Passive regen without sleep: Do we want it?

Game Talk The Bunker
1

Would post this in drawing board, but it doesn’t allow polls and I’d like to know the popular opinion too.

Current regeneration makes sleep very important, but in a rather bad way: you will want to knock yourself out with drugs just to sleep. For example, get wasted on vodka on ambien.
This slows the game down, but only till the next sleep. When you finally fall asleep, your wounds mend really fast - from almost-dead to full health in 12 hours of sleep.
It also doesn’t make sense that your wounds only heal when you sleep, but sense is no big deal.

One of the answers would be to allow some of the regen to happen without sleep.

Possibly with some extra limitations, but those would have to make sense (no tedious bullshit like having to manually activate wound cleaning action every x hours).
Possible requirements for the regen to be fast could include:

[ul][li]Adding/dedicating one vitamin to regeneration, then having that vitamin drop fast, but have no negative effects (other than slow sleepless regen) when not availaible[/li]
[li]Repurposing the global “healthy” value to change much faster (week for full swing from horrible to perfect) and affect mostly just regen[/li]
[li]Adding some sort of “well fed” effect to add what would basically be food regen[/li]
[li]Having traits. There is a “regeneration” mutation, but at the moment it is pitiful. Limiting the passive regen to those with “fast healing” or better could be interesting.[/li][/ul]

Horrible ideas that will not happen:

[ul][li]Adding regeneration, but making it so slow that it is there only for flavor. If it is to be there, it needs to have a gameplay role.[/li]
[li]Tedious but cheap bullshit requirements like washing wounds. Unless someone adds a “do chores” button that will handle it automatically. But unless you want to be the one to add it, assume no one will and do not suggest adding it.[/li]
[li]Making sleep regen so slow that downtime goes from a single day to a whole week, like it is with broken limbs (which are a horribly implemented mechanic)[/li]
[li]Making regen so fast that you only need an hour to heal from near death. HP is already stupidly binary (alive/dead), despite the game balance trying to be based on the notion of having some actual downtime.[/li][/ul]

But then, it may be just that DDA needs that downtime.

2

My two cents to this topic:

Regeneration in CDDA isn’t realistic. It’s not supposed to be. If it was realistic you’d need days to weeks in order to have a random wound heal up, and even then, scars would potentially give you a malus on the specific area which was hurt - after all, scars are a weak point in our tissue and can be reopened more easily than making a whole new wound.
That said, it’s obvious that any regeneration of any kind is for the player to have more fun. You wouldn’t really want to sit tight in your little hole and wait for all your cuts and bruises to heal up, just to go out and get pummeled by the horde which inevitably ammased itself outside of your hideout.
What I would propose is the following: Add a small overall regeneration, which will heal a specific amount every…hour or so. The sleep-regeneration should also stay active, as it makes sense, your body heals faster when you’re asleep, however, the sleep-regeneration should be nerfed to a more mediocre amount. fully healed in 12 hours is a bit too much, after all. Both regenerations together would probably be able to get you fully healed in about a day or two, but you’re not forced to sleep if you prefer to stay awake and do some meaningful stuff.

Now, as you said, we have to consider how to get a meaningful value for the regeneration. I like the Idea of nutritional values and diet having at least some kind of influence, after all, eating healthy would definitely help with healing.
The option that nutrition, iron, vitamins and so on should deplete faster while healing in exchange for a slightly accelerated regeneration makes sense as well and feels like a good Idea, at least in my eyes.
Regeneration should also be connected to your physique, at least in some way. I could imagine that stronger characters might be able to regenerate a little bit faster, but that’s just me.

As for traits: We are severely lacking in medical traits as is, in my opinion. making a few more traits, and possibly mutations, connected to regeneration seems fitting. We should also have stuff like thick blooded or thin blooded. Thick blood would decrease the risk of bleeding, while thin blood does the exact opposite - in fact, it might even give a malus in trying to stop the bleeding, while thick blood might even have a very minor regeneration buff.

While we’re at it, incurable diseases as traits of some kind? Some of them might influence regeneration, and they could influence how people react, give you random headaches or pain, or even hallucinations. Of course, we already do have traits for this kind of stuff, but adding more traits with similar effects isn’t necessarily bad, especially when you might be lucky and find a very rare cure in a hospital for that one ‘incurable’ disease you have.

