Frostbite is non-fatal?

[voskhod]

With this game having thousands of different ways to die, and the motto being “losing is fun”, I’m curious as to why then frostbite is 1) So difficult to come by (even stripping naked in the middle of winter and staying outside for an entire day only gets you chilly, not even frostnipped let alone frostbitten) and 2) is not fatal. Frostbite in real life is extremely dangerous, once the frostbite advances and turns skin necrotic, amputation has to occur before gangrene can set in and develop into a systemic infection. Yet in Cataclysm, all it does is cause a lot of pain, but that’s it. Nothing fatal, no need to amputate an arm or a leg, just pop a bit of morphine and you’ll be fine. Why?

[troll_from_behind]

Well to get to 4.degree frostbite it will take DAYS in temperature less than 42F (not counting wind).
Your average character will be dead from starvation by then.

[Random_dragon]

This is good for nudist challenge. But yeah, the speed penalties from being chilly will screw you over long before frostbite does.

[voskhod]

[quote=“troll from behind, post:2, topic:9659”]Well to get to 4.degree frostbite it will take DAYS in temperature less than 42F (not counting wind).
Your average character will be dead from starvation by then.[/quote]

What I’m saying is that it shouldn’t take days at all.
In real life frostbite can occur within hours, and hypothermia can occur within minutes.
The fact that neither frostbite nor hypothermia pose a direct, mortal threat really breaks the immersion of the game for me

[troll_from_behind]

Hypotermia is a whole different thing, don’t think frostbites really have time to prove fatal before that.
And cold DOES kill you in the game as dragon said earlier.
Realism is nice, but suppouse this would require a lot of coding to work differently than now.
At current cold is bad, it gets you eaten is enough realism to me, it makes the player actively to try and avoid cold.

[voskhod]

[quote=“troll from behind, post:5, topic:9659”]Hypotermia is a whole different thing, don’t think frostbites really have time to prove fatal before that.
And cold DOES kill you in the game as dragon said earlier.
Realism is nice, but suppouse this would require a lot of coding to work differently than now.
At current cold is bad, it gets you eaten is enough realism to me, it makes the player actively to try and avoid cold.[/quote]

In-game, getting cold means your hands and feet getting cold. If you have even half-decent clothes, most of your body will be warm, while your hands and feet get frostbitten. Same as what happens in real life. And your hands and feet getting frostbit only barely slows you down. But, getting frostbite on your extremities is just as fatal as getting it anywhere else, as frostbite kills by causing infections which then spread to the rest of the body. So no, even when walking barefoot in the snow, I don’t really have anything seriously pushing me to get warm and find some shoes.

[troll_from_behind]

Well then, to make devs life easier and to get this important part added to the game, maybe you have some suggestions as of how this might be implemented?
Maybe add a cold-counter that ticks away adding some penalties after a certain treshold is reached?
Naturally you need to come up with formulas of how beign wet adds to this, how much the wind increases it, do you factor in the fact, that some people are more resistant to the cold than others and the fact people get accustomed to cold slowly.
Also need to make sure changes are downwards compitable meaning they don’t mess other features in game.

[Coolthulhu]

[quote=“troll from behind, post:7, topic:9659”]Well then, to make devs life easier and to get this important part added to the game, maybe you have some suggestions as of how this might be implemented?
Maybe add a cold-counter that ticks away adding some penalties after a certain treshold is reached?
Naturally you need to come up with formulas of how beign wet adds to this, how much the wind increases it, do you factor in the fact, that some people are more resistant to the cold than others and the fact people get accustomed to cold slowly.[/quote]

Actually, it is implemented pretty much exactly like you describe it. Differences are: everyone is equally vulnerable to frostbite (but not to cold - some mutations change it) and penalties from frostbite are binary per body part - say, your hand is either frostbitten or not.

Frostbite was toned down a bunch of times because it wrecked new players. That’s probably why is it so non-dangerous.
Another thing is that apparently New England (where the game takes place) has mild winters.

It wouldn’t be very hard to make a temperature scaling option, though. You could then have “Siberia mode” and (way harder due to current mechanics) “Sahara mode”. They would only affect the player, so they wouldn’t be proper temperature alterations, but it could still be fun.

[i2amroy]

Honestly New England has some pretty bad winters (nowhere near as bad as Siberia, but definitely not fun either). It’s mainly just that it was wrecking everyone, I wouldn’t be opposed to adding back in some danger to it at some point.

[Random_dragon]

Now if only we had a Texas mode for the seasons and weather. o3o

[Wally-kun]

Honestly New England has some pretty bad winters (nowhere near as bad as Siberia, but definitely not fun either). It’s mainly just that it was wrecking everyone, I wouldn’t be opposed to adding back in some danger to it at some point.

Cold DOES wreck people. That’s not inaccurate. So does heat. Maintaining temperature is vital anywhere you go.

