I know I know…
There’s too many ways to keep your morale up. And not enough things that take it away.
Frankly living in the world presented would be miserable. Staying in positive spirits should be hard.
I dunno why the team is against penalties for not washing. I disagree. The game should be full of things that give small penalties and bonuses to mood. I can’t see a drawback to that, as long as everything is balanced and sensible. I think they’re being overly cautious. -5 mood for being dirty isn’t a huge gameplay interruption. Things keep getting added that give mood bonuses and almost nothing takes mood away other than being wet and killing child zombies. The only thing you need to do to stay happy apparently is not go outside. It’s silly.
What I’d do:
Dirty (-5 Mood): You’ve gone X amount of time without some kind of cleaning. You’re dirty enough to feel uncomfortable.
Filthy (-10 Mood): You have either been hit by a boomer or you have been mucking around in sewage or toxic waste.
Soap/Shampoo: Removes Dirty and Filthy modifiers.
Toothpaste/Deodorant: +3 Mood, ‘Feeling fresh from toothpaste/deodorant.’ (the two stack together to +6)
I dunno what the big deal is. There should be a lot more minor unpleasantries about living in a zombie apocalypse. Right now it’s a five star hotel unless you’re already emotionally unstable. I realize that nobody wants the game to turn into the Sims: Apocalypse (and for the record neither do I), but it’s also not just a loose context for a dungeon crawler. Because lemme tell you, the thing that is compelling about Cataclysm? That makes it worth playing and replaying? At least to me, it’s not the combat. It’s carving out a life in a bad situation. That is something the game does pretty well. So I don’t understand the tiptoeing around stuff like hygiene being an important part of mood management. Instead we’re going to give hygiene the same status as pot and cigarettes, candy and alcohol and books and one of a million other things that positively affect mood.
I dunno, I think it’s shortsighted.
Just my two cents, I doubt it’ll change anyone’s mind.
[quote=“Hyena Grin, post:22, topic:3698”]There’s too many ways to keep your morale up. And not enough things that take it away.
-more stuff, but clipped for brevity-[/quote]
Every bit of what was just said is a really cool idea. Being dirty shouldn’t be a massive morale hit, but it would make a lot of sense to implement it with a minor one.
After all, we already have to worry about food, water, sleep, the nutritional quality of our food intake, wound infections, and the risk of catching a cold. Why would it be such a bad thing if the player who went for weeks on end without washing up got a small morale penalty?
Because it’s a trivially easy task to due, the pursuit of which adds no challenge and nothing of value in regards to long term play.
Getting food and water is a big deal - you NEED both of them, and they are huge drivers of early gameplay and even have a significant role in guiding important player decisions later on. Sleeping is risky, and will only get moreso as the game progresses and risk of possible attacks during the night increases. Wounds can and do require you to go where you otherwise wouldn’t in pursuit of treatment. Colds wildly vary the optimum play style for a period of time.
What value, exactly, does hygiene failure causing a mild morale penalty offer, from a gameplay perspective? None, that I can see, especially when compared to every item you listed, all of which offer at least one and maybe more significant gameplay effect.
Like I said, there should be lots of little things that can impact your mood. Small things add up.
And it’s not trivial in longterm play, as soap would be a finite resource until you were able to make your own.
What value does it add? What value does mood in general add? Why are we cheerfully adding dozens of new morale-improving items to the game every single build while we pretend that morale is even a useful measure for anything?
The value is contrast. -5 or -10 may not seem like much on its own but it can add up with being wet and/or hungry and/or cold and/or whatever else. Positive situations versus negative situations. Everyone is familiar with how crappy it feels to be dirty. Everyone is familiar with how crappy it feels to be wet. Everyone is familiar with how crappy it feels to be tired. If you’ve ever been wet, dirty, and tired then you know the value of little things adding together.
