Not immune: if you are bitten, you need to find antidote, or you die.
Bitten: you start infected and you need to find a cure in the first 24-48 hours of the game, or you die.
No cure: if you get bitten, you’ll inevitably die.
With “Bitten” I could see there being other side effects, too. Like every so often you’ll feel pain or something like that. Maybe you can counteract the side effects of infection with antibiotics until you find cure? That would be cool. This whole idea would be great, it would give your playtime a sense of urgency/emergency.
Oi!
An oldie to the whalesdev forums here, and the lore doth sayeth: The humans are raised from the dead from an inter dimensional goo that has infected everyone, and only when one dies do they become a zombie.
Then why do you need antibiotics if you get bitten currently? Is inter-dimensional goo contagious?
Because the human mouth is really, really dirty.
What about a medicine you need to take every 24 hour, until you find a very rare final cure?
Well, insofar as my understanding of the lore goes, there can be no “cure” in the sense that you mean because it is not some otherworldly disease or infection that turns people into zombies. Gtaguy was trying to explain that what turns corpses into zombies is the alien goo-creatures that are possessing them, using them as puppets. If you die, you become a zombie. Period. The only way to prevent becoming possessed is to either destroy the corpse beyond being of any use to the goo, or simply stay alive.
The reason you need to take antibiotics after being bitten is simply because your wound becomes infected from natural irritants and bacteria, same thing that can happen to any wound you could get in real life if you don’t clean it.
Kind of spoiler-y if you weren’t already aware of that, and I apologise for it, but I feel it needed to be said.
Not that there’s anything inherently wrong or bad about your idea, as it is it just doesn’t really work with the established lore.
(In an unrelated note, this is my first post. Hello everybody!)
Hyup. Though perhaps this might fit as a gamemode if anyone cares enough about it to program it?
Would definitely be an interesting change from the regular game modes, I have to say. Unfortunately, I have no programming skill as of yet, so I would be useless with regards to actually making it happen.
Gives me an idea for a profession though - one that kind of fits with Mate’s original idea. “Savaged” or “Victim”, wherein you start with ripped/torn clothes, perhaps even no shoes, and in pain with an infected bite and maybe other injuries. Would effectively simulate the idea of having to scrounge for medications that I think Mate was going for, while remaining lore-friendly.
Hmm, so the goo only has a thing for human corpses? Those poor, lonely animal cadavers.
Close but not quite. Really the process is more like:
1)person ingests small amount of goo in the water supply
2)person becomes “infected” (the player already is this)
3)Upon death goo activates and makes them get up again. In that sense really it should apply to player corpses as well, but it doesn’t right now.
Bit of a spoiler about a cure:
They did find a cure. Sadly it involves warping a person through the portals and back again, which weakens the fabric of reality, causes more portals to spawn and release a sundry of horrors upon the world, and generally makes bad things occur.
I think it would be almost kind of morbid to have to kill former characters. Has a melancholy/poetic vibe to it.
Personally I’d be more afraid then sad when I needed to kill my hydraulic muscles and lazer beams, acid hands and poisonous claws, can take down a tank without blinking type character. 
And this is why I always delete my world when I’m done… It’s not worth the risk!
Personally I’d be more afraid then sad when I needed to kill my hydraulic muscles and lazer beams, acid hands and poisonous claws, can take down a tank without blinking type character. :P[/quote]
Just reverse on it with a truck.
It’d be very awesome if the zombified remains of your previous characters haunted their death piles, a la ghosts in Nethack bones files.