Mute Pawns Mod aims to make the inability to talk less crippling for mute pawns in RimWorld. It provides mute pawns with more options, such as taming and training animals, initiating romance, and participating in casual social interactions. A pawn is “mute” if they are incapable of Talking (Talking 0% in the Health tab), whether that’s a genetic inability, a result of injury, or any other reason.
Mute Pawns Mod Features
- New and adjusted log entries:
- When a non-mute pawn initiates Chit-Chat or Deep Talk with a mute pawn, the log will no longer imply that the mute pawn responded verbally. For example, “X and Y chatted about space travel” might be replaced with “X monologued to Y about space travel”.
- Mute pawns playing with babies (Biotech only) won’t generate log entries about singing to them or telling stories.
- When mute pawns release an animal to the wild, they will not “say some warm words”.
- (Toggleable, default: on) Animal interactions:
- Talking is no longer required to tame or train animals.
- Corresponding log entries will not describe the pawn talking to themselves or the animal.
- (Toggleable, default: on) Romance:
- Mute pawns are now capable of initiating romance and proposing marriage.
- Corresponding log entries describe the use of touch, gestures, and body language instead of words to communicate their intentions.
- Note that if casual interactions are disabled, mute pawns may still have difficulty building a strong enough relationship for romance.
- Also note that if they are mute due to an injury to the head and face, they may still count as disfigured, lowering other pawns’ opinion of them.
- (Toggleable, default: off) Slavery (Ideology only):
- Mute pawns can enslave and suppress others.
- Corresponding log entries describe the use of physical intimidation and crude gestures to make their intent clear.
- (Toggleable, default: off) Casual social interactions:
- Mute pawns will maintain (or destroy) relationships with other nearby pawns using the same mechanics (chit chat, deep talk, slight, insult) as other pawns.
- Corresponding log entries feature casual friendly touch, shared contemplative moments, obscene gestures, and more.
- Opinion modifiers, etc., will still name these interactions “Chit-Chat”, etc., because they use the vanilla interactions in order to maximize compatibility. Only the log entries have been overridden.
Mute pawns remain incapable of:
- Giving speeches
- Recruiting prisoners
- Converting anyone to their ideoligion
- Using “Word of” psycasts
- Using the comms console
- probably more
They also still have a very low Social Impact and Negotiation ability.
Compatibility notes
Compatible with Interaction Bubbles. The bubbles will display the adjusted log entries.
No mod-added interactions (e.g., Vanilla Social Interactions Expanded) have been touched. Most modded interactions ought to still be unavailable to mute pawns, but depending on the exact implementation, there’s a chance mute pawns will be able to use them.
If you find mute pawns having conversations they shouldn’t be, let me know. I’m willing to add patches to make sure mute pawns don’t use those interactions. I’m afraid I’m not going to be writing log replacements for modded interactions like I have for the vanilla ones.
With thanks to wep for Atmospheric font.