Gameplay-wise, it’d give you a reason to avoid boomers vomiting on you (and if you fail, a reason to do something beyond wait for it to go away). Being dirty could easily increase your scent mark, giving you an incentive to avoid it. It’d give you a reason to not wade through sewage, or if you have to, something you need to do about it. It’d give you an incentive to hunt down another finite resource that isn’t food. It’d give you an incentive to produce your own soap.
Which, I think, is more than significant impact to gameplay for a relatively unobtrusive thing.
Or we could just keep adding more and more ways to improve our mood, and live in a candy wonderland. =P
For filthy characters, we can increase their scent bubble slightly (just slightly), to give them the incentive to wash up. This will be similar to a weak and not permanent “smelly” trait.
I agree.
[quote=“Hyena Grin, post:22, topic:3698”]Dirty (-5 Mood): You’ve gone X amount of time without some kind of cleaning. You’re dirty enough to feel uncomfortable.
Filthy (-10 Mood): You have either been hit by a boomer or you have been mucking around in sewage or toxic waste.
Soap/Shampoo: Removes Dirty and Filthy modifiers.
Toothpaste/Deodorant: +3 Mood, ‘Feeling fresh from toothpaste/deodorant.’ (the two stack together to +6)[/quote]
I like this, should be a slight penalty for an extended period of time though. Hygiene is the last thing I’d worry about in a cataclysm.
Just my personaly opinion here, but I believe that if you care enough to post this, you should have confident that atleast it will add something to the disscussion and possibly sway someone’s mind (even just slightly so). Doubting your own argument won’t make it stronger 
I’m not a developer so I don’t have the vision about where will/should the game headed, though IMHO tiny bits like this (small penalty if dirty, small reward if clean) can add variety to a game, insert short term challenges (I should go bath a little in that river) between longer ones (where will I raid next? what should I bring along?)
Like I said before, we could extend this to the scent bubble, making dirty characters receive a small morale penalty; filthy characters receive a small morale penalty AND a slightly bigger scent bubble.
The same applies to bathing, very small morale bonus and a slight reduce to scent bubble.
We can amplify this mechanic specifically to characters with “Smelly” trait. Making both the penalty and bonus bigger.
OK, fine. I think this is unnecessary complexity too, but I know my day isn’t started properly until I’ve showered.
So now one needs…what? A Portable Shower? RV Shower Unit? Plastic Jerrycan load of water and Nearby Tub? Nearby Shallow Water? Soap, fine, wev. So long as the stuff spawns fairly reliably in houses, etc as I really don’t think people are gonna evac with or specifically loot it.
(Hotels should practically guarantee piles of the stuff!)
Shampoo, etc is definitely overcomplicating things.
I think soap and shampoo shouldn’t be required for a bath, instead more like the optional bonus if the character carry them when bathing, similar to the idea suggested in the “cordiment” thread.
Oh I am confident that I’m right. Game design is a love of mine. I see a system (morale) that needs to be balanced, but any suggestion to add some weight to an unattended side of that balance is shot down, pretty much not up for discussion. Instead there’s new morale bonuses every time I play a build, making the problem progressively worse.
I am frustrated with the hard-tack that has been taken in this thread. I was going to post to this thread the other day, before I read down and saw ‘We’ve already decided that anything other than the generic status-quo of yet more morale boosts just isn’t on the table.’ Everything that adds morale to the game is fine, any suggestions to take it away is ‘unnecessary complexity.’ Which is wrong. You keep adding to the pile without considering the other side of the balance and you’re making the entire system irrelevant. I don’t remember the last time I’ve had a character with a low enough mood for it to matter who wasn’t either suffering from withdrawals or mood swings.
KA101, in my suggestions shampoo is just another ‘variety’ of soap and they do the same thing, which is removing the negative modifier. It’s not a suggestion to have to wash your hair and body separately. Toothpaste and deodorant don’t clean you in a meaningful way, it’s a psychological boost. That is not over-complicated any more than having candy give you a morale boost is over-complicated.