3

Passive healing is something I thought we had already. Like broken limbs etc?

Also, when a limb reaches 0, is it considered broken?

What would make more sense than applying 50 bandages, would be to have Stim-Packs more prevalent and used.

Cleaning a would is never a horrible idea by the way. It isn’t tedious to stay alive for most people. It seems rather addictive to live =P

Healing system should be passive with a better concept of time and use of damage mitigation. Add bandages with a limit based on bleeding and/or hygiene purposes.
Add hemostatics to cut how much bleeding based on damage severity. Use of sutures to close serious wounds. Allow NPC with medical skills able to heal player toon if they black out. Add blacking out.

The entire medical section is under staffed and no love given… =(

But more seriously, we could use a new medical system and it is never tedious. Dying maybe inconvenient but this game is trying to be rather realistic. Just like your mod to remove Filthy. I add filthy to my game great! Remove it as an option? Good also!

4

[quote=“Kadian, post:2, topic:12896”]My two cents to this topic:

Regeneration in CDDA isn’t realistic. It’s not supposed to be. If it was realistic you’d need days to weeks in order to have a random wound heal up, and even then, scars would potentially give you a malus on the specific area which was hurt - after all, scars are a weak point in our tissue and can be reopened more easily than making a whole new wound.
That said, it’s obvious that any regeneration of any kind is for the player to have more fun. You wouldn’t really want to sit tight in your little hole and wait for all your cuts and bruises to heal up, just to go out and get pummeled by the horde which inevitably ammased itself outside of your hideout.
What I would propose is the following: Add a small overall regeneration, which will heal a specific amount every…hour or so. The sleep-regeneration should also stay active, as it makes sense, your body heals faster when you’re asleep, however, the sleep-regeneration should be nerfed to a more mediocre amount. fully healed in 12 hours is a bit too much, after all. Both regenerations together would probably be able to get you fully healed in about a day or two, but you’re not forced to sleep if you prefer to stay awake and do some meaningful stuff.

Now, as you said, we have to consider how to get a meaningful value for the regeneration. I like the Idea of nutritional values and diet having at least some kind of influence, after all, eating healthy would definitely help with healing.
The option that nutrition, iron, vitamins and so on should deplete faster while healing in exchange for a slightly accelerated regeneration makes sense as well and feels like a good Idea, at least in my eyes.
Regeneration should also be connected to your physique, at least in some way. I could imagine that stronger characters might be able to regenerate a little bit faster, but that’s just me.

As for traits: We are severely lacking in medical traits as is, in my opinion. making a few more traits, and possibly mutations, connected to regeneration seems fitting. We should also have stuff like thick blooded or thin blooded. Thick blood would decrease the risk of bleeding, while thin blood does the exact opposite - in fact, it might even give a malus in trying to stop the bleeding, while thick blood might even have a very minor regeneration buff.

While we’re at it, incurable diseases as traits of some kind? Some of them might influence regeneration, and they could influence how people react, give you random headaches or pain, or even hallucinations. Of course, we already do have traits for this kind of stuff, but adding more traits with similar effects isn’t necessarily bad, especially when you might be lucky and find a very rare cure in a hospital for that one ‘incurable’ disease you have.[/quote]

Regen is a solid idea. We all regenerate to heal slowly. It doesn’t make sense to heal up in 2 minutes from items that should only allow us to heal better. Unreal World healing is a solid idea. All it does is give you the best chance to heal well over time and to choose damn carefully how you deal with situations in the game world. Same should be applied to NPCs being hostile immediately. Unless they are tough, they should consider picking a fight for fear of dying.

5
Just like your mod to remove Filthy. I add filthy to my game great! Remove it as an option? Good also!

If you’re already talking about modding - i would actually enjoy having a mod which completely disables regeneration. Or maybe even a setting in the world options where you can decide for yourself, how high the regeneration should be (2 options, sleep-regeneration and ‘awake-regeneration’, both can have a value which is in percentages, means, you would heal for x percentages per hour while sleeping or being awake. In theory the value could have a range between 0 and 100, but I believe a value between 0 and something like 30/40 would be more than enough. just an idea there.)

