Slaves have default high positive slave mood bonus due to low expectations and no need of things like recreation. Although they work slower, it's fine as you can just assign them really horrid jobs like corpse disposal, cleaning at night or hauling all the stuff or general other tasks and they won't be complaining as much as your actually valuable colonists.
And failing that, any which catch a bullet by standing just ahead of the front line is a bullet that doesn't get caught by a colonist.
Someone has to get the base actually clean before my nobility wake up and expect their expensive meals. I can't possibly expect my soldiers to do it now can I...?
Some of you may die, but it is a sacrifice I am willing to make.
I do tend to have a few that distinguish themselves and are worth decent quarters. Must always make sure your bodyguards are well trained, well equipped and trustworthy. Can't have the lower orders thinking they can insult our beloved Archon can we?
Another advantage, enslaving a pawn causes them to ignore "incapable of X" restrictions from their bio, and lets you assign them to those tasks anyway. It's a great advantage, as long as you aren't assigning a skill based task, such as construction or plant work.
Some pawns might be incapable of it due to title or bio, which enslavement will fix, but if their bonus is sufficiently high enough from the rest of the bio or any genes or whatever, then even working slower but being good at it or having passions isn't bad.
They're also a mood buff for colonies who value slaves, and can serve as emergency silver when you need cash. You can sell slaves (or their organs) for a pretty penny, especially if they're decently skilled in an area you aren't exactly hurting in.
Give them decent amenities and the occasional alcoholic beverage and they'll almost never revolt.
It's never worth it to sell a slave, their parts are worth far more when sold individually than as a whole.
I suppose you could argue for honor though, but I don't really consider that selling since there is no monetary exchange, and even then there are a few parts you can remove for financial gain.
True. To be fair, though, if a caravan is passing by and you need some cash for something, selling a slave isn't a bad idea. You can get organs from raiders you capture without having to enslave them.
It's also hard to keep organs as a tribal, for example.
I tend to enslave talented or young people, and chop up everyone else. Young kids I'll put to work while I recruit them, and then I'll have a couple adopt them (adoption mod), and other slaves I'll have them work and keep them as a kind of financial asset on hand.
skill ups is just a valid as organs, though personally I grind a doc to 15 medical pretty early on with peg leg add/remove over and over with herbal meds.
I often see people refer to them as the ideal melee blockers for this reason. Helps that the actual colonists don’t care if slaves die either, unless it’s a situation where a colonist and a slave fall in love
I don’t usually play with slaves but when I do they’re usually the first line of defense
Slaves get a mood bonus from expectations, won't get into social fights with non-slaves, certain work exemptions like being incapable of dumb labour get overridden...
You can read more about the benefits of slavery on the wiki
Adding to this, this is a way to make some use out of pawns with really bad traits. It's a good early-game way to get, say, a too-smart colonist without having to worry as much about whether they're going to have a mental break. Or to get a pawn that has the "unwavering loyalty" prisoner trait.
They're also much, much faster to recruit than having to break a pawn to your ideology, and you don't have to worry about adding pawns that would contribute to a competing ideology in your base.
Bliss lobotomised slaves with the incapable of violence and no or low sleep genes make amazing human roombas and haulers in my 40K inspired runs as servitors. They never mentally break no matter how awful their jobs and conditions are, barely eat, and don't or barely sleep.
The penalty of lower work speed doesn't matter as they don't sleep or need recreation or stop much to eat. With the cleaning speed mod, you can boost their manipulation with genes which boosts general work labor and makes then even better roombas.
All lore accurate with non of the infrastructure mechs need. Just a single slave medical bed. Great for Gravships with limited space.
I think its basically you joywire the vamp and put in a psychic harmonizer, then get him to a very high mood and then you put him into sleep in his casket and you do it close enough to where everyone hangs out that they get a mood buff. There'd be no reason to enslave him first, but i guess he might get a bigger mood buff.
Oh nice, so you could do this with a few of them and spread them around the base. Smart. I have that mod that lets you pipe blood directly to the deathcaskets, and you have the blood draining machine you can leave a prisoner indefinitely inside of, basically automatic blood feed for the vampire.
Yeah, it's sort of worth putting a harmonizer in them anyway, but by keeping them asleep, they're just a happy generator. Also you can put them inside the walls, so they can't get out. you know, if your peons are scared of vampires. :)
I'll also mention that they aren't really meant for everything. A late game colony with a large population and good tech probably gains very little, if anything, from having slaves.
They're an option, one that might make sense sometimes, but not others.
Also, a lot of us like to make colonies with certain themes, so slavery can play into that theme.
