Target player
Someone with a long save file in RimWorld or Going Medieval who has stopped being surprised by what their colony throws at them. They know the tech tree, they know the raid timers, and their colonists' health tabs have become a chore to clear rather than a problem to solve — because in both games disease is a private dice roll that never spreads between colonists. This player wants the opposite: a colony sim where sickness is a social problem they have to read, not a stat they wait out.
Core loop
Osgith has a cough. So does half the colony, from the leaky granary roof and the overworked wood stove — boring, confirmed causes. But Osgith's cough catches wrong, and he's been skipping the mess hall. No lab slot free for six hours. Work his shift, send him to bed, or burn one of two isolation beds on a hunch. You isolate him. The test comes back negative. You've spent a bed and a day of labor on nothing.
A full day cycle: morning symptom checks, the Known Agents board updated against yesterday's results, shifts assigned around however many beds and healthy hands remain, then the day plays out while you watch the ward for anyone declining faster than their assigned cause explains. Evenings are triage — tomorrow's test queue, tonight's isolation calls, and the caregiver rotation.
Systems
- Known Agents board — a reference panel the player builds, not one handed to them; each confirmed lab result or autopsy fills in one more tell.
- Diagnostic pathway — free instant visual read, a certain but 18-hour lab test on scarce reagents, or a free, always-accurate autopsy that arrives one colonist too late.
- Isolation ward — two beds at the start, built one at a time, deliberately slower than population growth.
- Strain drift — every 20–25 days the outbreak swaps one of its tells for a mundane cause's, unannounced.
- Caregiver fatigue — tending the ward raises a nurse's own infection risk the longer she stays on shift.
- Containment Index — the Health Authority's one score, driven by how fast cases were caught, not how healthy the colony looks today.
Differentiators
- Sickness is a social, legible puzzle built from overlapping symptom sets the player has to read and confirm — not a private per-colonist dice roll like RimWorld's disease model.
- Isolation beds are a fixed, slow-growing resource that falls further behind the population every season, so the genre's usual comfortable plateau never arrives.
- The strain mutates its own symptom profile against the player's accumulated notes, so being right for three weeks is what sets up the week you're wrong.
- Treating a case costs the colony the same whether the call was right or wrong — the game never says which calls were wasted until the lab result lands.
Key features
- A diagnosis puzzle built from overlapping, deterministic symptom tells — no hidden dice behind the read.
- Isolation ward capacity that deliberately falls behind population growth all tenure long.
- A strain that mutates its own symptom profile against your notes every 20–25 days.
- Caregiver fatigue that turns your best nurse into tomorrow's hardest case.
- A Containment Index that scores how fast you caught a case, not how healthy the colony looks.