What would be pretty cool is to get variation in temperature at random intervals, simulating ‘mild’ and ‘harsh’ weather like you can get in real life. Maybe this year the winter was warm enough for rain, but you almost froze to death in the spring. Maybe summer was cool, maybe it was so hot that suddenly warm is the new cold that you’re trying to fight off.

That’d also pave the way for how to implement other biomes/regions for mapgen. Deserts and tundra, anyone?

[BeerBeer]

Perhaps frostbite could start lowering the hitpoints of the affected limb? After a limb’s HP gets down to 0, the cold would start chewing torso HP, and when torso HP is 0, it’s game over, right? Although that would mean you could bandage or first-aid the cold body part to full health… Is that acceptable? But you’d still have the cold status. And it would still keep draining your HP slowly until you’d get warmer. Should a bandage or first-aid then protect against the cold for some time? Should there be a necrosis limb status effect, and it would be treatable only at a hospital, at Mr. Stem Cell treatment?

One problem is that it gets tedious to switch in and out of clothing as the temperatures change. There needs to be a proper balance in place so that the changing of clothes doesn’t become a constant distracting chore.

[voskhod]

I tried testing this with debug just now.

I started off with the sheltered scenario, in the dead of winter. Immediately after spawning I stripped off all my clothes and items and ran into the blizzard outside. I waited. I waited. And I waited. It was 27 Fahrenheit for the entire day, and I waited from dawn to dusk - and the worst that happened was that I got frostnip on my hands, mouth and feet while the rest of my body only remained cold. When night fell, the temperature fell to -3 Fahrenheit, compounded by 50 mph wind speeds. I waited through the entire night in these conditions, and though my torso, legs and arms upgraded from cold to freezing, nothing else changed, I didn’t get frostbite at all, not even on the hands or feet.

As far as I can tell, it is completely impossible to get frostbite. Even under the absolute worst scenario:
Naked
In the middle of a -3 Fahrenheit blizzard
with 50 mph winds
In the dead of winter
At night

Did not result in frostbite. What the hell?

[Random_dragon]

Same reason you can perch next to lava all day long. :V

[voskhod]

Same reason you can perch next to lava all day long. :V

Well that at least makes sense since you just have to stay a distance away from it, stay too close to the lava and your skin just blisters and I’m pretty sure you die

[Random_dragon]

Very slowly though, if I recall.

[Pthalocy]

Stood in lava once. Unless it’s been changed, it only harms you when you enter a lava tile. Your temperature soars comically and you start hallucinating from the heat, but I don’t think it did much more than destroy both of my legs after repeatedly playing hopscotch on the lava tiles. It hurt my clothing more, honestly.

I’ve had frostnip within a minute irl, because I was handling trash compactor doors bare-handed while it was …uh. whatever -27C is in Fahrenheit. Frozen metal has a real habit of insta-sucking the life out of your skin just like those little wart freezing kits you can get at the drugstore. No bueno.

I feel like affected limb damage over time might be a good simulation. I don’t know that I want frostbite to impose the game’s infection disease, since untreated disease eventually requires a very specific fix, otherwise you’re waiting for your character’s death timer to count down. Not so fun. A leg reduced to zero though, I might be alright with that. Crippling, but not a guaranteed game-ender.

[voskhod]

Also, cold should reduce not just dexterity but intelligence as well - hypothermia can render you completely delirious, even make you fall unconscious.

In all honesty I’m just shocked by how non-threatening the cold is in this game. Being in extremely cold conditions can cause death within a day, and being in cold water can cause death in less than an hour.

[Random_dragon]

Stood in lava once. Unless it’s been changed, it only harms you when you enter a lava tile. Your temperature soars comically and you start hallucinating from the heat, but I don’t think it did much more than destroy both of my legs after repeatedly playing hopscotch on the lava tiles. It hurt my clothing more, honestly.

Both fire and lava will eventually kill you if you stand in it, at least. After your legs get zeroed out, your torso starts taking damage instead.

Also, cold should reduce not just dexterity but intelligence as well - hypothermia can render you completely delirious, even make you fall unconscious.

This would also be consistent with some of the game messages for when you start getting cold enough, like the one saying you feel like you should take some layers of clothing off.

[Pthalocy]

Ahh, torso damage from heat. Then I think extreme cold should at least mirror the rate that extreme heat will kill you. That’d make it easy for players to accept the change, as it’d be fairly predictable/not entirely unfamiliar.

I do believe the whole ‘YOURE BOILING, GET NAKED’ messages that come up from extreme cold are meant to mimic hypothermia’s sensations - sadly they do not mimic its lethality.

What would be really horrible/a bad idea, would be if you get colder than a certain point, you stop getting estimates of where your bodyparts health are at (or maybe those with self-aware trait now act as if they didn’t have it?). Then you could be so numb you can’t tell if your legs are supposed to be hurting or not, apart from hurting from how cold it is.