I’ve had a few characters that keep getting sick over and over.
After reading some of the forum posts it sounds like there’s a hidden “immune system” stat that’s influencing this but I have no idea how to raise this.
Is there any way to get some feedback on how my actions affect this so I can try and figure out how to stop this from happening? Would Self Aware or First Aid let me get some idea of how un/healthy I am and why, and what I can do to get better?
Raising health is a matter of eating the right foods, taking your vitamins, and, if lucky, finding a flu shot. Note that there’s a a point where taking too much of the same health-boosting thing the same day will give negligible health (ie more than two vitamins does little-to-nothing for you).
On the flip side, unhealthy foods (like junk food and zombie meat) and many ingestible chemicals (most recreational drugs, adrenaline, and even mutagen) will lower your health, and they don’t seem to stagnate on the decremental health given.
Also, I’m not sure of any mutations or traits that can help with this. There might be a CBM but don’t quote me on that.
there are (or were) 2 CBMs, one that monitors your blood contamination and one that cleans it. They function for most drugs and diseases , that’s about all besides prevention.
There’s also the Leukocyte Breeder System that works to specifically raise your health stat at the expense of bionic energy.
ok that helps. I also found a debug command that showed me how vitamins work (a little). Is there any way to either monitor this or check it even vaguely (even if it requires building specifically for it such as traits) without using debugging commands? Like using First Aid or Survival to notice that you’re feeling weak or have swollen gums or something?
Nope.
The general idea is that your immune function, “Health”, slowly normalizes to 0. Eating healthy stuff like fruit, vegetables, etc can raise it; Junk Food can lower it, as can mutagenic stuff. Vitamins and flu-shots exist to boost your health stat; flu shot lasts for about a season or two, and vitamins are generally good at one per day (if you’ve not had a flu shot).
If you’ve specifically been doing unhealthy things like drinking a gallon of mutagen at one go, then you may want more than one vitamin afterward.
The Leukocyte Breeder pumps bionic power into directly increasing Health, so it’s good to have and give a shot every so often, just in case.
Some folks avoid the issue altogether by wearing a filter or gas mask constantly. Since you get sick through your mouth, environmental protection on your mouth can reduce or eliminate colds and flu. (So the air-filter aug kinda helps too.)
it’s interesting that you mention the filters, since I’m starting out I’ve been using the Bionic Soldier heavily and they come with the air filter aug (does wonders when using braziers and pit fires) but I was still getting sick. I came across a bunch of vitamins and I’ve started taking one a day and that seems to be helping.
CBM air filter adds 2 environmental resist if you don’t already have 5 or more. So it’s handy to take the edge off things, but isn’t anywhere near a gas or filter mask.
Thanks, the bionic doesn’t actually tell me how much protection it offers
If you’re getting sick a lot you might have a parasite tanking your Health. Take some antiparasitic drug or royal jelly, just to be safe.
I thought about this a bit more, I definitely don’t want any kind of numeric readout, but as you suggest having symptoms of illness before they’re debilitating would be good, we can add some diseases that have relatively harmless symptoms that would act as a warning of poor health.
Stuffy Nose: half food morale (can’t taste it as well)
Scratchy Throat: 1 in 40 for annoying message, maybe minor noise hit (cough, 5 or so) if not Slaked