As to Zone’s second post: Yes, Regeneration is a ‘solid’ idea. I know that all living things regenerate, although very slowly. I said the CDDA regeneration isn’t realistic, and it’s not supposed to be. I said you would need several days, or even weeks to heal up if regeneration was realistic, and I stand by this point. The problem here is, it wouldn’t be any fun to sit around and do nothing while you’re sloooooowly healing up.

As to comparisons to UnReal world: I played this game a lot. I like it too, but UnReal World and CDDA are very different in a lot of things. For example, you can easily spend a few days for healing in URW, because it’s not nearly as dangerous in that game. Wild animals usually don’t come near your settlement, the only tribe which is always hostile to you is to the far east and usually won’t find you, in fact, it’s more likely that the PLAYER starts hunting THEM. In CDDA on the other hand you have danger everywhere. Zombies, wild animals, nether creatures, other npcs, do I have to go on? CDDA is a lot faster than URW, you shouldnt just >waste< time, you should be on the move all the time, doing stuff in order to survive, in urw on the other hand, you basically have all the time in the world. Hell, the whole winter season is basically a big sleeping party, as you rarely leave your hut in the winter and just craft stuff while waiting for spring.

6

I wouldn’t mix the nutrition/vitamin system with the healing one until the first is finish and balanced. Went over the current implementations of it, and it is awfully weird and with values that need several passes to balance in my opinion.

But then I would cut the regeneration of health, to be a thing over time rather than eating first aid kits like cookies, and such would need more balancing, testing and thought than the nutrition one has been given.

3-4 days to regenerate health from 0 to 70 wouldn’t be a too bad in my opinion.
And in this case there’s should be some thinking about what would be base regeneration rate per hour without buff/debuff of any kind, and then adding said modifiers and then I would look at how much percentage of health should sleep regenerate.

Also regen values being open to mod in json wouldn’t be bad if there’s a need of starting poking at the health mechanics. I mean, is always nice to give people options instead of forcing them to play the way I think is correct. Right now is bad in the sense that is too easy, but I would rather have that than some contrive hyper-realistic way.

And again, just my opinion.

7

No

8

[quote=“Kadian, post:5, topic:12896”]

Just like your mod to remove Filthy. I add filthy to my game great! Remove it as an option? Good also!

If you’re already talking about modding - i would actually enjoy having a mod which completely disables regeneration. Or maybe even a setting in the world options where you can decide for yourself, how high the regeneration should be (2 options, sleep-regeneration and ‘awake-regeneration’, both can have a value which is in percentages, means, you would heal for x percentages per hour while sleeping or being awake. In theory the value could have a range between 0 and 100, but I believe a value between 0 and something like 30/40 would be more than enough. just an idea there.)

As to Zone’s second post: Yes, Regeneration is a ‘solid’ idea. I know that all living things regenerate, although very slowly. I said the CDDA regeneration isn’t realistic, and it’s not supposed to be. I said you would need several days, or even weeks to heal up if regeneration was realistic, and I stand by this point. The problem here is, it wouldn’t be any fun to sit around and do nothing while you’re sloooooowly healing up.

As to comparisons to UnReal world: I played this game a lot. I like it too, but UnReal World and CDDA are very different in a lot of things. For example, you can easily spend a few days for healing in URW, because it’s not nearly as dangerous in that game. Wild animals usually don’t come near your settlement, the only tribe which is always hostile to you is to the far east and usually won’t find you, in fact, it’s more likely that the PLAYER starts hunting THEM. In CDDA on the other hand you have danger everywhere. Zombies, wild animals, nether creatures, other npcs, do I have to go on? CDDA is a lot faster than URW, you shouldnt just >waste< time, you should be on the move all the time, doing stuff in order to survive, in urw on the other hand, you basically have all the time in the world. Hell, the whole winter season is basically a big sleeping party, as you rarely leave your hut in the winter and just craft stuff while waiting for spring.[/quote]

What makes you sit and heal would make me think I’d want to either move my ass to an NPC camp(another NPC LACKING thing…sadly) to get help or if I can patch my ass up and hide a day, good. Besides that, I’d keep moving and hope I do not pass out(this in yet???) in my travels.

