Immortal Colony Leader

Pick one colonist when you start a colony and make them the immortal leader. They cannot be killed for good. They do not age, they do not get sick, and they keep the people around them safe. Works on any colonist of any race, needs no DLC, and you can drop it into a save you already started.

The idea

Every colony has that one pawn you can't afford to lose. This makes that real. Your leader can still get shot, set on fire, eaten by a thrumbo, or dropped by a raid they just don't stay dead. The body grows back, they get up, and the colony keeps going. Everything else they do is built around keeping the rest of your people alive too.

Picking the immortal

When a new colony starts you get one window listing your starting colonists. Pick one and they're locked in for that save. Only one pawn can ever hold the trait hand it to someone else with a character editor and the mod takes it off whoever had it and locks in the new one. Don't want the window? Turn it off in the settings and assign the trait yourself.

What the immortal leader gets

Can't really die

• When killed, the body grows back and they wake up once the brain and heart are whole.
• Lost far from home downed on a quest, a caravan wipe, a map that's gone and they make their way back to the colony after a few days.
• The colony isn't counted as lost while they're coming back, even if they were your last colonist.
• No single hit can drop them from full health, and they can't be put down by pain.

Immune to the slow stuff

• Does not age.
• No disease, infection, poison, addiction, food poisoning, heat or cold, or old-age conditions heart attacks, bad backs, cataracts, dementia, the lot.
• Can't be kidnapped, banished, sold, recruited away, or have a mental break.
• Grows back lost arms, legs, and organs over time. Clears their own scars.

Better at living

• Faster on their feet, never tired, carries way more, very good looking, and great at social, research, and trade.

A presence on the map

• People nearby get a mood boost, passive healing, faster learning, and a fight buff.
• Anyone having a mental break near them gets calmed.
• Enemies near them get scared.
• Becomes your ideoligion leader on their own if you run Ideology.

Tune it however you want

There's a full settings panel. Turn any single power off and keep the rest drop just the auras, or the damage cap, or the disease immunity, whatever you don't want. Sliders set the per-hit damage cap, how many days they take to return when lost, and the range and strength of the auras. Everything defaults to the values above, so you can ignore all of it if you like.

Holds up with the DLC

No DLC is required, but if you run them the leader is hardened against their nastier tricks:

• Anomaly shrugs off revenant and awoken hypnosis, the cube obsession, psychic-ritual comas, and can't be turned into a ghoul or shambler.
• Biotech immune to gene drug-dependency withdrawal and deathrest exhaustion.
• Royalty / Ideology resists psychic shocks, becomes ideoligion leader, and keeps their ritual scars instead of having them cleared.

For modders

• An advanced settings box to list extra hediff defNames the leader should also be immune to for modded diseases and conditions.
• A small public API to register extra immunities, check if a pawn is the immortal leader, or get the current one.
• Dev-mode tools to force a resurrection, transfer the leader to another pawn, or trigger the far-from-home return.

Compatibility

• Safe to add to a save you already started.
• No DLC required Biotech, Ideology, Royalty, and Anomaly are all optional.
• Needs Harmony. Put this below Harmony in your load order.

This is the immortality system from the Kurin Demigodess mod, pulled out and made to work on any colonist of any race.