I had a colony once where only the starter colonists were citizens, everyone else had to be slaves, period.
You end up making new laws for your colony on the fly. A child born to a citizen and a slave? Which way does the kid go?
That slave is a war hero, does that deserve freedom? Does it deserve citizenship? If they died, should their family be rewarded?
"You end up making new laws for your colony on the fly. A child born to a citizen and a slave? Which way does the kid go?"
All children are given a chance, once they reach the age of maturity (13) they will be judged. If they are found lacking (bad traits/passions) they will be enslaved to serve their more deserving betters.
That's one way I like going about it but it's rare I go that heavily into slavery.
The main benefit is that they don't have a recreation need and have a significant expectations mood buff. So you can treat them like shit and they don't freak out.
You can absolutely play without slaves. I mostly turn prisoners I do not want into slaves so those lazy bums do not just sit around while I prepare their sale.
If you are playing purely for the most optimal strategy then yeah it’s probably best to just spend a bit extra time and recruit them especially if you have a pawn with good social who can reduce resistance quickly
However they do have a purpose of being very quick to get working and being expendable you don’t have to worry about giving them luxuries and if they die nobody cares. If you need labour quickly and don’t want to spend days converting and recruiting they can be quite useful.
And of course there are mods that make them more useful I use one that gives some extra precepts around slavery allowing you to prevent rebellions easier
I think they dont need to share in your ideologies needs/requirements so they're relatively easier to maintain (albiet, unless they have access to weapons during a breakout). You get the production boost without the mood issues, hence the need for oppression items.
colonist: friend that you like, good at stuff, it's sad when someone shoots them in the face
slave: bastard, can force to do stuff, fun to watch them get shot in the face
some things are good for colonists, like doing stuff, and some things are good for slaves, like making them sweep your floors or get used as scyther bait
Cheap and disposable labor. They work slower, but don't need recreation, so you can schedule them longer shifts. Your colonists also don't care if they die (unless they have a personal relationship) so they're good disposable soldiers/mobile sandbags. You can also usually enslave pawns faster than you can recruit them, and it gives you a way to extract labor from unwavering prisoners.
You can also get mood buffs for your real colonists with honorable slaves ideo, but that's more of an afterthought.
Shove a circadian half cycler into that bitch and get them cranking out drugs and stone blocks with a 24hr work schedule. As a bonus, you even get yourself a mobile sandbag during firefights!
I think its kinda cool that it does offers benefits when your colony is kinda small and developing, then as you get stronger and get better colonists they just gradually become obsolete and phased out
Have one follow around your psycaster so you can heat dump on them and not worry about them dying from falling into a coma. If they die then you can just get a new one.
Mining, Crafting, Tailoring if they have skills. Mining and growing if they have those talents. At the very least they are hauling and cleaning. Probably wouldn't keep just a hauler/cleaner.
Not having to fill their recreation bar would make them powerful, but instead they just get a basically identical bar that might as well be labeled "negative recreation" because it's basically a measure of how bad a time they're having and which letting it empty can have disastrous consequences. That means separate, special clothes and decoration items, as well as a unique job that a regular colonist has to do on a regular basis.
On top of that you have to be more careful about your armory and there are more tasks you can't/shouldn't have slaves do than ones they're actually good at, especially in a post Mechanitor gameplay environment.
The only real reason to keep slaves long term is specifically because you have an Ideology which rewards their use, though in the short term handing them over to the tribute collector may be a niche strategy on some maps where gold is not forthcoming. A regular colonist or a mechanoid will always be a better value for general labor.
Lack of recreation means they only take food and sleep breaks. Add the no sleep gene or the half cycler and they only ever take food breaks.
For long-term skilless labor like hauling, cleaning, crafting stone blocks, etc, they get more work done due to much longer work hours.
For example, if you do a lot of deep drilling, you might get a few slaves decked out with dual drill arms and a half cycler so they can drill near 24/7.
I mitigated this considerably by creating a slave quarters once. They just lived in there by themselves producing food, cotton, and stone blocks like a mini-colony. Their storeroom had shared access with my main colony so we'd just go in there and take what we needed for profit. Endless low upkeep resources. Rebellions were a joke because they were all in one place, without weapons, and only had one exit out of the quarters.
Not in the right conditions. Just to give one example:
You add Circadian half cycler to your slaves, so they don't sleep.
You add peg legs to your slaves, so they revolt less often.
Ideally but not necessarily add a bunch of irrelevant metabolism slowing genes to lower their food need even further.
You put them in a small room with:
1. Deep drills
2. Stone cutter table
3. Table and stools
4. Nutrient paste turned towards the room
5. One EMP trap close to the door, in such a way that if they break out, they will trigger the trap, giving them brain shock and knocking them out.
