Let’s brainstorm ideas of how to properly improve on the medical system in CDDA!
Right now the first aid skill drops off somewhere around level 4 Regarding items and the things you can do with them yet incentivizes you to level it due to the bonuses to installation of CBMs.
I think this skill needs some love and I am excited to see what you guys come up with.
This is healing with a high health stat and 9 in first aid:
Start:
That’s with poor healer too and it’s not like it wouldn’t of been more then 15 points if my survivor had been more injured. High first aid (and health stat) makes quite a difference at least IMO, It’s even more important (and effective) on survivors with imperceptive healer.
What is “Kunstler”? Off the top of my head, it’s the name of a painter known for his Civil War art, and the name of the author of World Made By Hand.
I actually considered doing an AAR loosely-based thereupon.
Anyway, something I would like to see is an ability to get a sense of what nutrients you’re lacking based off your first aid skill. On the other hand, lack thereof might make it more difficult to know what nutrients are in the food you’re eating.
Maybe that combined with some cooking you’d be able to make proper supplements too, like home made multi-vitamins.
That would actually be really great.
What is “Kunstler”?
The Kunstler trait is added by the mythical martial arts mod. In the Battle Angel Alita comics, a Kunstler is a practitioner of Panzer Kunst, a martial art made for cyborgs.
I haven’t played with the mod, so I don’t what it is like.
I see what you mean, but I don’t mean simply in response to recovering HP. I think that first aid (and all the illnesses and injuries related) could be expanded pretty broadly.
Like the tools in game it’d be interesting to see a variety of tools for treating wounds snd performing surgeries, medications to treat a range of symptoms, and illnesses that are symptomatic.
For example, it’d be cool to have the character menu show only your symptoms at lower levels, but as you get more knowledgeable you could determine whether you have the flu, strep throat, bronchitis, pneumonia, or even alien illnesses.
A broader range of treatment for infections would be interesting too.
I think the limb HP bars could be expanded upon to include specific statuses to each limb such as lacerated, stitched, sore, weak, numb, stiff. It feels really jarring to have an arm go from functioning to broken or alternatively bruised after getting tossed by a brute. Most musculoskeletal injury is pretty polar, such as bruises, scrapes, and lacerations or breaks and deformity. Making bleeding and laceration more common and the possibility for infection seems more sensible as bleeding fits nicely into the middle of the spectrum and bandages are stupid easy to come by, either made or found.
I really like that idea.
I imagine the survivor busting into a GNC and pocketing every bottle of B vitamin he can to later cook up some knock-off vitamin B shot, the whole while near collapse from Beriberi.
Hmm, I suppose if anything I’d like to see limb loss added to the game along with varying qualities of prosthetics ranging from handcrafted hooks and peg legs etc to bionics. If I was going to do it under the current system it would be based around a threshold of damage passed broken, like say 50% of total limb health taken after being broken with different levels of first aid skill being required to fit varying qualities of prosthetic.
I’m a bit leery of how much illness stuff gets added, we already have the flu which is more tedious then dangerous (at least once you are passed the first week or so of survival). I wouldn’t really be a huge fan of more statuses that leave you hold up in a safe spot for a week or more while you recover, it’s going to get to the point where it’s either irrelevent or just isn’t much fun to deal with.
Well the benefit of that would be symptomatic treatment. Like, if you know you’re coughing and vomiting then just steal cough syrup and zofran and you’ll bd right as rain for 12 hours. If you were smart enough to know you had the flu and thst the flu could be treated with tamaflu in the first 48 hours you’d be gucci too.
I assume these meds would fill out the pharmacy shelves, doctors offices cabinets, grocery stores, and medicine cabinets of most homes. I think it’d be cool to find more old dayquil and allergy meds than aspirin and caffeine pills.
But I see your point about illness being more tedious than anything. This could probably be remedied by making symptom severity more like a bell curve than an of-off switch. Then you’ll really need roughly 72 hours worth of meds rather than 2 weeks worth give or take a day or so depending on your health stat.
I was just thinking about prosthetics! Yeah, that’d be great. I’m curious if at a certain skill level you could fully replace limbs with living tissue ones, perhaps with a CBM thet allows for more modular slotting of arms or legs. It’d change the meta for CBMs then because then you could build a utility arm and a combat arm and change them out as the situation dictates. Though admittedly that may be a bit scifi and simply having pre-CBMed prosthetics would work for that better thematically.
