Health just the other day suddenly dropped almost 60 points down to just below -50 the other In-Game day from a normal flow of between ±10. I’ve also picked up an effect [Concerning Symptoms] with a twitching leg that knocked me down whilst crafting chems in my self-built base.
I’ve popped an anti-parasite pill to no chestburster death effects from my in-game guts.
I’m curious as to what caused this very sudden health drop & symptoms.
Just health drop symptoms, or what.
The diet my character normally dines on is tea-protein-water & various meats + various carb meals. I pop a multi most days to cover missed vitamins.
Luckily, I’ve got a Glob-shot if this is just health-related and this continues to spiral. I just don’t want to use it if I’m missing a treatment that should be coming to mind. I’m also flu-shotted.
Hoh boy, health’s dropped from -50 to -111 in another day’s time. I’ve got my finger on the glob shot now. Gotta hope this is going to end sooner than later.
The quest has concluded. The heath issues became vicious for a while, I popped the Gamma shot, and switched to a Vegetarian diet of various fruits and veggies for roughly two weeks before the massive -120 health stat (Self-aware) started to finally recover. I’ve managed to claw back up to -14 now, and can assert that I’m likely out of the woods.
The source of the issue was my recipes using mutant tallow too much in my food recipes, so I was essentially eating a ton of Mutant goodies.
All in all, eating too much Mutant meat/fat will quickly start causing massive health effects worse off than just eating only junk food. Eat only if you really need to, and treat that noise as if it were a drug with terrible addictive properties. It takes weeks to get it out of your system once the negatives hit, and probably more if I didn’t have an emergency gamma shot for a just-in-case scenario.
That change took away a huge number of food options. It’s not the slightest bit less limiting even if you can still find food. And then what happens if you become a high-maintenance carnivore; or are stuck in a lab where it’s pretty much either mutant meat or junk food? Unless there are accompanying mutations to overcome the health hit.
Carnivore is supposted to be a negative trait, as it was it made almost zero difference if you had it or not. The only real way to get stuck in a lab is to start in one, that’s also supposed to be difficult.
So, you originally said its become a “metric f-ton more difficult to find food”
Which isnt true.
Now you are talking about a challenging lab scenario, and being a carnivore, these arent normal play scenarios and wouldnt impact the difficulty of them hugely anyway, being that a carnivore can still hunt normal meat.
A high-maintenance carnivore, in a lab scenario start, might encounter a bit of elevated difficulty with this, and thats fine, for 99% of other situations, this does not make it a “metric f-ton more difficult to find food”
I think you should perhaps retract your hyperbole, its untrue and unhelpful.
It’s not hyperbole the least little bit. “Mutant” creatures were formerly one of the easiest ways to obtain mass quantities of meat. Making that strategy nonviable necessitates significantly more time and energy spent finding food. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing…but it’s wildly inaccurate to try and claim that DOESN’T make finding food a metric f-ton more difficult merely because there are still other food options.
Mutant creatures were one of the easiest ways to obtain mass quantities of meat?
Ignoring for the moment, the fact that you started off saying food and then shifted the goalposts to meat-only niche situations, there is still a lot of very easy methods to obtain meat.
Lemme paint you an example.
You spawn on the overmap, there are gonna be on average, at least one dairy farm or horse farm within walking distance on th efirst day, each of these has multiple cows/horses. each of which can feed you for a season.
There, meat done, easy to kill, they dont fight back,no need to raid giants ants nests.
Easy huge stacks of meat in a minute.
Not to mention the surplus of fish in lakes and rivers now that dont deplete.
In short, changing mutant meat to be unhealthy and have side-effects, only affects a small percentage of the potential meat sources you could go for in early game or later.
Back on 0.D release, which is before the fishing changes which made fish renewable resources, they were my primary source of meat early game. I’ve occasionally augmented my food supplies with what is now considered mutant meat, but I have personally never relied on it.
Notably, you can still augment your food supplies with mutant meat. As long as it’s nowhere near the majority of your daily caloric intake, you can get away with a bit of it each day. It’s only if you eat so much the toxins build up that it’s a problem.
Does the Eater of the Dead mutation allow you to eat mutant meat without downsides? It seems like it would be very similar to tainted meat given that it’s all weird blob stuff in the end.
There is a thing called ‘rabbit starvation’. Eating only a lean meat that does not provide us with a lot of fat may kill us after two weeks due to diarrhea. Diarrhea is likely to be a death sentence when we are in the wilderness. In fact, during a survival situation it is better to eat nothing instead of eating ‘easy food’ that does not provide us with things that our body needs. The proces of digesting uses a lot of ‘resources’. We should drink water and try to survive. Mors Kochanski and John Wiseman explain this in their books.
Humans need carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and vitamins. Approximately 2000 - 3500 calories per day. It depends on the situation. Anxiety, cold, pain, physical efforts, being wet etc lead to bigger usage of calories.
My ideal camp has to be located near the place where a forest connects with a swamp. Moreover, it has to be located near a river. This kind of setting provides us with:
carbohydrates (cooked cattail stalk, starch) = over 100g per day is a healthy amount
fat (pine nuts = 68 grams of fat per 100g of nuts) = from 40g to 70g per day is a healthy amount
proteins (various fish) = 56g per day is a healthy amount
vitamins (wild vegetables and other things) = humans need most 12 vitamins. Vitamins D, and K are easy to get through sun and gut bacteria. Other vitamins are much more problematic though…
I think that it is not so difficult to survive in Cataclysm. Eating and drinking system is soooooo pleasant now. It takes only three regular meals per day to satisfy our characters’ needs. We do not have to eat a given amount of food per two - three hours as in 0.C. We can plan and stick to our healthy diet that is based on specific eating hours. THANK YOU DEVELOPERS:)
Very well put Wojtek. I’d also mention pine needle tea in regards to vitamins, since it’s the easiest source of vitamin C to get year round. Naturally Vitamin C deficiency will kill you dead through scurvy as well.
In spring dandelion greens are also a good source of vitamin C, just as they are in real life. I feel like the rest of the vitamins are very easy to get without any extra effort just by attempting to meat caloric needs.
Yeah, i wasn’t at all meaning to imply I ever ate only fish in-game, only that fish was my primary source of meat.
Notably, if you can get a bit of farmland set up by late spring, you can have a pretty solid amount of non-meat sources of the rest of your needs well before winter (when things get a bit lean). This does take a bit of work, admittedly, but with the help of some recruited NPCs you can totally get it done and still have plenty of time to do be doing your scavenging and threat removal during the year.
Tangentially, we do not yet actually model the consequences of vitamin deficiency; we track the vitamins, but they are currently purely cosmetic in nature (not that i personally will ever treat them as anything other than the serious problem they should be). This is unlikely to get fixed before 0.E, sadly.
I thought there was a pull request in the works that made vitamin deficiency matter? I remember reading something on the github about it some time ago.