They will work 24/7 forever making stone blocks. They will barely need to move other than to eat and turn chunks into stone blocks.
There's no "upkeep" other than the bare minimum food, and moving them out if insectoids come.
Objectively incorrect. Slavery has huge mechanical differences in terms of mood offsets and recreation needs, and pawn points, which is balanced by needing to suppress revolts.
Slaves have default high positive slave mood bonus due to low expectations and no need of things like recreation. Although they work slower, it's fine as you can just assign them really horrid jobs like corpse disposal, cleaning at night or hauling all the stuff or general other tasks and they won't be complaining as much as your actually valuable colonists.
And failing that, any which catch a bullet by standing just ahead of the front line is a bullet that doesn't get caught by a colonist.
Edit: Minor rewording
Oh no, night janitor, what a horrible job fit only for a slave.
Truly, only a deranged, broken individual would clean after the sun has set
Night people have existed since cavemen walked the Earth and they gotta make a living somehow due to capitalism.
Capitalism in the Stone Age?
“I’ll trade you two rocks to go clean up that mess in the back of the cave.”
Someone has to get the base actually clean before my nobility wake up and expect their expensive meals. I can't possibly expect my soldiers to do it now can I...?
you mean slave soldiers :)
Some of you may die, but it is a sacrifice I am willing to make.
I do tend to have a few that distinguish themselves and are worth decent quarters. Must always make sure your bodyguards are well trained, well equipped and trustworthy. Can't have the lower orders thinking they can insult our beloved Archon can we?
Few things more disturbing then seeing people clean… it simple isn’t dignified… I am so bothered I must go and indulge in some flake.
Usually janitors don't have to deal with that much blood, vomit, insect blood, insect vomit, elephant shit in the hallway etc.
Dude has never been to Newark Airport.
https://preview.redd.it/9fh38vq0g7dg1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e9e92c31166bfbf259a0e6bb051d558dc12f6f1a
Depends on the job tbf. As a driver I love nights, traffic is minimal and far less stress inducing than morning rush.
Another advantage, enslaving a pawn causes them to ignore "incapable of X" restrictions from their bio, and lets you assign them to those tasks anyway. It's a great advantage, as long as you aren't assigning a skill based task, such as construction or plant work.
Indeed. And even that's not a huge deal breaker.
Some pawns might be incapable of it due to title or bio, which enslavement will fix, but if their bonus is sufficiently high enough from the rest of the bio or any genes or whatever, then even working slower but being good at it or having passions isn't bad.
They're also a mood buff for colonies who value slaves, and can serve as emergency silver when you need cash. You can sell slaves (or their organs) for a pretty penny, especially if they're decently skilled in an area you aren't exactly hurting in.
Give them decent amenities and the occasional alcoholic beverage and they'll almost never revolt.
It's never worth it to sell a slave, their parts are worth far more when sold individually than as a whole.
I suppose you could argue for honor though, but I don't really consider that selling since there is no monetary exchange, and even then there are a few parts you can remove for financial gain.
True. To be fair, though, if a caravan is passing by and you need some cash for something, selling a slave isn't a bad idea. You can get organs from raiders you capture without having to enslave them.
It's also hard to keep organs as a tribal, for example.
I tend to enslave talented or young people, and chop up everyone else. Young kids I'll put to work while I recruit them, and then I'll have a couple adopt them (adoption mod), and other slaves I'll have them work and keep them as a kind of financial asset on hand.
I just enslave my future organs and harvest them when a traders comes around, keeps wealth down, solves most problems.
I don't typically butcher humanoids anymore, it's just easy mode. The leather and meat shouldn't be worth 1/10th what is.
Or just have a really high fail rate for extracting organs depending on your medical skill and hospital quality.
skill ups is just a valid as organs, though personally I grind a doc to 15 medical pretty early on with peg leg add/remove over and over with herbal meds.
Never thought about using slaves as human shields before.
It's rather amusing when you watch a raider waste a triple launcher or Doomsday on a slave instead of it potentially catching the soldiers.
In my head canon, from a distance they can't tell the prestige of our colonists, so they atk anything on two feet.
I often see people refer to them as the ideal melee blockers for this reason. Helps that the actual colonists don’t care if slaves die either, unless it’s a situation where a colonist and a slave fall in love
I don’t usually play with slaves but when I do they’re usually the first line of defense
Or better, buy the biotech DLC that does all that without worrying about hoodles
Slaves get a mood bonus from expectations, won't get into social fights with non-slaves, certain work exemptions like being incapable of dumb labour get overridden...