Hell I don’t feel much pain when seriously injured. The flip?(take notes for traits). I get 2 minutes tops to figure stuff out before i get severe motion sickness. Basically the room spins like dirvish and I have a coin toss as to whether I puke. Oddly enough I can stumble without falling down, go figure >_>

9

[Sarcasm] We all know your busy schedule, but please, could you enlighten us why you chose in your divine wisdome the answer ‘no’ ? [/sarcasm]

Seriously though, just one word as a post basically tastes like spam, even though you technically answered the proposed question. This thread is, as I understand is, also for discussion about this topic, so could you please elaborate why you prefer sticking with the regeneration as it is right now?

1 Like
10

Sure.

This sounds like mod material. Do you heal in activetime in real life? Is there any reason to think that your wounds should get less serious as you run around the city with them, strapping filthy clothing to them?

additionally, what is the reason for adding this? Just cuz? to make people happy? 20% of sleep is very vague. And very small. Like so small its a waste of cpu to emulate.

theres no reason to expect this. this isnt halo, and you dont have a combat shield. You arent a reptile, and you arent a slime. This encourages players to hide in a hole to heal instead of using healing supplies. This makes the already lenient combat even less in touch with both Zombie Apocolypse and Survival simulation. This goes against CDDAs established nature as a grimdark game with consequences and it goes against the idea of an actual roguelike.

No thank you. there is no reason to force this upon the player. make it a mod kthnx, and take you snark with it

11

Just a friendly reminder.

C:DDA Design Outline

We consider DDA a freeform, post-apocalypse, [i][b]low-intensity[/b][/i], reality-based, roguelike, with a focus on survival-sim elements and a heavy emphasis on scavenging.

Low-intensity means that the game is not constantly high-pressure, and not every move must be precisely calculated. It’s OK to relax and enjoy it; there will be aspects that you need not mess with, and that’s OK. Someone else will like those, and maybe even dislike the aspects that you enjoy. But there’s enough to go around. We neither need nor want competition for the “best” DDA player, and don’t even know how we’d define that. The Rule of Fun is prime: if it isn’t fun, you shouldn’t be doing it. That said, super-intense stuff may happen (and it may happen when you don’t want it to!) but the overall experience should come at you at whatever pace you choose to pursue. It should be just as possible to lead a slow and careful life in harmony with nature outside the cities as it is to make crazy laser-slinging assaults on superscience labs.

12

I’m against it. In fact, apparently I’m the sole vote for “Nerf existing regen”. Bandages and other healing items are cheap and common enough to not be a cripplingly limited resource for players. I’ve healed from nearly completely fucked to just fine, just by sleeping for six hours in the back seat of my security van. Having even more healing atop that would, as it is currently, be pointless at best.

Seriously, what am I supposed to do with all these first aid kits and bandages. I’d much rather see the low level healing items buffed slightly, and sleep healing reduced. Over a couple days, sure, sleep healing all the damage away is fine, but if its day after day after day of combat, having |… left on my torso and limbs by the end of the night, it should take more than a bed and some rest to patch that up. We have healing supplies, give us a reason to burn them to sustain heavy combat and looting.

1 Like
13

Meh. I was almost there myself. Id be okay with it, mostly, but using items to heal is not too too bad. They did good by nerfing cotton balls and bandages. Sleep healing does happen too fast.

@Alec

Low intensity has nothing to do with magic healing. It make fine mod material, the same way my buffing of monster damage makes good mod material.

You are free to take all the pacing time you need to sleep off your injuries.

14

A paper cut wound should probably heal on its own in a minimal time frame. Anything worse than that is going to need bed rest to heal.

15

I’m ok with literally anything BUT this. Vitamin nutrition is already horrible enough without crap like this tacked on. That said, my proposal would be to keep nighttime healing, but restrict it to wounds that have been treated. Go to bed with a bandaged wound and it heals. Go to bed with an unbandaged\disinfected wound and it either heals more slowly or it gets worse depending on it’s severity.

1 Like
16

[quote=“pisskop, post:13, topic:12896”]@Alec

Low intensity has nothing to do with magic healing. It make fine mod material, the same way my buffing of monster damage makes good mod material.

