MENTAL ECHOES: LEARN TO COPE
Mental breaks do not happen "for no reason". They have history.
Mental Echoes makes psychological strain visible, explains likely drivers and lets pawns build coping ability over time.
Content Note
This mod covers topics around stress, emotional strain and mental health struggles. The wording and presentation were written with care to reduce unnecessarily triggering language.
Even with that effort some players may still find parts of this experience intense or triggering.
Please take care of yourself and skip this mod if needed.
Educational Focus
This mod is meant to help players better understand mental health topics through gameplay. It shows how ongoing stress can build up, how different coping habits can help or fail and how recovery often needs time and support.
It is not a clinical or diagnostic tool but it aims to encourage empathy, reflection and respectful language around emotional well-being.
Features (Quick Overview)
- Visible stress as hediff for colonists in health tab
- Stress states: Settled, Strained, On Edge, Overwhelmed, Emotional Shutdown, Irritable
- Directed coping or automatic coping (if no explicit mode is selected)
- Context-aware feedback: clean tooltip for players including top-3 coping suggestions based on context
- Break risk clarity: mood tooltip includes ME extra threshold deltas for Minor / Major / Extreme as simple yellow +% lines
- Supportive social comfort: positive interactions can trigger a small hug-like comfort stress relief
- Early recovery rolls with safety limits for extreme and volatile states
- Post-break aftermath with gradual decay
- Long-term learning: positive and negative coping affinity adaptation
- Coping capacity stages: coping capacity grows through readable stages from learning up to veteran
- Mental strain records: moved some vanilla records into this new group (and added additional records)
Readable UI Philosophy
- Tooltip stays short and practical: stress band, state, top-3 coping, clear driver groups
- Goal: less micromanagement feeling, more understandable psychology in normal gameplay
Why choose Mental Echoes?
Many mental mods focus mainly on the break moment
Mental Echoes models the full mental cycle in a vanilla-friendly way:
- Before: stress builds over time with readable causes
- During: recovery is handled in a controlled and fair way
- After: lasting aftermath and gradual adjustment instead of a full reset
Result: more depth, clear feedback, fair gameplay and no overpowered shortcuts
For Modders: Use Mental Echoes as a Framework
Mental Echoes also offers a small framework hook for modders who want their own mental-health-related features to integrate with ME instead of staying fully separate.
- Read current stress: use the Mental Echoes stress value in your own mod logic
- Hediff opt-in: let custom mental-state-like hediffs count as active strain states in ME
- Shared behavior: active custom hediff states can pause coping and feed into ME's active mental-state driver path
Compatibility with SnapOut! and other mental mods
- Complementary design: built to work alongside SnapOut! rather than replace it
- Clearer understanding: not only what happened but also why risk is rising
- Long-term development: coping develops over time instead of being a one-time fix
If you want mental systems that are explainable and long-term Mental Echoes fits very well.
Gameplay and Balance Focus
- Coping helps clearly but does not replace full mood management
- Extreme and volatile states remain dangerous
- Not a free-win system: high stability is earned over time and fit activities
- Break-threshold scaling is tier-specific for fairness: everyday strain pushes minor risk first, sustained burden pushes major risk, escalation pressure pushes extreme risk most
Performance Notes
- Stress processing is spread across time instead of brute-forced every tick for every colonist
- Heavier checks use raretick-like staggered updates
- Caching helps avoid recalculating the same stress details over and over
- The goal is to stay stable even in larger colonies and longer saves
Typical situations that can increase stress
- Lower mood over longer periods
- Too little sleep, hunger or low recreation
- Very low outdoor recovery over longer periods
- Social isolation: being indoors with weak contact and low recreation
- Ongoing pain and untreated injuries
- Chronic health burdens (for example long-lasting illnesses or permanent injuries)
- Long work phases with too little recovery time
- High stimulation phases such as noise overstimulation, light overstimulation, crowding or harsh weather once stress is already high (60%+)
- Nearby hostile threats, especially when exposure is sustained over time
- Conflict, loss and repeated high-pressure situations (including disasters)
Credits
Special thanks to Pandora Fox for the original inspiration and thoughtful contribution.
Compatibility
- SnapOut! compatibility included (guarded)
- Safe to add mid-game
Bug Reports
Please include a short description, reproduction steps and your Player.log or HugsLib log in the comments or discussions.
If you notice other situations in normal gameplay that feel like they should clearly add to stress but currently do not, please let me know in the comments or discussions.
- Activate devmode, select affected pawn and click the gizmo ME Debug: Log stress drivers
- Copy the created Log.Warning output and post it in Discussions
Licensing & Legal
Copyright (c) 2026 b4ttl3m3d - All rights reserved.
Allowed: Adding to Steam collections
Not allowed: Reuploading - External redistributions - Off-site mod packs - Commercial use - Asset or code reuse without permission
Contact the author before reusing any part of this mod.
Fan-made project - not affiliated with Ludeon Studios. RimWorld EULA
Languages
English, German - more on request.
Support & Donations
If you would like to support the project:
[ko-fi.com]
Donations are completely voluntary and do not grant access to additional content or features.
They are simply a way to support ongoing free development.
