The main focus item (such as a Brazier for Flame focus) must be inside the 7x7 circle of the meditation spot to give it's bonus. Secondary focus items (such as torches for a Brazier) can be outside this area, as long as they show a green line to the focus item they augment.

Thus, the optimal meditation setup will have one of each major meditation item in a spot where all the meditation spots areas overlap, and all secondary items outside that radius.


Nothing: Pawns seem to be able to meditate at their base value of 50%, even if no focus items are in range. Vanilla behavior. Testing needed. Increasing the Psy Stat raises this base value by 10% per level invested.

Minimal: 22% meditation strength from any wall. No support items. Useful when ruin diving, as walls are plentiful. The Ascetic Trait gets this for free. May result in the pawn wandering all over the map to meditate if you don't give them a better focus item or meditation spot.

Artistic: An Excellent Sculpture gives about 33% by itself, and can link to 8 other sculptures. If the 8 sculptures are also Excellent, add about 8% for 41% total. A masterwork Sculpture gives 34% by itself. A Legendary Sculpture gives ?%, plus 16% if all secondary sculptures are legendary. Artistic is the default meditation type for non-tribals.

Natural: ? from anima tree, ? from shrines, ? from anima stones.

Group: Bonus for meditating in a group. 1 person gives 0%, 2 people together get 6%, 3 get 20%, 4 get 45%, 5 get 80%. There is no additional benefit for having more than 5 meditators.

Morbid: Sarcophagus gives 20%, +10% if a relative is inside. Up to four secondary sarcophagi or graves can add up to 8% if they contain humans. Total possible is 38%(?)

Flame: Brazier gives 15% if lit, with up to 8 other nearby flames (ie, lit torches) that give 2% each, for 31% total. Pyromaniacs get this for free.

Dignified: Requires a title. Yeoman is enough. ? from sitting on a Throne.

Wealth: "Percentage of colony wealth" If colony is poor/small, this might be easier. If colony is large, this might be impossible to use.

Archotechnology: "Archotech Artifacts" Not sure what counts as an artifact, especially with mods in effect.

Archotech: From SOS2, all pawns get this by default. It allows meditating at the Archotech Spore that serves as the late-game AI for your ship.

From Best to Worst:

Natural is so OP that it got a minor nerf already. It may need more, because it's still at the top. Tribals only.

Group Focus is really strong, but only once you have 3+ psycasters. (Cough tribal start Cough)

Diginified Thrones are really good, because the small thrones take up the same amount of space as a regular meditation spot, making it easy to stack buffs. (Watch out for dishonored throneroom mood debuffs if you add research benches though.)

Artistic is really good, as long as you have a good crafter and/or the Archotechist path to bump the quality of everything up to Excellent. Consider bringing legendary small statues on caravans.

Minimal is kinda meh, but walls ARE plentiful, and you only need 1 wall to benefit.

Morbid: The bonus is nice, but the logistics of killing off relatives may or may not be tricky. Bringing the corpses with you on caravans will be a pain.

Archotech: Not sure. It's probably OP wants you get it. If your ideology relics count as artifacts, that might make things easier.

Flame is eh. Costs a lot of wood and labor to keep the fires fed, but it does stack easily with everything else. Save it for mid-late game colonies.

Wealth is eh. If it were based on absolute value, instead of percentage value, I might like it more, but it's really hard to cram a colonies worth of wealth into a single 7x7 meditation area. It's actually EASIER to abuse percentage wealth if you are a POOR colony.

Archotech: Not sure. You get it free with SOS2, so you'll never have to waste a level up on this!



Alternative Methods (best to worst):

PsyStats: Don't forget you get faster EXP gain the more you invest in Psystats. If you can get away with it, it's faster to invest in Psystats FIRST and THEN choose abilities. I wouldn't do that unless I had a small army of established psycasters first.

Chronomancer Timeskip Meditation: Each use grants 300 EXP, enough to blitz through the first few levels, after which point you can start transfering your age to prisoners. It's a very nice boost, but the micro of managing the cooldown is annoying. Could really use an autocast.

Recharge Focus Ritual Reward: Refilling focus gives a small amount of EXP. Not worth it, too much hastle.

Drain Psyessence: Devour all the EXP of a target, killing it. Sadly, enemy psycasters are rare, low level, and dangerous, so you aren't likely to use this on enemies. You're more likely to use this on your own pawns to get rid of "failed" psycasters with bad stats/bad builds.