Personally I’d love it if you needed access to some amount of water to properly clean, but that’s not what I’m suggesting.
You can keep yourself somewhat clean with just about 1 liter of water and a rag with some soap. You’re not going to be super clean, but enough that you will feel noticeably better (I know from weeks of backpacking and water was scarce in many cases).
One thing to keep in mind: soap has a smell to. That smell can be attractive to wildlife (which for the most part, either ignore or avoid human scent unless they are very hungry). You should wash yourself away from camp and not near bed time as you might attract some curious wildlife.
Basic soap is made from fat + lye. You could easily have butchers bodies produce fat, or just use sinew (I know it’s not fat, but connective tissue: it would save adding another item, unless we added more uses for lard). Lye already exists in game.
Realistically, the soap isn’t even need unless you’ve been rolling around in oils or fats.
Anyway, Hyena, it seems like the main argument you’re putting forward here is that you believe there needs to be a serious downward pressure on morale that the game currently lacks (I agree) and that this hygiene problem is the answer (I disagree). It’s important, I think, to know exactly where are disagreement lies - I am not sure hygiene, as you have described, would do much to alleviate the issue. Heck, it seems like adding an overtime negative morale multiplier that increases to something noticeable would be a much more effective solution to that particular problem than something that can be easily alleviated.
However, I do think creatures like boomers could use a boost to impact, and wouldn’t mind adding a disease condition that can only be alleviated with some sort of soap. Trudging through honey, slime, or sludge could do something similar. If the boomer disease actually increased your smell radius (as mentioned for the general case) as well as reducing your morale, suddenly this becomes an enemy with an actual potential threat level rather than the pathetic pushovers they are now. It could also be added for things like sludging through sewage which, at the moment, has no drawback whatsoever.
So I support adding this as a method to increase the risk of certain hazards that are currently under served. I don’t think it should apply automatically and in general, though, both from a realism (damp towel scrub, dirt bath, there’s too many ways to keep yourself acceptably clean once you’ve gotten used to it a bit) and gameplay (low level cleaning would just be a monotonous regular task that adds little of value as described, while diminishing the value of the one bit of this convinced me as actually important, adding another threat vector to certain enemies and environment)
GG beat me to it, it’s not that we don’t want there to be downward pressure on morale, we can certainly have a discussion about that, it’s that we don’t want to add a chore the player needs to periodically perform.
Washing as a morale boost (with the baseline being lower, but that’s a somewhat seperate issue) is cool, enemies, terrain, or other situations inflicting various “dirty” conditions, that are cured by washing is also a workable idea. Pretty much the only thing we’re hardline against is adding a new “hygene” stat that needs to be maintained all the time.
You can absolutely start every day with a shower in order to get a morale (and potentially health) boost. Both morale and health decay to some baseline, the main question being where to put that baseline.
Realistically, your body is producing oils all the time, that is why soap is effective. Germs and other particulates anchor themselves in the natural oils produced by the skin, and because of that they become moderately water insoluble. Dust baths work by saturating the oil with particulate to the point where it ‘scrapes’ off. It’s not inherently cleansing; it simply overwhelms the oils that contain the germs and makes it easier to remove.
Anyway, I’ve tried to be very clear that I don’t see hygiene as the sole solution to the morale imbalance. A willingness to introduce small things that when ignored can build up into a problem - that will solve the problem, however. I am not against an accumulative hygiene penalty - my first iteration of the system allowed the player to reach Filthy through the passage of time, and not just from boomers etcetera. I decided to simplify it because the very notion of penalties was already such an embattled position that it didn’t make sense to push the point.
The characterization of it being a ‘chore’ seems ludicrous to me, given a game where any given action takes exactly two key presses and no waiting time. It’s not a ‘chore’ by any definition of the word I go by. In order to stay fed you need to consume certain resources and that need for resources drives the character out into the world to experience threats. It doesn’t matter whether you are hunting for food or soap or medicine - it’s an incentive to leave your home and search out necessities. What I am seeing is an urge to include nearly all things into the same pool.
