I was trying to figure out my stamina issues in the ‘tips & tricks’ thread and eventually realized the cause.
If you have high enough speed even butchering and walking will make you out of breath since you are able to execute multiple stamina draining actions per turn but stamina regenerates on a per turn basis.
Currently playing on build 10613 to let the nested container stuff get a bit more stable but it was the same on older versions as well.
You can replicate it without any mods, merely the traits quick and fleet footed with some 20-30 mouth encumbrance is enough. If you boost your speed further with mutations or through other means to ~140+ you will lose stamina from walking even at 0 mouth encumbrance.
I’d make a github bug report but they’ve yet to send me a confirmation e-mail to complete my registration and I can’t be bothered to make more accounts.
With 20+ mouth encumbrance, my characters frequently get out of breath even with lower stats. I don’t think that’s a bug. I think that’s Rules As Intended. And butchering always lowers your stamina quite a bit.
Even with 0 mouth encumbrance, you’ll get out of breath with fleet footed and quick by simply walking (albeit it’ll take some time unless you have further speed enhancers).
If I have 177 speed with 0 mouth encumbrance and butcher something for 1 hour, I’ll be forced to stop and catch my breath.
At lower speed values my stamina never reaches quite that low.
I shouldn’t lose more stamina by covering the same distance as someone who is slower than me, simply because the slower person needing more turns, gets to regenerate more stamina.
Walking should be done at a comfortable pace and should under normal circumstances not drain stamina. Having high speed should imply that my comfortable walking pace is faster compared to those with lower speed.
Get Hollow Bones, Quick and Fleet Footed. Now go out and walk for a while with no stopping. Your stamina will slowly drain.
It’s an unintended effect of stamina regenerating every 1 second, but being able to take multiple actions/steps within that single second means that you’ll end up with a stamina deficit even though walking is meant to let you recover the same amount you lose.
This is not how you originally expressed the issue. I originally read it as “I have stamina recovery issues when my mouth is moderately obstructed” :
I agree that a setup where you engage in baseline activity like walking, with 0-10 mouth encumbrance, is probably not working as intended. I don’t recall Hollow Bones. Is that a mod or a mutation? If either, then it makes sense to me that those extra-normal statuses could lead to a body that isn’t optimized for its own performance capabilities.
Quick and Fleet Footed are both meant to be within the range of normal human experience. Hollow Bones, however, doesn’t sound like it is.
That was merely to point out that with just 2 common traits and slight mouth encumbrance (which under normal circumstances is not enough to make you lose stamina when walking) this issue still occurs.
It’s a vanilla bird/elf/slime mutations: "You have Avian Bone Syndrome--your bones are nearly hollow. Your body is very light as a result, enabling you to move and attack 20% faster, but also frail; you can carry 40% less, and bashing attacks injure you more."
The only way hollow bones affects your stamina regeneration is by letting you take more steps per turn, it’s just a way to increase the characters speed and prove the underlying issue.
I don’t know the easiest solution, but since stamina regen is coded to proc every 1 second/every turn, it’s probably easier to make your speed increase the amount that regens (just enough to offset the loss) rather than have speed increase the frequency of stamina regen.
Yeah you’re right actually, i just jumped in my debug world and tested it. I think you’re explanation is right as well, its the fact that we’re taking 2 actions in the time that we recover 1 stamina tick. I dont think thats how it should work and it is punishing you for going faster in a way it shouldnt
I mean, I’ve got no dog in this fight, as I’m just a player who doesn’t tend to play past his 1st relocation, but I stand by my position that a mutation making you able to tire yourself out by walking is probably Rules As Intended.
I’ve got an analogy in my head comparing this issue to proper exposure in photography. For every step you take in one direction, you need to adjust one of the other two directions by one step in the opposite direction to get the right amount of light on the film.
Likewise, in this scenario, there’s a base character with 20-30 mouth encumb getting no stamina loss. Shift it one step with a 1pt merit, and you need to shift something somewhere else to get the same degree of result. You’re shifting it 3 “steps” faster and objecting to receiving a penalty without moving anything else to compensate. The question to me is, how much encumbrance counts as a “step” in this metaphor, and how many of those steps do you need to take in order to get back to “proper exposure.”
