and gives them immunity or resistance to having their intelligence debuffed by pain, or even just some kind of general pain resistance, might be a better approach and would avoid the pitfall I mentioned. It would probably need to be a post-threshold trait as it's a dramatic change in brain structure and that's usually where that stuff goes.

The implementation could be as simple as:
{ "value": "INTELLIGENCE", "multiply": -0.8 }
{ "value": "PAIN", "multiply": -0.8 }

This enchantment would negate 20% of incoming pain but would permanently give a 20% intelligence debuff. Feel free to nudge the numbers around if you like the idea.

Numb is probably a bad fit as it's one of the few unique post-thresh medical traits.

Gastropods are also quite a bit smarter than the other animals listed here. They aren't geniuses, but they can recognize people and steal food from traps. They're not as smart as their cousins the cephalopods, but who is?

[Venera3]

Not sure on either insect nor spider getting hit with it - both have very intelligent species, and you already make an exception for ceph despite nautiluses, well, nautilusing. Frog or Beast would feel a better fit than those two, but that might be my invert favoritism at play.

Intelligence (in the sense of operative learning) has nothing to do with pain, and we already have pain resistance as its own trait line even if inverts didn't feel pain (they do).

[bateau-de-coal]

1.Why is it both INT and ATTITUDE?: Primitive or none neural system. Thus low INT and the lack of advanced psychology.
2. Is -3 too much?: -2 could be more reasonable than -3.
3. Seasonal affective disorder: a solution could be making seasonal affective disorder not an ATTITUDE, as it is not a psychological problem. The other ATTITUDES look fine with this.
4. Are invertebrates smart?: except for cephalopod, most invertebrates can't solve problem via reasoning. They don't rely on their brain.
5. Pain: I don't plan to include pain in this.

[fairyarmadillo]

Intelligence (in the sense of operative learning) has nothing to do with pain, and we already have pain resistance as its own trait line even if inverts didn't feel pain (they do).

I didn't mean to imply they don't, but you do see arthropods behaving somewhat normally despite suffering catastrophic injury fairly often, like mating while being eaten or (seemingly) calmly surrendering a leg to a predator and walking away. Mammals seem to be less capable of that sort of thing.

Pain's existing intelligence debuff seems to be more about distraction. The character isn't forgetting how to do calculus because their foot hurts, they just can't concentrate on that kind of task.

Beast already gets a -3 intelligence debuff from Apex Predator. Maybe ectotherms could get a cold-based int debuff? That'd incentivize people to set up little habitats for themselves in the winter so they could keep reading and crafting.

[Kamejeir]

If your original intent was to have something to remove innate psychological traits (or otherwise get rid of them without using purifier), I'd love for you to include (at least the mental part of) Chemical Imbalance as well.

Regarding anything to do with pain, you are right in that we are not to include pain in this, owing to Venera3's good point mentioning such dedicated traits already existing.

It seems making a one-size-fits-all case for all possible creatures that have simpler thought processes is too difficult, so I suggest removing the INT category while keeping the debuff, like the predation category does. This will allow us to express Cephalopod intelligence.

The cold debuff is doable, but will likely have to be hardcoded.

Seasonal Affective Disorder can have its category removed, but don't forget to add it to the list of stuff Human Mind cancels or tests will give you a hard time.

I will insist on Numb (probably as an addon to Simple Mind + a json comment on why not-Medical gets it because fairyarmadillo has a problem with it). I imagine your mutation to have the character become more ascetic, ignoring hardship and pleasure as the brain feels at home with more extreme conditions.

[bateau-de-coal]

Thanks for the tip about making SAD purifiable.

It would be difficult to only partially cancel Chemical Imbalance. From my experience, CI has very minor effects. It is mostly a flavor trait.

Simple Mind specifically wouldn't affect cephalopod.

Temperature based debuff makes sense. We can probably add that later. It's not necessarily needed right now. An insect is just not as intelligent as a cat or a dog, even in perfect temperature.

JSON data shows that Numb only adds a flag. What does it do actually?

[Kamejeir]

Chemical Imbalance bothers me because it yells for my attention with red text whenever I'm crafting. Saying "mental part of" was intended to mean that it would be hard to actually accomplish (and implicitly suggesting disregarding the physical aspect to cancel the whole thing). That's all, really.

Simple Mind has INT category. Cephalopod's Very Smart (+2) of the same category would not be able to get a foothold in seeing that it's actually more intelligent than the other creatures when crossing mutation lines. If Simple Mind loses the INT category, the two mutations would add up to (-1) intelligence, showing that it's relatively intelligent compared to the other lines with simpler thought.

