More Diseases! Post ideas here!

[Jakers]

Currently disease isn’t actually a huge factor in cataclysm. For example, from drinking dirty water you get food poisoning; I know this is actually pretty dangerous (especially if you took the weak stomach trait, thirsty, etc.) But I started this post for any ideas on diseases people may want to add.

Here are the ones I’ve been thinking about.

Cholera: This would be a more improved disease you could get only from drinking water. I know it could still be classed as ‘food poisoning’ as its a bacterial disease, but cholera is actually a lot more violent than food poisoning, so it could last a lot longer and make vomiting more frequent, stopping those strong stomachers shoving their head in the river and drinking away.

Tetanus: Stop climbing over that wreckage! Tetanus could be a rare but possible addition; when affected your character could have random muscular spazms, greatly reducing dexterity or paralyzing them for a while.

Also some sorts of animal - related diseases like T.B. and perhaps rabies. But that’s all I got anyway, I’ll leave the rest to you guys!

[P.S. Let’s not be too silly and suggest things like AIDS. I’m pretty sure cataclysm won’t get that deep.]

[FunsizeNinja123]

[P.S. Let’s not be too silly and suggest things like AIDS. I’m pretty sure cataclysm won’t get that deep.]

Lol.

[Binky]

This is a great ideas. They’d add a lot of strategic thinking for making sure you had enough medicine and just generally add a lot of ‘survival’ back in. It also gives a chance to put in some useful ‘non-craftables’ which require the player to scavenge for.

I can imagine cholera (water), Salmonella (bad meat), tetanus (deep cuts) and rabies (animal bites) being the main ones - everything else is a bit obscure. Those ones can all be cured by antibiotics and shots, other than salmonella, but a new treatment could have been made for that in the 30 years between now and Cata.

An idea I had a while ago was putting in Pneumonia. This could be a long term disease caught from ‘bad conditions’, which would give you a reason for making sure that your living area was clean and that you were staying ‘healthy’. I’m unsure of the factors which would go into this, and it’d probably require adding in a few more player variables, but I imagine being wet/cold for long periods of time, eating bad food, being at low health and being dirty (if that gets put in) could all add up to a slow ‘pneumonia counter’ which would go down over time.

I have to say that this is one of the few things which I feel should be an option. Even though I’d absolutely love it, I imagine some of the less survival focused players might find it annoying if they kept getting serious illnesses.

[AseaHeru]

Is scurvy in yet?

If not, than add it.
(fresh fruit/vegg/meat to cure, weakness leading to death is untreated, also old wounds opening up)

[Binky]

[quote=“AseaHeru, post:4, topic:5706”]Is scurvy in yet?

If not, than add it.
(fresh fruit/vegg/meat to cure, weakness leading to death is untreated, also old wounds opening up)[/quote]

Good idea, especially as it could be cured by vitamins and whatever.

[Adrian]

I know it’s not much in the way of disease, but what about pollen allergy?
With all the mutated flowers around, you’d expect they would give some kind of adverse reaction.

[Cat09]

new diseases are showing up all the time, and the world of cataclysm is… altered… randomized diseases (within certain constraints and parameters) could add a lot of FUN http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Fun to the game!

[Jakers]

An idea I had a while ago was putting in Pneumonia. This could be a long term disease caught from ‘bad conditions’, which would give you a reason for making sure that your living area was clean and that you were staying ‘healthy’.

Now that’s an idea. I can’t believe I forgot pneumonia; in wilderness survival it is actually the main cause of survivor deaths. Of course, this isn’t wilderness survival all the time (unless you turn cities off) but I think pneumonia [glow=red,2,300]definetely[/glow] needs to be added.

Also, I just remembered that there are actually a lot of vaccinations for things such as cholera, which usually are injected into one when they are a baby. So this gave me the idea of a negative trait:
[glow=red,2,300]
Unvaccinated [This trait gives 5 points][/glow]

Due to lack of money and a birth in a poor place, you never had the chance to get the usual vaccinations. Diseases are more frequent and more fatal than usual, and you can catch diseases mankind took care of ages ago with vaccines… which you failed to get.

This could add brutal diseases like smallpox for the player and finding a vaccine syringe in hospitals would probably be high on the player’s list. And, seeing as I see the ninja caught my little ‘inside’ joke about AIDS being in cataclysm, why not have blood-transfused diseases too? That would sure make people stop running around like a maniac with a chainsaw, or in one case I saw in a zombie survival film, a freakin lawnmowers. Eeyup.

[Binky]

I think if we just had ‘heavily vaccinated’ as an expensive positive trait then it’d mean there would be no need for optioning it out which would be good. Otherwise we’d have to work out separate levels of frequency for vaccinated and un-vaccinated (whereas with just vaccinated we could just turn it off altogether).

I like the idea of random/procedural viruses but I imagine they might be hard to put in in a non ‘wacky’ way, as most illnesses kinda just make you varying shades and levels of generically ‘ill’ (vomiting, delirium, fever and so on).

[TheGrifter]

Ebola and smallpox in vials in labs. If you’re dumb enough to open one, you deserve what happens.

[system]

I’d love randomized diseases.
We did open a portal to another world. You’d have no resistance to any diseases in that realm.
Such diseases probably require royal jelly or antibiotics unless they are a virii. In that case you’re fucked.

[Hibou]

TRANS-DIMENSIONAL INFLUENZA

[halberdsturgeon]

We did open a portal to another world. You’d have no resistance to any diseases in that realm.

Nor would diseases in that realm be able to make use of a human host, since they’d have never seen one before. But it’s science fiction, so neither argument really matters.

[system]

Huh, the goo effects people. Maybe the goo gets sick?

[Dominae]

[P.S. Let’s not be too silly and suggest things like AIDS. I’m pretty sure cataclysm won’t get that deep.]

Well what other diseases will inter-dimensional tentacle monsters have? Nether-Syphilis?

[Lorknis]

[quote=“Jakers, post:1, topic:5706”][P.S. Let’s not be too silly and suggest things like AIDS. I’m pretty sure cataclysm won’t get that deep.]

Well what other diseases will inter-dimensional tentacle monsters have? Nether-Syphilis?[/quote]
Nah, the tentacles will simply have NAIDS.

[Blackopsman9999]

Why not procedural diseases like SS13 TG servers have? Maybe make them able to use more symptoms as time goes on?

[kevin.granade]

Our sci-fi space sickness thing telesickness is kind of like that, it procedurally chooses your current symptoms from a list. Another procedurally generated disease wouldn’t be too unreasonable.