It doesn’t matter whether you read a book or take a shower. A stop at the library is enough to keep you ‘clean’ for months, in so far as they do the exact same thing. To ignore the differences between hygiene and entertainment completely devalues them.
Hell I’d even like to see a ‘boredom’ mood modifier if you haven’t done anything entertaining in a while, like read a book or played a game. I think there’s more than enough room for things like this so long as they are not so persistent or severe as to get in the way. As I said before, a -5 or -10 to mood isn’t enough to make anyone stop what they are doing. It’s not interruptive. If you are out killing zombies and looting a store you aren’t going to stop and say OH MY GOD and run back to your safehouse to alleviate your mood problem. But it’s also something that you can’t ignore forever. Because it will accumulate with other small problems.
Personally? I like the idea of there being different and specific negative influences on mood that can only be rectified with a certain type of resource. It’s not a ‘chore’ it’s a damn game where time passes instantly. It’d be a chore if you had to play a mini-game every time you wanted to clean up. Otherwise, I just don’t see the problem.
But it sounds like you guys have made up your mind. I’m sure the game will continue to be great either way, so good luck.
The morale issue has been known for a long time and has changes planned, they just haven’t been coded yet.
Hygiene in a game can be called a chore because it’s a repetitive and boring task you would have to periodically perform for negligible change to general gameplay.
If it’s based on environmental issues like boomers, murdering zombies with a chainsaw, or wading through sewers, it’s suddenly more relevant to what you’re actually doing, and not just an accumulating issue in the background that is trivial to alleviate.
[quote=“Weyrling, post:34, topic:3698”]The morale issue has been known for a long time and has changes planned, they just haven’t been coded yet.
Hygiene in a game can be called a chore because it’s a repetitive and boring task you would have to periodically perform for negligible change to general gameplay.
If it’s based on environmental issues like boomers, murdering zombies with a chainsaw, or wading through sewers, it’s suddenly more relevant to what you’re actually doing, and not just an accumulating issue in the background that is trivial to alleviate.[/quote]
When someone can explain to me how ‘once every day or two’ is ‘repetitive’ and how using an object called ‘soap’ is boring while using an object called ‘book’ or ‘food’ or ‘towel’ is not, I will stop thinking of this line of thinking as a fantasy. It is nonsensical. Most objects behave the exact same way. Maybe the entire game is boring?
The attitude that every single item that gives a morale boost is thrown through without any concern whatsoever, but the moment someone suggests an incredibly reasonable negative morale influence suddenly it’s a huge goddamn problem, is exactly what is progressively going wrong with this game.
I don’t want more items that give a blanket morale boost. There are enough of them already.
Even basic things like getting wet are trivial now because towels mean you don’t even need rain gear. If you’re going to reduce hygiene to another meaningless mood-boosting item then in my opinion you should forget it until mood has been entirely reworked. Because right now the last thing the game needs is more morale boosting items.
What I want is a reason to bother using them.
[quote=“Weyrling, post:34, topic:3698”]Hygiene in a game can be called a chore because it’s a repetitive and boring task you would have to periodically perform for negligible change to general gameplay.
If it’s based on environmental issues like boomers, murdering zombies with a chainsaw, or wading through sewers, it’s suddenly more relevant to what you’re actually doing, and not just an accumulating issue in the background that is trivial to alleviate.[/quote]
My initial reaction to this whole idea was “wow, that is a stupid chore.” Upon further review I think I stand very firmly with what Hyena is suggesting.
How is cooking water, meat, putting on sleeping clothes, maintaining temperature, taking vitamins daily, etc not a “chore”. This whole game is a post apocalyptic chore simulator. And that’s a good thing.