You can read more about the benefits of slavery on the wiki
I love this sub. What a hilariously casual comment for an objectively evil thing.
You can actually set them to a "work" schedule and not have to deal with them being unhappy about it.
Slaves are like 60% for raid point calculations.
No one cares if your slaves die in the front lines of battle. They are great melee shields.
Great role playing potential.
Adding to this, this is a way to make some use out of pawns with really bad traits. It's a good early-game way to get, say, a too-smart colonist without having to worry as much about whether they're going to have a mental break. Or to get a pawn that has the "unwavering loyalty" prisoner trait.
They're also much, much faster to recruit than having to break a pawn to your ideology, and you don't have to worry about adding pawns that would contribute to a competing ideology in your base.
Bliss lobotomised slaves with the incapable of violence and no or low sleep genes make amazing human roombas and haulers in my 40K inspired runs as servitors. They never mentally break no matter how awful their jobs and conditions are, barely eat, and don't or barely sleep.
The penalty of lower work speed doesn't matter as they don't sleep or need recreation or stop much to eat. With the cleaning speed mod, you can boost their manipulation with genes which boosts general work labor and makes then even better roombas.
All lore accurate with non of the infrastructure mechs need. Just a single slave medical bed. Great for Gravships with limited space.
I feel like the only reason you'd ask this is if you're uncomfortable with the quality of the war crimes you're committing.
Looks like someone needs a Bliss Lobotomy 😊
I prefer joywires. And lots of drugs. If you can enslave a sanguaphage then you could use one to make everyone happy.
How do you mean with the last statement about the sanguophage?
I think its basically you joywire the vamp and put in a psychic harmonizer, then get him to a very high mood and then you put him into sleep in his casket and you do it close enough to where everyone hangs out that they get a mood buff. There'd be no reason to enslave him first, but i guess he might get a bigger mood buff.
Oh nice, so you could do this with a few of them and spread them around the base. Smart. I have that mod that lets you pipe blood directly to the deathcaskets, and you have the blood draining machine you can leave a prisoner indefinitely inside of, basically automatic blood feed for the vampire.
Yeah, it's sort of worth putting a harmonizer in them anyway, but by keeping them asleep, they're just a happy generator. Also you can put them inside the walls, so they can't get out. you know, if your peons are scared of vampires. :)
Others have pointed out some of the benefits.
I'll also mention that they aren't really meant for everything. A late game colony with a large population and good tech probably gains very little, if anything, from having slaves.
They're an option, one that might make sense sometimes, but not others.
Also, a lot of us like to make colonies with certain themes, so slavery can play into that theme.
I had a colony once where only the starter colonists were citizens, everyone else had to be slaves, period.
You end up making new laws for your colony on the fly. A child born to a citizen and a slave? Which way does the kid go?
That slave is a war hero, does that deserve freedom? Does it deserve citizenship? If they died, should their family be rewarded?
It adds depth to the story.
I did one where I made everyone we captured slaves, but those who got 10 kills in battle got to be recruited (with dev-mode).
"You end up making new laws for your colony on the fly. A child born to a citizen and a slave? Which way does the kid go?"
All children are given a chance, once they reach the age of maturity (13) they will be judged. If they are found lacking (bad traits/passions) they will be enslaved to serve their more deserving betters.
That's one way I like going about it but it's rare I go that heavily into slavery.
The main benefit is that they don't have a recreation need and have a significant expectations mood buff. So you can treat them like shit and they don't freak out.
you can enslave those with unwavering loyalty,
Just harvest there organs for large profit
Fair, but it is useful for skilled pawns who otherwise won't join
You can absolutely play without slaves. I mostly turn prisoners I do not want into slaves so those lazy bums do not just sit around while I prepare their sale.
Slaves are great for getting expendable labor without needing a nice prison and spending the time to recruit prisoners. Plus they are just fun.
Temporary work force that there is no colony-wide mood penalty for getting rid of.
Dassa bout it.
If you are playing purely for the most optimal strategy then yeah it’s probably best to just spend a bit extra time and recruit them especially if you have a pawn with good social who can reduce resistance quickly
However they do have a purpose of being very quick to get working and being expendable you don’t have to worry about giving them luxuries and if they die nobody cares. If you need labour quickly and don’t want to spend days converting and recruiting they can be quite useful.
And of course there are mods that make them more useful I use one that gives some extra precepts around slavery allowing you to prevent rebellions easier
Mood buffs depending on your ideolegion
I think they dont need to share in your ideologies needs/requirements so they're relatively easier to maintain (albiet, unless they have access to weapons during a breakout). You get the production boost without the mood issues, hence the need for oppression items.
