Well, after poking at things a bit, using developer mode to test a couple different scenarios, it appears that a Pawn does need to be fully mutated into an animal for the permanently feral thing to kick in. Not sure if that's a limitation of some sort of the underlying game.

If it's not, that'd be a change I'd like to see. turning raiders feral and releasing them into the wild, or returning them to their faction, is an option I'd like to have.

But they still have a human brain if they're not an animal. The brain is the last thing to go, from my understanding of this mod, hence why that's only possible under mutation.
There are gas shells to go ♥♥♥♥ 'em up from a distance though.

Honestly, we need a way to permanently turn unmutated pawn feral. If it's a limitation, sure I can see that.. but then why not just state it's a engine limitation? If I want to go planet of the apes and turn my enemies into bald monkeys to show off to their horrified friends and family or make a human farm without all the pesky mental breaks let me dang it. Rimworld and even more so pawnmorpher is all about those warcrimes after all so why can't we already do this? Seems like the perfect warcrime: You take away their sapience and basically turn them into a animal without actually turning them into a animal while their forced to know it's happening to them, arguably a even worse insult in the end all thing considered

Originally posted by ParasiticSquid:

Honestly, we need a way to permanently turn unmutated pawn feral. If it's a limitation, sure I can see that.. but then why not just state it's a engine limitation?

It's not a limitation on the engine, it's an intentional limitation to make consequences for letting it get that bad. Personally, I don't think making humans go feral makes any sense. The feral part comes from their mind literally degrading into whatever animal state they're in. What sense would it make if the humans had their mind degrade into a human state?
That said, I wouldn't mind a totally optional game toggle to allow for reversion at greater cost. Maybe 2 reverter serums, or maybe a pill that you can only get from quests or a really, REALLY high tech level with a long research time.
I might make that mod if I find any spare time to do so.

Originally posted by ParasiticSquid:

If I want to go planet of the apes and turn my enemies into bald monkeys to show off to their horrified friends and family or make a human farm without all the pesky mental breaks let me dang it. Rimworld and even more so pawnmorpher is all about those warcrimes after all so why can't we already do this? Seems like the perfect warcrime: You take away their sapience and basically turn them into a animal without actually turning them into a animal while their forced to know it's happening to them, arguably a even worse insult in the end all thing considered

Again, it's supposed to be consequences to becoming an animal, though you make an enticing point. I don't think this should be a part of the base mod though, a patch could easily make this work.

Considering the mutagenic mechanites store and effect the mind of the one it's mutating it makes perfect sense to allow players to have a way to make humans or humanlikes feral. Your telling me we can transform someone fully into a animal, have specific pills to remove a pawns sapience, and yet somehow humans are immune? Normally a human can't go feral for obvious reasons but if you feed them a bunch of feral pills why the heck don't they work unless they are a morph, and even then they still regenerate even when you don't want them too.

Shoot, don't even need the pills or mechanites. Even in real life there are brain surgeries that were being done in the medival days that practically turned humans into drooling monkeys due to the damage they caused. Even using the mechanite "lore" argument theres zero reason not to have a brain implant to make a pawn go feral or slowly lose sapience. The literal opposite of sapiostore mesh which exists already.

If it's not a limitation theres no reason not too allow us to make humanlikes feral. Would need a configuration option for players who don't want that but we wouldn't need to rely on devmode to make feral humans. Which is another thing: It already works with devmode and sapience limiters so why not add a way to do it without cheating?

Originally posted by ParasiticSquid:

Considering the mutagenic mechanites store and effect the mind of the one it's mutating...

Shoot, don't even need the pills or mechanites. Even in real life there are brain surgeries that were being done in the medival days that practically turned humans into drooling monkeys due to the damage they caused. Even using the mechanite "lore" argument theres zero reason not to have a brain implant to make a pawn go feral or slowly lose sapience. The literal opposite of sapiostore mesh which exists already.

If it's not a limitation theres no reason not too allow us to make humanlikes feral. Would need a configuration option for players who don't want that but we wouldn't need to rely on devmode to make feral humans. Which is another thing: It already works with devmode and sapience limiters so why not add a way to do it without cheating?

Paragraph 1:This is pretty easy. It stores the DNA of the human body, but not the information of the brain itself. The feral pills, as far as I can tell, accelerate the process in the brain itself.
Paragraph 2:These are apart of the same series as lobotimies. I'll give you the point towards the fact that it does destroy the human mind, but the mechanites only begin to degrade it AFTER the body is fully transformed and specifically during mental breaks. That suggests there's something more going on.
Paragraph 3:I shouldn't need to tell you that what you can do in dev and cheat modes isn't canonical to whatever game or mod you've activated it on. Sure, I can get an Exeguttor in Pokemon Red before I even have my starter using the debug menu, doesn't mean that's how the game's intended to be played.

Despite my "defense" for this choice, whatever the lore behind the mod is, I'm looking into my own mod to provide this experience anyways. It would be interesting to lock a pawn in a feral state with a gas attack.

Since this is a hot topic, I can say that we will be adding a sapience control device in Mutagenesis, which will allow you to make fully feral humans.

I didn't realize this was considered a hot topic, but cool to know that I don't need to look into hooking into your own code and bastardizing it with my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ written, ill-thought out C#.