I’m definitely with you on limb loss and prosthetic replacements! Make it so! 
Stands to reason when I discussed this topic years ago most of what I suggested went into the game. Kept things simple. But what didn’t make it in were stuff like Sutures and other simple to pick up to craft medical supplies and procedures. Arterial bleeding and dissolving sutures. Tricky part however is how long can you stay conscience while performing such surgery. I know that certain injury upon my body (not pain or sight of blood) makes me completely dull to the injury for about 60 seconds. As soon as this time seems to lapse. My body reacts by making me pass out or become dizzy. Soooo…some other people like my cousin gave birth while conscience without any drugs at all. Split her anus wide open and got sewn back up all while enduring the pain.
I believe this addition of what I talked about could have some interesting traits and items/craft to the game while providing some scary situations. Like picking up a trait that when harmed makes you drop like a stunned mountain goat unless drugged up already on pain killers and/or a drug to make you indifferent to the situation. If nothing else. It would stun you or daze you. Perhaps make you dizzy?
Just brain storming.
Well I think the way the pain system works would already perform well with that, perhaps with some minor tweaking. Still though I think this is a pretty interesting idea. This is the dort of thing I’d love to see.
Do you recall why the idea was shot down originally?
Perhaps, with high medical, computer, fabrication, and elections levels, the player could construct Autodocs.
You know, that’s an interesting idea. I would imagine autodocs would be modular (a stapling arm, a suturing arm, a cauterizer, a scalpel arm, a camera eye. Medication applicator) and you would instalL what is necessary for each specific surgery. That would allow for another aspect of scavenging to make auto docs useful (without a doctor around to finish the job). With high enough electronics and some schematics you could probably fabricate your own, makeshift, versions or alternatively raid a hospital or rip some of the arms off of a nurse bot. I really think this has promise.
I’d be against this, personally. Even if your survivor was the world’s preeminent expert on robotics, piecing something together from scrap or from salvage from other robots that weren’t built for this task would be dangerous at best.
Think about it, really think about it - would YOU risk life or limb to let some Rube Goldberg contraption slice into your flesh and root around in your organs or nervous system to (hopefully) install sensitive electronics then sew you back together?
Additionally, I’d wager most robotics experts aren’t surgeons, and would need additional help to program something that was built to alter human physiology at such exacting levels. Doubly so if it’s scrap & salvage pieced together in a less than sanitary, post apocalypse where there’s no national or even local power grid. Where the most precise tools come out of a mechanics shop.
I imagine this would come with a manual or design document like the augmentee tech review and I imagine it would have it’s own negatives. I doubt you could ever fabricate something that would do better that the manufactured equivalent. But I’m also okay with only salvaging modules from labs, hospitals, clinics, ripped from a nurse bot, and probably some black market CBM basements and mansions.
The framework I’m imagining is essentially the integral firearms from robots and loot.
I think when Kevin and Cool were fighting and a bunch of people wanted 50 different things. I just suggested and gave an outline for keeping everything super simple and whoever coded it that apparently agreed. But the more sophisticated stuff would have required traits. In game timing solutions and variables that would interlace.
Tricky stuff compared to slapping a bandage on and sterilizing it while having a timer or two for variations on this theme.
Plus the NPCs are still crap and would have to perform extra duties to stay alive. While having to also perform medical duties on the player(player to NPC also)…then there is various timing to how long the player toon can stay conscience while incorporating traits and skills + pain/pass out thresholds…yeah. My guess is this is another of my nice ideas, but nobody wants to pick up the torch to code it. Which I never make anyone assume they should(unless something is broken of course).
Although playing after a 6 month break, made me smile to see lots of my ideas added into the game(despite unpleasant people trolling me hard for most of those ideas they now enjoy 
)
Thought of some other stuff I can’t remember if I already mentioned. But If I did. They are thus, once again;
-Saline/Sugar drips(corresponding drip IV bags)
-Coconut Water(NOT MILK) as a makeshift saline drip in place of actual blood(this works in real life assuming you can filter the C water with a cheese cloth or a tshirt for all the brine like bits in it)
-Blood Transfusion elements; Blood(of course) Labs with blood dialysis filters and the diseases the would correspond with blood transfusions.
I would like to see when we expand drugs IV only drugs. Honestly mutagen and purifier would make a good candidate and be interesting if the effects were given over time and not immediately.
Though, I think the people who savescum (myself included) would hate this.
