@Jimbo, In the absence of a heart to pump blood, there is no way to get oxygen and nutrients to the cells. Someone made a case that the goo replaced the blood and is serving the same purpose of transporting blood and nutrients to cells. That’s fine, I don’t really care about that. Like I said, it’s sci-fi/magicky handwavy stuff. It’s speculation. Until the developers explicitly explain how this particular brand of zombification works, it’s anyone’s guess as to how anything works. It doesn’t matter whether zombies are necrotic or technically living. The default position is that viruses require a very particular environment in order to survive and reproduce and it’s more unlikely than it is likely that a virus could survive in a zombie that does not have blood pumping and may or may not be breathing. Unless you come up with some additional reason as to why it can. Which is fine, if you want to do that.
But that is not what this thread is about. This thread is not contingent on whether or not zombies can host a virus. This is about mold.
@Otaku Game balance is tricky. I’m as much in favor of a game being fun over being ‘realistic’ as anyone. You shouldn’t have to spend a week outdoors to solve a problem. But as a hypothetical example;
Increasing exposure:
0 Exposure - No problem
50 Exposure - No Problem
100 Exposure - Develop 1st tier symptom
200 Exposure - Develop additional 1st tier symptom
300 Exposure - Develop 2nd tier symptom
400 Exposure - Develop second 2nd tier symptom
500 Exposure - Develop 3rd tier symptom (cannot be fatal)
… at 600 and every 100 after you take random effects from the third tier, some of which will result in death after a short period.
Every 100 exposure would take about 8 hours of fresh air to get rid of. However you don’t undo the damage until 50 points lower than the symptom you received. So you get a symptom at 100 and it goes away at 50. If you get a second symptom at 200 you lose it at 150, and are fully healthy at 50. So if you were to get your first symptom and immediately spend 4 hours outdoors, it would go away. And you’d need to accumulate back up to 100 to get a symptom again.
If you’ve managed to get all the way up to 500 exposure then it would take 36 hours of fresh air to return to a healthy state (50 exposure). Though it can be more than 500.
As for how long it would take to accumulate exposure is another matter. It would depend on the kinds of places you spend time in and how long you spend there. Just looting houses wouldn’t be a big deal. Some houses would be clean and some would be mildly bad. If the house is marked as on the higher end of bad (for houses) then you might develop a symptom overnight by sleeping in it(100 exposure). Eight hours of sleep = eight hours of fresh air. A cleaner house wouldn’t affect you nearly as much and you might never develop symptoms at all because you naturally spend enough time outdoors to counter it. So unless you never left your house for days you’d have nothing to worry about.
It’s when you start walking around moldy grocery stores - and in particular sewers - that things spike. A few hours in a sewer without breathing protection could leave you with multiple symptoms that take substantially longer to recover from than a night in a moldy house.
@Kevin Granade, I really like the idea of certain tiles being ‘spore traps’ if you will. Ambient air levels are one thing, but having active dangers to avoid makes things a lot more interesting. And given the lore it’s possible that mold itself has been affected and mutated. After all, we already have the creepy fungal zombies. Their territory could be thick with mold that makes attacking them without masks dangerous. And they could give off clouds of spores when you kill them. Etc.
I just think there’s a lot of interesting gameplay potential with this kind of environmental threat.
Edit: Re: Aggressive treatment of fungal infections, there are oral anti-fungal medications which can be taken that will attack fungus in the body. They are quite toxic and not healthy (they can result in liver damage), but they could be found in pharmacies because they are often prescribed to fight foot fungus. I’d just tack on some unpleasant side-effects to make it less desirable unless you’re in a real bad way.
The ordinary method of fighting a fungal infection (in real life) is avoiding further exposure and avoiding foods that feed the fungus (sugars, starches, alcohols), but that’s not very interesting.