Update on Archotech/Wealth foci: Adding objects like Psychic Harmonizers seems to add 3-5% psyfocus per object, scaling to give more psyfocus the more objects there are. Wealth Focus seems to benefit by 1% for every $800 or so, but it's hard to tell because wealth overlaps with Archotech but lacks explicit tooltips.

Archotech items give more psyfocus if you don't stack them (assuming you use stacking mods). (2 stacked Harmonizers + 1 Archolife Womb (SOS2) give 9.4% psyfocus, 1 Harmonizer + 1 Harmonizer + 1 Archolife Womb gives 14% psyfocus).

These two seem stronger than I thought, but would require a very specially built mid-late game base to take full advantage of - especially since you usually want to use archo-items, not hoard them.

Update: From user reports in Balancing thread, Wealth is indeed super busted. Will likely be nerfed, so I won't comment further.

Archotech focus is very good. At 10 archotech items on SEPARATE squares (ie, don't stack them) I'm getting +90% psyfocus. Actually finding that much archostuff may be tricky, and what counts as archostuff varies. I don't know what the upper limit is, but it seems to be big if there is one.

Wealth can be abused by caravans, as they only count the wealth on the caravan for total wealth... And are considered next to everything in the caravan. If, say, using a mod to have spaceships as reusable transport pods your caravan carries with them, you can get up to 9346% gain rate.

Vanilla Foci haven't been changed, and are displayed as such on the Wiki:

Pawn base psyfocus gain: 50%.

TLDR - Vanilla
Pawn base psyfocus gain: 50%.
Natural: +2% Psyfocus, but you get anima grass and linking ritual.
Morbid: +33% with 1 sarcophagus with relation +4 sarcophagus with corpses.
Artistic: +44% for Legendary Sculpture + 8 Masterwork or better sculptures.
Minimal: +22% for a wall.
Brazier: +31% for 9 lit Braziers.
Dignified: +25% for normal throne and 170 impressiveness, +33% if royal title requirements are met.

TLDR - VPE
Wealth: OP, subject to being patched. Reports of up to over +9000% psyfocus gain from caravaning with gold piles and setting up camp.

Archotechnology: Formula unknown, cap unknown. Might not have a cap. Highest I've gotten is +90% with 10 archotech items. Items must be on different squares (not stacked) to link with eachother.


Natural
Anima Tree: 28% base. +4% with 4 nature shrines (large or small doesn't matter), OR +8% with 4 animus stones (rare). Building close to the tree gives a maximum penalty of -30%. IIRC 4 Shrines + 1 anima tree + lots of buildings = net psyfocus bonus of +2%.

Since the main benefit of the anima tree is the grass and linking ritual (which are unaffected by the psyfocus penalty), it's generally considered a good idea to build near the anima tree.


Morbid
The following traits grant Morbid for free: Psychopath, Bloodlust, Cannibal, Masochist, Jealous, Undergrounder, Tortured Artist.

Sarcophagus base 10%, +10% if containing a corpse, +10% if corpse has relation to meditator, up to +8% if four nearby sarcophogi contain corpses. +33% possible.


Artistic
Default focus type UNLESS ascetic or tribal backstory (ie, natural meditation backstory)

Excellent +24%, Legendary +28%. Up to 8 supporting sculptures give a total of +8% if excellent or +16% if Masterwork or better. Total +32% excellent, total +44% if Legendary+Masterworks.


Minimal
+22% for a single wall. No modifiers.


Flame
The following trait gives Flame for free: Pyromaniac.

Brazier: +15% if lit, +2% per up to 8 nearby lit objects (Brazier, Torch, Campfire). Braziers need the least frequent refueling, and have the same burn rate as torches, so I recommend Braziers. +31% possible.


Dignified
Requires a royal title. Yeoman suffices.

Both throne types are identical at +15%. If the throne room meets title requirements (Yeoman is easiest) add +8%. Up to +10% if room has 170 impressiveness.

Note that the +8% from meeting title requirements might be mutually exclusive with some VPE focus types, such as Research.


Other
Go-Juice fills 15% psyfocus upon being drunk.
Wake-Up gives +20% psyfocus gain.
Recharge Psyfocus Ritual Reward refills all psyfocus.
Persona "Psy Meditative" weapons give +10% psyfocus.
Persona "Kill Focused" refills 20% psyfocus on kill.

Ignoring Wealth, the maximum possible psyfocus gain before VPE focus types is:
+206%

Add Archotechnology for +296% or higher.