Numb quarters all mood. Snorted some diamond dust for +40 morale? Only +10. Did you have to drink this tub of mayo for -4 morale? Only -1.

[bateau-de-coal]

Numb is an interesting trait. I prefer not include it in this though. Food is a big factor that interacts with morale. Morale boost from good food is very real for invertebrates.

[Consoleable]

Spiders should not be on this list. There are a lot of dumb spiders, but there are a lot of dumb fish too. Spiders can be pretty good tool users, and many species have excellent, if monomaniacal intelligence(like jumping spiders, who have some of the best planning skills in the animal kingdom) and the tree already suffers debuffs. Animal intelligence can be very subjective(due to biases in how humans judge animal reactions and visual responses) and it's a pretty broad stat in game.

The mutations are definitely a gamified part of cdda. What a zooiform human mutant should end up like is pretty subjective. If mutation categories lose intelligence because that makes them somehow resemble that species, shouldn't more mutation trees have decreased size? Most of the mutation trees reference animals which are much smaller than humans, yet have no size change or even enhanced size(crabs, lizards, bats, frogs etc.) why is a crustacean a large mutant? why do lizards get good hearing? Shouldn't all mutation trees, barring elf, medical, and alpha get this trait?

Since there is obvious gamification of the mutation lines, I think there should be gamification justifications of changes like this, especially if this were un-purifiable or part of the threshhold tree of mutation lines. Is this mutation really (0) and not negative? Are the lines it's a part of very good otherwise? Or is this a "smooth brain" meme in the form of a PR? Cancelling other possible negative mutations isn't really enough imo. Maybe a built in mood buff, or focus loss prevention?
This just feels like it's a bit hasty as is.

[bateau-de-coal]

How about -1 point, INT -1, removing Spider from "category"? Compare "Smart": +1 point, INT +1.

[Kamejeir]

Remember that Venera3 brought up Insect having smart species too.

Morale boost from good food is very real for invertebrates.

Not particularly sold on the idea of the morale boost for inverts, can't find anything on the top level of a search, maybe you know something specific? Right, Sweet Tooth. Actually scratch that again, that was just Insect, not inverts in general.

[bateau-de-coal]

Does INT-1 not fit for insect? Some examples of smart insects may be needed here.

[Fris0uman]

Why editing the type of another unrelated trait here?

[bateau-de-coal]

fairyarmadillo commented May 8, 2024 Giving this ATTITUDE means that Plant will eternally flipflop between gaining and losing seasonal affective disorder
bateau-de-coal commented May 8, 2024 Seasonal affective disorder: a solution could be making seasonal affective disorder not an ATTITUDE, as it is not a psychological problem.
Kamejeir commented May 8, 2024 Seasonal Affective Disorder can have its category removed, but don't forget to add it to the list of stuff Human Mind cancels or tests will give you a hard time.

[Fris0uman]

Feels like you're packing too many unrelated things in the same mutation. A mutation that just debufs intelligence, and another mutation that clamps your mood would make more sense.

[bateau-de-coal]

Splitting it into 2 mutations: Stupid: INT-1, and Indifference: removes ATTITUDE and kaluptic psychosis, clamps Morale. Good?

[Fris0uman]

I don't think it should affect kaluptic psychosis

[kevingranade]

I'm not following the rationale for this at all, it links a token int debuff with "you're now immune to nervous disorders", except the list of disorders is very limited.

If you're committing to "animal level intelligence free from nervous disorders" I feel like we'd be talking about losing access to crafting and speech, not a tiny loss of learning speed.

[bateau-de-coal]

So nothing affecting ATTITUDE and kaluptic psychosis. Then only Stupid: INT-1.

[fairyarmadillo]

I don't think they should even get that.

[bateau-de-coal]

It is obvious that some of the invertebrates have simpler brains. What is the reason to not show this in their mutation tree?

[Kamejeir]

It is obvious that some of the invertebrates have simpler brains. What is the reason to not show this in their mutation tree?

Kevin told you the direction to take. Human hybrids being in possession of "simpler brains" would amount to more than a "Stupid" mutation.

[bateau-de-coal]

INT-1 looks reasonable enough, until some examples are provided, of how insects, snails, crustaceans, and plants, use their intelligence to solve problem.

[bateau-de-coal]

@fairyarmadillo What is confusing about this? Just to clarify: we're now only talking about a trait Stupid: Int-1, nothing else. It won't affect ATTITUDE, won't remove any psychosis.

It makes sense that these mutants are not free from neural disorders, but there is little reason that their intelligence is not even slightly affected.