Fr the best perk of slaves is that it gives you a way to keep those super loyal pawns. But I also use a mod that unlocks all work types for slaves.
colonist: friend that you like, good at stuff, it's sad when someone shoots them in the face
slave: bastard, can force to do stuff, fun to watch them get shot in the face
some things are good for colonists, like doing stuff, and some things are good for slaves, like making them sweep your floors or get used as scyther bait
Cheap and disposable labor. They work slower, but don't need recreation, so you can schedule them longer shifts. Your colonists also don't care if they die (unless they have a personal relationship) so they're good disposable soldiers/mobile sandbags. You can also usually enslave pawns faster than you can recruit them, and it gives you a way to extract labor from unwavering prisoners.
You can also get mood buffs for your real colonists with honorable slaves ideo, but that's more of an afterthought.
Shove a circadian half cycler into that bitch and get them cranking out drugs and stone blocks with a 24hr work schedule. As a bonus, you even get yourself a mobile sandbag during firefights!
Serves as cheap labor, emergency food ration, cannon fodder, involuntary organ donor and can be isekaid into leather jackets or hats.
What else can you ask for?
Any colonist that's perpetually mental breaking or any raider that has the 'unwavering' tag gets slapped in a collar and welcomed to the colony.
It's a vibe
I'm usually unlucky with which raiders survive. I typically get the unwavering ones. Slavery lets them be a useful member of the colony anyway.
Fodder
Who else are you going to have to fight to the death in your arena pits?
I’ve never had slaves
I think its kinda cool that it does offers benefits when your colony is kinda small and developing, then as you get stronger and get better colonists they just gradually become obsolete and phased out
Mechs are superior
They work.
Have one follow around your psycaster so you can heat dump on them and not worry about them dying from falling into a coma. If they die then you can just get a new one.
For the brothels and genetic experiments
Wdym brothels?
Mining, Crafting, Tailoring if they have skills. Mining and growing if they have those talents. At the very least they are hauling and cleaning. Probably wouldn't keep just a hauler/cleaner.
Gonna sell them anyway? May as well get cheap labor out of them
And they're good as cannon fodder, since they don't have an associated "colonist died" mood debuff
They're not good in Rimworld.
Not having to fill their recreation bar would make them powerful, but instead they just get a basically identical bar that might as well be labeled "negative recreation" because it's basically a measure of how bad a time they're having and which letting it empty can have disastrous consequences. That means separate, special clothes and decoration items, as well as a unique job that a regular colonist has to do on a regular basis.
On top of that you have to be more careful about your armory and there are more tasks you can't/shouldn't have slaves do than ones they're actually good at, especially in a post Mechanitor gameplay environment.
The only real reason to keep slaves long term is specifically because you have an Ideology which rewards their use, though in the short term handing them over to the tribute collector may be a niche strategy on some maps where gold is not forthcoming. A regular colonist or a mechanoid will always be a better value for general labor.
Menial labor mostly.
Lack of recreation means they only take food and sleep breaks. Add the no sleep gene or the half cycler and they only ever take food breaks.
For long-term skilless labor like hauling, cleaning, crafting stone blocks, etc, they get more work done due to much longer work hours.
For example, if you do a lot of deep drilling, you might get a few slaves decked out with dual drill arms and a half cycler so they can drill near 24/7.
Cheap Labour
Slaves don't require as much upkeep. They can be stuck in garbage conditions and fed paste as long as you keep them in line. Use your brain, dude
They require much more upkeep due to being slow, rebelions and you can't safely give them guns
I mitigated this considerably by creating a slave quarters once. They just lived in there by themselves producing food, cotton, and stone blocks like a mini-colony. Their storeroom had shared access with my main colony so we'd just go in there and take what we needed for profit. Endless low upkeep resources. Rebellions were a joke because they were all in one place, without weapons, and only had one exit out of the quarters.
Not in the right conditions. Just to give one example:
You put them in a small room with: 1. Deep drills 2. Stone cutter table 3. Table and stools 4. Nutrient paste turned towards the room 5. One EMP trap close to the door, in such a way that if they break out, they will trigger the trap, giving them brain shock and knocking them out.
They will work 24/7 forever making stone blocks. They will barely need to move other than to eat and turn chunks into stone blocks.
There's no "upkeep" other than the bare minimum food, and moving them out if insectoids come.
I am both in love and terrified by your ideas
Ethically, of course.
None
Roleplay only
Objectively incorrect. Slavery has huge mechanical differences in terms of mood offsets and recreation needs, and pawn points, which is balanced by needing to suppress revolts.