Make healing cost calories

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Currently one of the most broken and unrealistic things in cataclysm has to be the healing rate. I know that it used to be more broken as you just regain your entire health bar on limbs via a night’s sleep. This has been changed so that this only happens if you slap a bandage and some disinfectant on it. Which to me doesn’t seem like much of a improvement. However, it is also necessary for gameplay reasons to forgo realism in this case and explain it away as a effect of blob infection.

So, I thought that we could make it more balanced by making a realistic trade-off. You are still able to have a healing rate a few orders of magnitude faster than real life (with bandages and disinfectant). But this would mean that the caloric cost of healing normally spread out over a longer timeframe would also happen much sooner. This would mean that there should be a fixed calorie cost per hp point regained.

This would also tie in nicely with the weariness system which is based on the number of calories burned. Meaning that if you are healing very rapidly you might not be able to do as much work before getting weary or if you are particularly wounded you might not wake up in the morning with all of the weariness gone. This would also make a interesting trade-off for mutants with things like regeneration as they would get quicker and stay longer weary after a fight do to their insane base healing rate. And if they did choose to use healing items to go from heavily wounded to healthy in a few hours that would take a physical toll on them and leave them extremely weary.

I also like the idea of the one super power that everybody has by default (super healing) coming at a cost:

Summary

“You curse at yourself for not keeping your new year’s promise to start jogging before everything went to hell. Not only would it have kept the pounds off but it would have also prevented you from getting nearly mauled to death by a few hungry undead. By some miracle you managed to beat them off with a stick and found a first aid kit in the shelter basement. After patching yourself up to the best of your abilities you decide to sleep. The next morning to your surprise all of your wounds are gone. Only faded scare marks convince you that yesterday wasn’t a dream. Although you feel surprisingly tired you decide to get out of bed and measure your weight as you always do. In shock you realize that you lost a full 2 kilograms of weight. Who knew jogging was such a effective weight loss strategy?”

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it already does though, so to speak. you burn 2000 calories regardless of what you’re doing, and thats the body doing its normal metabolic ‘thing’ so to speak, which in reality is ‘healing’, healing small woulds, etc etc… admittedly healing in cdda is faster than in real life but thats the scale of fun… nobody wants to be waiting around in a building for a month just to heal wounds

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Dear god I wish people would stop complaining about healing. Base heal rate is already unfun, I always take fast healer because I dunno man, maybe I play video games to do things not play afk in base for days every fight. Go take imperceptive healer if you want it slower. The options there, go “enjoy” and I say that as sarcastically as possible. As for healing I agree with zan that it’s probably already covered in the base metabolic rate and honestly calorie intake is already intense in game and I would hate to see it just keep getting more stuff tacked on.

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… y’could always mod it in for yourself if you want it that way, set the hidden health to be higher, set the base metabolic calorie burn to 4000 or 6000

i guarantee that after a month or two in game you’ll turn it off again, but hey, the options available to you.

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Long term we’re probably going to get rid of hit points in favour of a wound system, so it’s probably better to put efforts into that instead of implementing a calorie to hp ratio thingy

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In part I do like the idea of having to sacrifice more food for grievous wounds, because I thought jumping into a horde would be fun. You know, As payment for being reckless.

“Want to take on a literal bodyslam from a hulking mountain, that’s going to cost you a whole 5 course meal. Want to endure a hail of bullets? MORE FOOD!
Nom nom nom.”

Kinda reminds me of ‘Skyrms’ form of healing, except food not instantaneous healing, just a replacement of lost calories.

Plus, it would explain how the body can replace so much blood and chunks under the same amount of calories, simply used to replace dead cells and other minor bodily effects.

Gameplay wise I am worried that it could mean a death sentence to those with higher metabolism traits, since a simple scuffle would invoke a heavy loss to all of their food.

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