In that light, I do believe that the suggested gradual dirty morale penalty system would be awesome. After ~3-4 days without actually using water and GAME TIME to clean yourself up, you start stinking. Health drops slightly (infections, whatnot), morale goes down (damn, this rash on my crotch is getting pretty red…) and the scent bubble increases. As you hit longer milestones without washing - 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month - you gain significantly bigger penalties. Considering how “long” a game day lasts in real time, this shouldn’t feel too chore-like. Daily basic hygiene (splashing water on your face, wiping your ass, etc) is considered to be done automatically, like breathing or blinking. Only after these extended time frames do penalties occur.
I see it as being more of a game mechanic that acknowledges hygiene as a significant part of reality without making it a pain in the ass routine like boiling water or getting wet in the constant Thunder Storms.
I think it sounds like a chore because there aren’t many variants to the task.
For example, “food” you have to think about what food to eat, where to find it, what should you do to obtain it. “book” what book to read, read which one first, reading a book can easily take all your day and prevent you from doing other thing more important to your survival.
Hygiene is just that, hygiene, you take a short bath (5~10 mins) and you can consider it’s clean enough, there aren’t much thinking to it. It’s not really a bad thing but similar to always eat cooked meats from squirrels in the forest without ever venturing into the city and facing the danger, it can get boring after a while.
I agree that the penalty should be made gradual, only become a true problem after quite sometime so players don’t have to bath regularly and only have to worry about it after he secured a decent supply. I also agree with the idea about giving the boomer and sewer a larger threat, forcing the player to worry about hygiene sooner.
About the towel, maybe raincoat should prevent the penalty while towel will only slightly reduce it?
Part of the issue is that the devs have literally hundreds of other things they’d rather do than add what boils down to a minor gameplay element.
I’m okay with dirtiness being a thing that happens over time and causes minor accumulating penalties, it makes sense and isn’t that big a deal. I’m not fond of repetitive tasks, but I’m not fond of having to spend time eating IRL either (If I could just drink food or absorb sunlight like a plant, that’d be just swell).
I suggest you code it yourself and submit a PR, I can’t think of any particular reasons not to add it, and more things that reduce morale would be great for balancing out the current morale system.
I guess I don’t have a side I’m happy being permanently clean, I think I’d still be happy if my guy stank every couple days and needed submerged (also there is “dry bath” stuff you can get that doesn’t require water at all)… I guess I’d be fine even if my fabric clothing got “blood caked” every 100+ kills and I had to find new jeans or wash my old ones, even 
Or got melted by spitter acid, or melee killing an NPC splashes you with human blood and your scent radius triples till you can wash it off…
All I really wanted to say is that if someone did the coding for this it could be added as an unobtrusive toggle in the options menu, could even eventually add a Realism tab in the options where all kinds of (brutal life-ending) stuff could potentially be welcome.
[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:24, topic:3698”]Because it’s a trivially easy task to due, the pursuit of which adds no challenge and nothing of value in regards to long term play.
Getting food and water is a big deal - you NEED both of them, and they are huge drivers of early gameplay and even have a significant role in guiding important player decisions later on. Sleeping is risky, and will only get moreso as the game progresses and risk of possible attacks during the night increases. Wounds can and do require you to go where you otherwise wouldn’t in pursuit of treatment. Colds wildly vary the optimum play style for a period of time.
What value, exactly, does hygiene failure causing a mild morale penalty offer, from a gameplay perspective? None, that I can see, especially when compared to every item you listed, all of which offer at least one and maybe more significant gameplay effect.[/quote]
Increased scent cloud, getting worse with time, making hunting more difficult and night raids more tense than before, NPC interactions being affected if you are cleaner or dirtier then them, the increase potential for disease, and a pretty damn big bonus from shear relief of finally getting a nice, hot, soapy, shower after days of wallowing in blood, guts, and sewage.
If you really don’t wan’t to have a “do it or suffer” mechanic, then remove ambient diseases. You either take your vitamins, or you get sick.