As I’ve said:
Now, may I ask on a source on that?
Because all I can find in the code are hints that it is indeed intended as just a mechanical surgeon:
Snippets
Welp, I’ve asked the author of it for a source. Perfect 
.
1 Like
Not sure that’s a very good faith argument. I understand your point, but if you expect the lore to refer to a functionality of the machine that literally doesn’t exist and has only (in my knowledge) been recently proposed, then you are going to be waiting for a long while. Even if someone wanted to write in additional function for it in the lore, it’d probably get rejected because “yea but it can’t do that can it, it’ll confuse people”
I think it’d be better to step back and ask why would we not want the functions in the autodoc. As far as I can tell, assuming the intent is to have medical services for diagnosing mystery diseases, it’d be because we want some sort of NPC doctor or player profession doctor involved, or anticipate situations where a machine would have the functionality, but should not be where an autodoc can be found.
Considering I am mostly aware of them being in labs, hospitals, and doctors offices, those are all places I would check for medical help. Unless we want to go through and add another machine ala Mr Stemcell (Dunno why he was merged, but my guess is redundant machine), I’d imagine that it’d be just part of the autodoc functionality. Maybe even some autodocs have it, some don’t. We have a Mk9, why not a Mk10, not like hospitals are ever keen on replacing equipment so long as it works, so both would be around.
Well, I didn’t actually made a point, all I wanted to know was, if it ever was intended to be more than a surgeon. There were no comments in the code that indicated that (or I just didn’t see them), and just someone saying that it was is not helpful, as anyone can say anything they please.
…unless, of course, if it’s the author. I’ve checked the first commit on it (or at least what I thought what was), and it wasn’t Valiant.
I only now realized, as I’ve rechecked, that it did not sort by the “Recently committed” I’ve set it to, and setting it properly and checking again shows that Valiant is indeed the author.
So yeah, I’m happy with that answer and stay to what I’ve said first: It would be a great addition to the autodoc.
Higher levels of first aid should start auto-ID ing symptoms imo, similar to recipies.
This should also be added to first aid books/references that help ID your symptoms. First responder handbook etc for common diseases to Lab notes thar ID the werid scifi diseases, etc.
I think you already ID zombie infections with “filth gets into your wound” messages already.
No matter how good you are at stopping blood and making splints, you aren’t going to identify diseases without doing blood analysis and whatnot in the lab.
1 Like
You are, because each disease has a unique set of symptoms 
Now, if some of those diseases had overlapping symptoms, I would agree with your argument.
1 Like
Then maybe we could have a compromise with medical books having the ability to give you a (incomplete) discription of diseases and there symtoms depending on what book you are using and your medical skill/character background and the player still having to figure out what is wrong with them. This would simulate nicely that your character might try to diagnose themself if something is wrong but could still misdiagnose themself as the player might do.
Human body reacts to various diseases with non-unique reactions and most of the times humans perceive these reactions just as “pain/feeling/sensation in X”.
Too bad it doesn’t work like that in-game, unless I’m missing something.
It works exactly like that - disease effects give messages about various sensations.
Do they or do they not each have their own, unique, messages?
Its not that the messages themselves break immersion (cuz they dont), but the natural response from most players when seeing obscure messages in a game is to look up their meaning online, which causes the immersion break.
Agree that medical skill should allow a PC to self diagnose, with a difficulty related to how well known the disease is.
You can check messages in player_hardcoded_effects.cpp.
That’s like cheating, though. It’s a single player game, you can do it if you want, but if doing it bothers you in some way, then how about you just don’t do that?
I never said I do it, nor that doing it bothers me.
Diagnose by symptoms? “AutoID” doesn’t mean 100% correct, it means you can ID stuff.
How can you forget how colds work. Then you can’t stop arterial bleeding because you can’t tell high pressure spurts of blood is a larger problem than just bleeding.
You don’t get a blood test every time you see a doctor lol.
Making splints does not magically give you medical knowledge.
How do you splint your bones straight without medical knowledge?
I am not sure why did you reverse the question.
But thats a matter of how skill progression currently works, not of whether disease diagnosis is feasible for a survivor