It seems to be a no-brainer to unlock ALL focus types before investing in any psytrees or psystats.

Originally posted by RedPine:

Ignoring Wealth, the maximum possible psyfocus gain before VPE focus types is:
+206%

Add Archotechnology for +296% or higher.

This is absolutely incredible. Do you have a screenshot of your setup for this? My setup has been rather minimalistic in comparison.

In case you're curious, the formula for the Archotech focus is (number of items in 10 cell radius, capped at 5) / 5.55 * (total value of those items, capped at 5000) / 10000. It counts all things of Archotech tech level.

Originally posted by legodude17:

In case you're curious, the formula for the Archotech focus is (number of items in 10 cell radius, capped at 5) / 5.55 * (total value of those items, capped at 5000) / 10000. It counts all things of Archotech tech level.

So with <5000 silver worth of archotech implants (5 of any archotech limbs works), split into at least 5 stacks, the maximum psyfocus would be:

(5 / 5.55) * (5000/10000) = 0.90*0.5 = .45 or 45% psyfocus maximum.

I'm getting 90%. There might be interference from the wealth focus, but given that I'm getting exactly double the predicted psyfocus I suspect the formula given is incorrect. Specifically, I currently have 10 archotech items worth about $800 each, giving 90% psyfocus.

I'll have to double check in game.

Note: on Randy 500%, trying to get all the foci results in dying to wealth long before your psycasters can level up. With that in mind, the best early game foci are:

Natural Meditation (duh)
Minimal (cheap)
Morbid (graves are cheap, sarcophagi less so unless it's awful quality.)
Group (requires 3+ psycasters to be viable, preferably 5)

A note on Dignified: You only need one thrown in range to get the ~10% bonus. The throne room bonuses won't stack with the anima tree (anima grass doesn't grow on flooring). Even with a cheap wooden thrown, that's pretty lousy. Still, getting Yeoman doesn't cost a level up, so might as well throw that in there.

After that, you're probably better off investing in Psy Stats. They not only increase psyfocus gain by +10% each (more exp/refill focus faster), but they also increase your burst power and endurance in the form of sensitivity, max heat, and the focus discount.

Btw OP, Foci is just the plural of focus

Hey @RedPine, love your work man, love looking into the technical details. So my interested question is: do thrones count all potential foci in the room, or within that 10 radius. The reason I ask is I'm messing around adding focus types to my three psycasters (RP Empire house run, only those with noble title or dear and valued members of the House are permitted psypowers), and there's no radius displayed when selecting thrones. So following that logic, perhaps dignified meditation is superior as you may be able to fit way more foci objects within the throneroom. That or it's merely vanilla interaction and hasn't been included in the mod.

In which case, that could be a nifty QOL patch opportunity for the Vanilla expanded team.

I'm adding Foci types now because of your advice btw. You did a great service with your educational tinkering, and for what it's worth, I greatly appreciate it.

Originally posted by Lex_the_Grim:

Hey @RedPine, love your work man, love looking into the technical details. So my interested question is: do thrones count all potential foci in the room, or within that 10 radius.

Thrones follow the same rules as all other foci. As long as a single throne is within range of a meditation spot (about 5x5 square area), that meditation spot will get the full benefit of that throne, as long as the pawn in that spot has Dignified.

Same goes for Minimal. As long as a single wall is within range of a meditation spot, it will count for Minimal.

If a pawn has both Minimal and Dignified, and both a throne and a wall are within range of a meditation spot, they stack. Whether the pawn is meditating at the wall, the throne, or the meditation spot is irrelevant, they stack up to the same number either way if fall are in range.

> perhaps dignified meditation is superior as you may be able to fit way more foci objects within the throneroom.

False. There is no advantage to throne rooms - in fact, they are the LEAST compatible with other focus types (Research requires production building, Natural requires unfloored dirt).

You are limited to how many primary foci can fit in a ~5x5 square of the mediation focus. Since only the PRIMARY foci needs to be in the 5x5 square (ie, a sculpture), and any SECONDARY foci supporting the primary can be slightly outside that area (ie, up to 8 supporting sculptures), space generally isn't the limiting factor. The limiting factor is finding or making enough focus items - and protecting them from raids.

Quick note on Research for people who don't know/didn't notice, there's an entry on the Research Bench showing how much it provides. The value seems to be half the research speed of the bench rounded down meaning it can cap out at 77% from just that focus type. That plus some sculptures and braziers seems like one of the strongest combos. It also lends itself well to a dedicated research room with clean floors and the like.