You are free to take all the pacing time you need to sleep off your injuries.[/quote]

It was just a friendly reminder about the CDDA’s “nature” and its idea.

17

Do YOU heal a nearly broken limb to full health in one night? Are YOU able to be beaten half to death, then sleep for 12 hours and be in near perfect health again?

Is there any reason you should be able to sleep off half a dozen bullet wounds and slashes from a variety of melee weapons, as well as bruises and possible blunt trauma to the head?

What’s the reason of having regeneration in the first place? Just cuz? To make the occasional player happy that he doesn’t has to make more bandages just to survive all the cuts and bullet holes?
Yes, the percentages people gave (me included) are vague. They are supposed to be vague. Why the hell would be give exact numbers out, when we have no clue how an additional regeneration would change the balance?
20% ain’t small. it’s a fifth of your health. If you put it in perspective, a generic survivor probably has between 60 and a 100 hp, that would be between 12 and 20 hp. This is a lot, especially if you compare it to available healing items.
To put 20% in a different perspective: 20% of your body would be one and a half or your legs. Or a bit more than both of your arms. Or roughly half your torso. Do you still want to say that 20% is small?

And the current regeneration system encourages players to just sleep their wounds off instead of using healing supplies. I don’t see how 2 kinds of regeneration would be able to change this for the worse.

I did propose to make it an option to actively change both regenerations and the amount they heal. If you don’t want an all-time regeneration, just put a zero there and double your beloved sleeping-regeneration, which in no way, shape or form could possibly encourage you to ignore healing items and just sleep all your wounds off.

Make me. You basically begged for it with your insightful first post in this topic.

18

I dont have to. This idea is not going to float. And if it does it will be a heavily modifiable option that Ill turn off and ignore forever.

see this isnt a fight. its a bad option, and Im not the one who has to champion its inclusion.

19

This idea is already floating, Pisskop, for a simple reason:

Coolthulu started this poll/topic. He’s a Contributor, so that tells me that he and most likely other Contributors and Coders already thought about it and would be able AND willing to add this feature. Coolthulu himself seems to kinda like the Idea as well, if I read his first post correctly, so the chance is already there that this could be implemented in the feature, if you want it or not.

Also, if you check the poll, over 50% (currently) seem to like it. Of course, barely anyone voted on it yet, but I will do a small prediction: This trend will continue, and the percentage will, at maximum, fall to 40%. It will most likely stay above 40 though.

1 Like
20

The design document isn’t really a big deal - it’s just some initial plans that weren’t updated for a long while.

It’s less about adding it as a vitamin to do things with vitamin system and more about adding some sort of an option for the player to possibly influence regeneration.

Currently regeneration has two major problems: no cost (other than time) and huge speed. This could fix both.
Risk is adding extra keypresses to eat more food, which isn’t handled too well.

The problem with this approach is that it turns out worse than the problem:
Instead of automatically magically healing, you have to manually magically heal by turning self into a mummy with tons of bandages.
It does impose a cost, which is a good thing, but also tedium of having to rummage through inventory.
And later on in the game, the cost pretty much disappears, though at this point it’s hard to actually force player to pay any cost.

At the moment the game is slowed down heavily by armor dependence and necessity to kite things, mostly fueled by how being bumped a few times can put you out of combat for the whole day.

20% of sleep regen isn’t small. 12 hours of sleep is about 1 per 20 minutes at base, 1 per 5 minutes with fast heal. So with fast heal, it would be 3 points regen on whole body per hour and ~30 per day - enough for another “run” in the evening, before going to sleep.

Wakeful regen is just one of the ideas I’ve seen that would address it. While also being less bullshit than what we have now (though realism doesn’t matter much).

It would also help with balancing nanobots, which at the moment are only balanced by the fact that HP is relatively unimportant.

[quote=“pisskop, post:18, topic:12896”]I dont have to. This idea is not going to float. And if it does it will be a heavily modifiable option that Ill turn off and ignore forever.

see this isnt a fight. its a bad option, and Im not the one who has to champion its inclusion.[/quote]

Emotional reactions like that are a good way to really lose the image of someone who “gets” the gameplay and hurt your cause.

Instead it would be better if you explained why is the current version of regen good.