Meth balancing and various other small bugs

v701fd70

Somebody changed meth to make you crash into exhausted in a fairly recent build and I really like the change (earlier on, my character didn’t sleep for 2 weeks after a few meth-fuelled days of running from hordes). However, the crash down to exhausted currently seems to happen way too soon, usually while you’re still “high on meth”. High metabolism traits seem to exacerbate this too, dropping you to exhausted an hour or so after you smoke, while you’re still crazy-high on meth.

Also, from personal experience caffeine and possibly even nicotine seem to remove ‘tired’ a lot more than adderall or meth does. I’m not sure what’s going on there but caffeine might need a nerf, or amphetamines might need some kind of buff to their tired-removing qualities. I’m not sure if I should have put this here or in suggestions since it might be a balancing issue more than a bugfix, so I’ll follow up with a few very minor bugs I’ve noticed and never bothered to make a thread.

  • Using remote control to turn stereo on and off lets you teleport your CD there and back. Very minor issue.
  • Running out of battery with stereo on eats your CD.
  • Guns with shoulder slings sometimes decide ‘Putting on an AK-47+++ would be tricky’. Usually removing the strap and putting it back on fixes it, but not always. Happens fairly irregularly. Not sure what’s going on there.
  • Some debug spam when you hit a slime with your car and it tries to gen little slimes on spaces your vehicle takes up. Minor issue.
  • Fish corpses are ridiculously huge, to the point where I think somebody must have left an extra 0 on one of the values somewhere.
  • I made an electric car that somehow got stuck on about -172kph. Not sure exactly what caused it, all parts were in good condition, it simply refused to let me change the desired speed. I fixed it by letting go of the controls until it came to a stop, removing the engine, ‘start driving’, then getting out and putting the engine back in. If I can get something like that to happen again I’ll post details.
  • Not 100% sure but I think Very Fast Healing (possibly combined with fast metabolism) cures addiction. I had a heavy smoker with fast metabolism, he needed to smoke almost immediately after putting out his last one. Once I started going up the medical chain, I noticed he’d ceased to be addicted to smokes overnight, and I think it was after getting Very Fast Healing. Afterwards, he didn’t get addicted to anything despite ‘Addictive Personality’ and living almost entirely on alcohol. Later on my Very Fast Healing became ‘Regeneration’ and now he’s hopelessly addicted to stuff again. Not an issue if it’s WAD, but I’m guessing Medical mutants aren’t supposed to be addiction-immune, since addictive personality is one of their drawbacks.

edit ; oh and, all those new chemicals like hexamine and aluminum oxide etc aren’t spawning with the containers their .json says they should have. It’s no big deal for the ones that are supposed to be in canvas sacks, but for the liquids it means you can only ever get them through crafting.

A while ago I found you could literally go days at a time without being tired if you just drank coffee every time you were thirsty. Someone needs to add in a check to make sure you’re not going without sleep, and make you start seeing things after a few days.

The large-scale fix to address this is separately tracking tiredness and fatigue. Stimulants would only decrease tiredness, but wouldn’t restore fatigue, and high fatigue would make tiredness accumulate faster.

Do music CDs need to exist? They look like a placeholder for some sort of a music system, but are both moderately unrealistic (who uses CDs nowadays?) and mildly inconvenient from the coding side and also player side (need to carry that CD in the inventory).

I see no reason for them to, except I’m thinking maybe they’re supposed to explain away why your stereo produces music when there’s no radio stations left.

I see no reason for them to, except I’m thinking maybe they’re supposed to explain away why your stereo produces music when there’s no radio stations left.[/quote]

This is exactly it. I’d have no objection to letting computers play music CDs too.

I’m not exactly one of the cool kids, but I use music CDs nowadays, actually, if only because they’re compatible with car stereo systems that don’t have support for newfangled gadgets (though I don’t actually own newfangled gadgets either)–our current vehicles at my house are a couple of Fords from 2005 and 2007. However, that’s for vehicles from the first decade of the 2000s. Coolthulhu’s not entirely wrong in observing that, at the very least, CDs are on their way out, even if they’re not completely obsolete yet IRL. In the world of Cataclysm it’d probably make more sense for the time period for stereo systems to require an upload of music from an MP3 player, E-Ink reader, SD card, USB drive, or yada yada, after which it ideally retains its “filled” status so you don’t have to keep the item in your inventory, but rather only need it if you want to use a new stereo system for some reason, like installing one in your house or another vehicle.

In the meantime, it’d be nice to be able to just leave the music CD in your stereo like you can in real life so that you don’t have to dig it out every time you want to use the stereo. Alternately, perhaps just an assumption that previous users already have their favourite songs uploaded to their stereo, such that each stereo system you find effectively includes its own music CD courtesy of whoever used to own the vehicle before they died and you came along to harvest the stereo/fix up and use the vehicle.

…Granted, this particular discussion could probably be had about things like the MP3 players and PDAs, too. The smartphone is gradually replacing everything else, such that by the mid-21st-century personal gizmos will likely just be smartphones and maybe E-Ink tablets if it’s important to retain a distinction of “this thing has more functions but eats batteries faster, while this thing has more limited functionality but doesn’t eat so many batteries.”

Requesting a Pip Boy atomic wrist computer that does all that shit.