20-30 mouth encumbrance is a lot. You’d get that from, what, a balaclava and a motorcycle helmet? Do you think that in real life, you could walk 2 miles at a steady pace wearing that without being out of breath?
On the other hand, I agree that stamina regen as a constant is a problem, now that turns have been standardized to one second.
To avoid going super hardcore into things you can’t program like individual differences in muscle endurance etc. one should assume that if you’re able to do something faster, you’re able to do so without overexerting yourself in the process. A 150 speed character should be able to sprint further before getting exhausted than a 100 speed character, rather than simply arriving faster but much more exhausted.
For example, toggling the ‘Run’ ability is you overexerting yourself and sprinting to the best of your ability, of course your stamina will take big meaty hits. But because I’m fitter than an old lady with a crutch and am able to comfortably walk twice as fast as her, I’ll also get exhausted twice as fast? Get real.
Completely irrelevant. If a 100 speed character does not lose stamina from it, a 150 speed character should not get punished and lose stamina. And again, it’s possible to attain high enough speed in vanilla that 0 mouth encumbrance is enough. If the point of Hollow Bones was to decrease your stamina regeneration, I’d be fine with that. But right now it’s just a tool used to demonstrate the effect more frequent actions have on your stamina pool.
i thought it only affected combat or some actions, since pointed, it lets you do more in a turn against a stamina tick, but i though walking, not matter the speed it still took a turn (or at least it seemed that way if you see the ingame clock)
Not in my experience. Moving over a tile has a movement cost associated with it, and if you have a high enough speed its entirely possible to move multiple tiles in a turn, and to do so frequently if you are particularly speedy. You’ll see enemies occasionally ‘skip’ a tile too, when they got enough moves from leftovers.
If you have 150 speed and ~100 walking cost you’ll see that every ~third tile/step does not advance the time by 1 second. At 200 a turn will only advance every other step.
It’s pretty simple like Profugo pointed out, speed is the amount of moves you can do per turn, and walking speed is how many moves are used up by taking a step. So if you have 200 speed but walking a tile only costs 100 moves, you can walk 2 tiles in 1 turn (second).
Now if you stack Road Runner and/or Parkour Expert to further reduce walking cost whilst also boosting your speed through other means, you’ll easily start burning stamina by just taking a casual stroll.
Everything about this is intended except for one detail, which is that when walking, it should slow your pace to whatever extent is necessary to keep stamina neutral at worst.
It is absolutely intended that you recover stamina at a fixed rate per second but that the number of actions you take per second is not.
I didn’t doubt that this was the case and under most circumstances it seems fair, except for when walking and doing things like butchering.
Being able to do those things faster should imply that the character has superior fine motor skills and better physique, being able to take a corpse apart faster shouldn’t mean that you’re pushing your body to the limits of fatigue.
Kiting might be a bit too easy so from a balance perspective I kind of get it, but not being able to improve your running speed all that much still sounds lame. Even ~150 speed with fleet footed drains stamina.
EDIT: Also a mutation like Hollow Bones is already considered very bad by most people, not being able to even capitalize on its speed increase is just devastating.
I’d say it is the flaw of current speed system: you have one number that affects everything. If we didn’t have “speed” but instead it was divided into, say move speed, melee/throw attack speed, fine motor skills speed(i.e. dissecting, aiming with guns, some crafting like electronics) it would make more sense.
Currently, with one modifiers to bind them all(but not quite, as it turns out), it leads to this issue. It’d make more sense if it just raised “speed” of everything PC is doing, including even metabolism and stamina regen.
Yeah it’s really hard to work with the speed stat in its current state if you want it to both make sense and feel all around balanced and fair.
Maybe you could change walking and butchering to only consume stamina once per turn even if your speed is high enough that you’re walking 2 tiles within that 1 second.
Would be a good fix for now, until the day when/if the speed system gets reworked. For balance reasons I’m fine with combat actions being able to consume multiple actions worth of stamina within a single turn.