Bodily Functions - Never?

There would be no micromanagement or grossness in simply having a morale effect for being in reasonable proximity to a toilet or latrine pit. Bodily functions could be a part of the game without actually being depicted or acted directly on. It would just be a small incentive to live in more stable, civilized surroundings.

I don’t know about you but I wanna be as far away from toilets as possible.

I’m kinda unsure a about toilet n stuff, but I’d definitely like to see cleaning yourself - the game made a first step in this direction with cutting your hair/beard, now we’d need to be able to use soap with water in order to wash ourself. A bucket of Water would technically be enough to clean yourself, and I’d love to see actual working showers - either makeshift one, with a barrel of rainwater, or one in a vehicle - a good, long shower could however cost up to a tank of water, depending on the shower, the pressure and so on. Oh, and power obviously, for heating said water.
I believe shower/washing yourself was talked about before as well, and it was rejected due to the possible problems with morale, as a shower would need to give you a rather high/long lasting morale boost or it would be useless…still, a mod like this would be lovely. . . but I have the feeling this would have to be hardcoded somehow…?

Well, instead of looking at long-term morale boosts, why not health instead? Not as high as vitamins, perhaps, but a bath could help in cleaning off all the germs you get from exerting yourself and wiping off the monster chunks in your body. Something like that.

Isn’t that also the major hidden reason for washing in DF? Not just for morale and to mitigate forgotten beast contaminants, but also to reduce the chance of getting infected when being treated for injury.

It is, and showers and washing isn’t something that I’m opposed to, though I’d see it as more of a buff then a penalty. Rather than being forced to wash every X amount of time or suffer a penalty to future wound infections (though of course we’d need actual wounds to get infected first), treat it as “you can take a shower for a buff to your infection resistance and morale for X amount of time”. Then it doesn’t force the player to use them by penalizing them if they don’t, though it’s a nice thing for the player to do when they finally get the resources or should they choose to do so.

Maybe, though technically the health stat is already the same situation in practice. You will inevitably catch a cold if you don’t take vitamins regularly, unless you wear a gas mask.

Eh, it has a smaller effect than you might think. If a player did absolutely nothing or was perfectly balanced in their health approach (either of which would mean their health stat should eventually approach zero) they would, on average, get sick every 18.75 days. On the other hand the literal maximum health that you can reach would be a value of 300. Just getting to said value would take you an absolute minimum of 75 days, and would require immense luck due to the way the rolls scale. At this value you would get sick on average once every 25 days.

In practice, however, once you reach 200 health than even if you are abusing every health giving thing in the game you can only reach a 50/50 chance of increasing or decreasing (and the higher you go the lower your chance of increasing and greater your chance of decreasing), meaning that the effective caps on health are at +/-200. This gives us these chances to get sick:
@-200 health: once every 14.58 days
@0 health: once every 18.75 days
@200 health: once every 22.91 days
So even if you are totally abusing health sources you only buy yourself about an extra 4 days without getting sick, or an extra week if we compare someone with totally tanked values to someone in the epitome of health.

On the other hand getting sick isn’t the only major benefit of health. Here’s the chance of spontaneously healing from a bite/infection without any treatment:
@-200 health: 38.66% chance of spontaneous healing
@0 health: 46.84% chance of spontaneous healing
@200 health: 53.76% chance of spontaneous healing
(Though if you are recovering from a previous infection it can drastically lower those values down to almost zero, depending on how close you were to death before the infection healed). Comparing the tanked values to the epitome ones you can see that you have almost a 15% greater chance of survival without treatment between the two.

You mean people actually count on the infection self-resolving instead of stabbing germs to death with a knife? o3o

Proof that all you need is a gas mask, a knife, enough matches to give Smoky the Bear a heart attack, and enough bandages to mummify a T. Rex.

You just wait, I’m looking at wiping out the ability of cauterization to cure bite wounds sometime in the next week or so (since in reality cauterization is one of the absolute worst things you can do to a wound that might get infected, it seals in any infection already in there and damages surface tissue to allow for more possible infection locations).

Butbutbut it’s the manly dwarvenly way to do it. ;_;

Okay, DF logic is actually to jam a soap bar into the wound, but still.

Yeah we definitely had a rather in-depth discussion regarding cautery as a solution solely for bleeding. I liked that conversation. I just like medically accurate things distilled into playable form. So many games lack that beyond the usual ‘get sick, cough med removes the status effect’.

True. Could use more improvised antiseptic though.

We have a shaving and haircut kit that give morale boosts and they went in the main game without a problem.
I’m against micromanagement for bodily functions, but a buff from taking a shower would be nice. Or getting the [smelly] mutation if you don’t wash yourself for a week (which is almost like two months in cata since a cata day is 7 real days, if I remember correctly).

Yes

Or getting the [smelly] mutation if you don't wash yourself for a week (which is almost like two months in cata since a cata day is 7 real days, if I remember correctly).
No.

Positive = almost always okay to go in.
Negative = much less likely.

And in the unlikely event that other bodily functions somehow become a thing, don’t forget to add hand-washing. XP

I can’t wait for this.