Common Cold

[Mistakensir]

Day 20. Lucky enough to get past the roadblock with turrets just outside the evac shelter,caught the cold again for the third time, popping vitamins twice a day seems useless. eating healthy, staying dry, what can stop this madness.
Sure its great to catch up on reading, the first time or two…
But at what point do we develop a resistance to the “common cold” if its that strong perhaps it should just kill us outright.
If I have to wear a mask all the time perhaps design one that doesn’t impair breathing and thus run speed.

[Pthalocy]

Wear gear that covers your mouth. I forget the rules regarding that(mouth encumbrance??), but even a bandana can help to reduce inhaled contaminants a little bit, and thus lowers opportunities for cold-catching. Get thee a filter mask or better! Drugs also affect your health score, and it takes a long while to normalize again after such abuse. Eating healthy after a cocaine binge for example will still leave you with a shitty health stat for a while.

(There is also talk in another thread that revealed the disease is cold-like, yes, but given how the common cold pre-cataclysm through concentrated communities of people, where the hell would a legit common cold get a chance like that when everyone’s dead? I thought it was an interesting point. I don’t know how gaining immunity to such diseases would work.)

[Coolthulhu]

Vitamins take time to start working. Health stat changes very slowly, even when you have an optimal vitamin popping routine (yours is good enough, assuming you pop pills every day, not just when ill).
A 20 day old survivor most likely won’t have maxed out health.

In the end it’s still random chance.

Oh, and if you’re playing a background that starts with “leaky bionic” bionic (and haven’t removed it yet), your health degrades faster than if you snorted cocaine and shoot up heroin for breakfast every single day. You’d need to eat vitamins every single hour to counter that,

where the hell would a legit common cold get a chance like that when everyone’s dead?

Zombies probably host a whole lot of diseases. While they don’t breathe and thus probably don’t sneeze, they bite, salivate, splatter blood all over the place, cover your face with bile and stomach acid and exhale clouds of stuff.

[Pthalocy]

I agree, it is food for thought on how disease vectors have shifted post cataclysm. I am not a contributor to lore, however, so what I said was just wondering aloud X) I’m not sure now zeds would act in this fashion! Clearly they carry something, given their bites are infection-prone. So you’re probably right in that regard.

[Snaaty]

Hm, some of those numbers indeed could be tweaked, now that I experienced it myself. (Flawless logic, I know.)

I even picked “disease resistant” as a starting trait, and yet on day 2 I got the flu (!). (Imagine the chances.)

I managed to cure it, but I was incredibly close to dieing.

In the same game somewhere between day 3 and 5 I also got tetanus from climbing across maybe 4 or 5 broken window frames and still with disease resistant!

TL;DR: People with “Disease Resistant” shouldn’t get the flu on day two, if the description says that you virtually never catch ambient diseases (IIRC).

[Mistakensir]

Oh ver 2326 I forgot to put that. Standard survivor no bionics no drugs.

Yeah I get it’s not the actual cold but 3 times in 20 days is a bit overkill.

Currently im wearing a balaclava ill try the bandana thanks, I carry a filter mask but it drops my run speed so i just wear it for smokers ect.

The day before the 3rd cold I did get 2 deep bites I had to use first aid kits on guess that lowered my health.

[ryvn]

AFAICT the only way to become immune to the cold and flu is to wear something with high environmental protection on your mouth, like a gas mask, all the time. You have a chance, based on your health score, to get sick every half hour, and if it happens then wearing protective gear can block it. No matter how high your health is, you still have a chance to get sick, and at realistically achievable levels of health you don’t make all that much difference. (At standard starting health of 0, with nothing over your mouth, I think you’ll average one sickness every 18 days, although obviously it could be much more or less frequent in practice, and at 100 health, which you might reach eventually if you take two vitamins and then one every couple of hours, you push the average to about 20. The maximum possible health is 200, but you would have to be eating a LOT of vitamins, because health slowly moves up and down with influence from the difference between your health and your healthmod, which is what vitamins affect, and healthmod trends relentlessly toward zero.)

Based on responses I’ve received before, I believe this is working as intended. Stock up on DayQuil! (Er… I guess it’s “non-drowsy cough syrup” now.) It’ll keep you functional while you wait for the cold to run its course.

[Coolthulhu]

The chance to get sick (every time the roll triggers) is:
One in (900 + health + 300 if disease resistant). One in 6 that it’s flu, otherwise cold.
After that check, there’s a second: 3d3 vs (environmental resistance on mouth)d3. If 3d3 is more, you get the disease.

This means that unless you have at least 9 environmental resistance on mouth at all times, it’s still a matter of luck regardless of how healthy you are. Health variable generally stays above -100 and below 100. Most healthy survivor has a one in 1300 chance without a mask, most unhealthy one has one in 800 chance. It’s not that much of a big difference, meaning disease resistant is a bad trait at the moment and catching diseases is more luck than skill (until you can make that survivor mask).

Stock up on royal jelly.