I noticed a shaving kit in game, I like it but I feel a step further is in order. Ask yourself, if you are a survivor, what would you do?
I would want to regain as much of my old life as possible. The cataclysm is depressing. I want electric, i want a HOT SHOWER. It would actually kind of work since most rvs and motorhomes have 12 volt pumps for sinks and showers. A hot shower could be a huge boon for morale and maybe a small health bonus. Maybe washing clothes to get the weeks of blood, sweat and more blood out of them. Have it in a tier. The old bucket from the river and a bar of soap for a small 5-10 morale boost and a minor single point health (not hp, the health stat for disease) increase, upping it to say, a solar shower, a full on pressured shower and a step further, a hot shower. A hot shower could require gasoline or A LOT of battery power. A sign of a successful survivor is a hot shower, followed by morning coffee and johnny cakes. Entertainment: Why settle for a gameboy and a sex toy when you could be playing an xbox or watching a dvd? With enough power from a vehicle you could be shackin it up. Death is around the corner, morale is important. Thoughts?
Nothing against, I could help if anyone decides to try to implement it.
My only concern is warping morale with a ton of little morale boosts, and then making all of this kind of stuff effectively mandatory because the game balance shifts to assume that having those boni is the new norm. the same with the health boni.
Basically there need to be a small number of different morale bonuses from this kind of thing, and the quality of a particular action will extend the duration of the bonus or possibly have a higher max morale bonus, but the total numbers should be relatively small, especially if it becomes your new normal.
Morale system could use some adjustments. Currently stacking it is way too easy and “weird”. Snorting a lot of cocaine, meth and s’mores shouldn’t turn a caveman into a genius.
Agreed. Morale system needs some balancing. It’s not broken, not by a long shot, but there’s just been so much content added that the game no longer resembles what it did when that system was built up. I mean, there’s intolerance traits you can take that give you a morale hit for eating shit like dairy even though the description says it makes you feel sick; most actual sicknesses in game cause everything from vomiting to exhaustion to stat and speed penalties, not a case of the SADS. It’s a functional deterrent but since when can I chug a whiskey of cocaine to cheer up from lactose intolerance? Realistically you’d feel even more sick, also high, and hate yourself.
Further tangent: the worst thing about eating uncooked food used to be the morale penalties. You could get by and not starve, but you’d be too damn unhappy to build shelter or toolcraft. Now, folks in the know don’t even bother anymore because of the parasite risk. Morale is being skewed not just by positive abundance and weird stacking, but also by instances where penalties just lack relevance.
I remember some ideas to introduce bathing/hygiene as a trait that gave penalties when neglected, which I think is utter garbage. Glad those got tossed. Making these things small rewards is totally the way to go. Again, I agree with the concerns for new morale sources skewing the game’s morale norm - but if a hot shower once a day can severely alter what is considered normal/a necessity in CDDA, it is likely not the only contributing factor.
I do like the addition of a small health boost as a bonus, though with a small change. Don’t give a static boost to the health stat: just help it get to its neutral point faster if it’s below average. No showering yourself into captain America.
Edit: if sufficient mouth protection prevents one from catching the cold or flu, is there even much point to keeping the health stat balanced? To rephrase: would a health bonus be anywhere near as useful in-game as it sounds in print?
Well to avoid stacking morale you could always implement diminishing returns. Like after 30-50 morale boosts are worth half or less. Health neutral sounds good, no idea how you could fix the mouth protection.
On a side note, we have hot drinks, any chance of cool or cold ones? We have a minifridge. Cold beer on a hot summer day etc.
He’s got a point, I mean think about it right now? Short of after a long/hard day at work, or on a particularly hot/cold day you don’t really view a shower as a “plus” to your delay beyond a “now I’m clean again :D” thought in the back of your mind that’d rate /maybe/ a 3 on CDDA’s scale TOPS and all of ten to 30 minutes later, you’re not thinking about it anymore. Now you start going two or three days without a shower and it starts to bother you, something you took for granted before is gone, but the inverse applies now, after an amount of times has passed you just don’t care anymore.
As for mouth protection protecting you from all ambient diseases that’s just nonsense. Sure, you could keep a gas mask on 24/7, but you know what you won’t be doing? Eating, drinking, or anything else that’d require you to remove the mask. And to be frank, you wouldn’t want to sleep in one either, or have to breathe hard. Moreover, you can get illnesses from things you eat, or in a few cases, contact with your skin/open wounds. Sure we only have to worry about “Common Cold” “Flu” and assorted parasites (…plus I think Tetanus at one point?) in CDDA, but the lack in variety really shouldn’t be the limiting factor. And on a side note, gas masks cannot adhere properly to a face that isn’t shaved, meaning that men would have to either take it off, or risk breaking the seal, fairly regularly.
[size=1pt](I really need to go to sleep…)[/size]
All of the things you just stated that are difficult about gas masks has never once stopped me from enjoying juice boxes and potato chip baggies. You are absolutely right. Forcing people to micromanage their mouth gear for food/drink/sleep seems awfully tedious, so I can see why that never happened. Sometimes I forget about my irl lack of beard. Holy moley gas masks would suck.
Diminishing returns makes a lot of sense for many items, as does …showers just not being worth a huge bonus to begin with. Yeah. I like this direction.
Applying diminishing returns across all morale bonuses is exactly the same as exponential increase in morale thresholds, and the latter is much easier.
That aside, that’s not a solution to the problem, I’m not worried about people reaching some heretofore unheard of level of morale, I’m worried about a playstyle where you mechanically get all the morale buffs in order to keep your character “elated” all the time for the bonuses, but it’s not really a fun thing to do because juggling all those bonuses is tedious.
If we’re talking about overhauling the system instead of limiting damage to it, the first thing I’d suggest would be to have a very small number of different morale bonus types, say 7 or so, and categorize every bonus under one of those. That would make balancing the system as a whole much easier, and possibly allow proliferating more niche bonuses for flavor possible without breaking the system.
Just as an example, types could be entertainment, cleanliness, food, stimulants, rest.
Sounds good to me. One of the worst offenders in morale stacking is food, simply because there are tons of different kinds. At the same time, food is only stacked for CBM installations, due to the extremely low time it takes for the bonus to wear off.
I like this. A bag of cheetos and BEING ON ALL THE DRUGS are just not the same thing, they should be categorically separate. You wouldn’t even have to change how you interact with your morale stat screen to see how you’re doing. Mmm, simple. Just so long as we get to keep the little 
:l 
D8 mood marker on our HUD. I’m rather fond of that.
Health also affects how fast you regain hitpoints while sleeping, or whether you regain them at all.
Okay health points is a really big motivator for me, thanks for reminding me of that!
Coming to think of morale and stacked bonuses, it makes me remember the “hardships” of norse berserkers.
With promises of land and riches, they went on these overseas conquests and for an uncertain ammount of time. It was pretty much the same thing back home whereas various clans made pacts and battled for dominance. Some male-dominance bull***t, eh? I’ve been thinking on those aspects of mind that make a great warrior and thus, a survivor.
Sure, the devs could tweak the current morale system so it doesn’t punch the bits of positive morale values into oblivion, doing so by proposing that crafting, construction and repairing your road-rig is just about the same as spending your days bashing 20k zombie heads, leaving a bloody trail of your advancement throughout New England. Or just leave the system intact, compromising over the consent saying the account of civilized habits is denied because luxury items and services are simply no more to be seen.
On the other hand, one could perceive a succesful survivor as a sum of all his deeds. Did he/she choose the safer path, staying out of harm’s way whilst scraping the fat of the land with midnight supply-runs, hoping to never face the real perils of the after-cataclysm wastes? Or, our hero is perhaps going to great lengths to maintain his/her sense of safety, embracing can-do spirit throughout every day after Day-Z? Believe it or not, this gave me an idea. (!)
Let’s make two columns before naming all the rows by those morale buffs:
1. Unwind
The real stress of survival, honing skills like melee and dodge devotedly, sustaining injury and recovering from infection whilst forming a new sense of self through surivalism. In order to shake off all the bumps and bruises, both body and spirit need to relax and get somewhat distracted. If there was a treshold for plainly stacking morale bonuses it would be because of this - it’s only the treshold, found in the positive range, gets higher according to the abovementioned hardships. The proposed value should decline fairly quickly if the “need” isn’t satisfied, leaving enough space for a different kind of play (rest, a change of pace, honing different skills).
2. Entertainment
Even though profoundly sought after, all the small (and sometimes really expensive) things that are told to be of great value in life are somewhat habit-forming. You need to take a rest from old games on your computer, your favorite soda tastes bland lately, even that hot-tub you’ve been into seems kinda boring. Once charged, your “batteries” that fuel all the enthusiasm you put into achievement and ego-satisfaction cannot fit any more of that fun-juice, making you indifferent towards all that leisure-bit you’ve been into. The proposed treshold, and you can feel it, is kinda low making it hard for you to just lay around, eating pizzas and watching TV all day long. In this (bottom-low) case all those values above the treshold decimate rapidly, so that extra bag of candy or that Spiderman comic you found at the store really don’t mean much to you.
But proving yourself you’re up to the task just might.
Honestly, I don’t think more super-buffs to morale would make this game any better. But if the devs found a way to “support” an aspiring survivor and motivate him/her to explore the Cataclysm world even more, I think that would just do the trick for us.
If you add hot showers they should also actually reduce your scent for some time.
Vultures, are you laying down a system where the amount of hardship you experience would raise the max morale you could get from doing entertaining stuff? Because that’s pretty dang cool. I have no idea how that’d work code-wise, but it would be quite neat. You wouldn’t want to stagnate in your safe home with fifty stacks of candy quite as much, if going out and fighting/building etc actually allowed you to savour said candy better.