Poison persists for too long

[Agoelia]

Given that there is no antidote, and you can only heal when sleeping, inhaling gas from a toxic cloud can be a death sentence if your torso is already damaged or even with very low strenght. It won’t matter if you can run to your base in 30 sec, or how many medicines you can apply, since almost nothing restores hit points instantly (and that’s fine).
You can just wait, sometimes for hours, until you die. You can’t even sleep to try and restore health points faster than you loose them, because “your torso hurts” will wake you up.
I undertsand wanting more consequences from breathing toxic gas, but right now bloated zombies are more dangerous to me than brutes, unless equipped with gas mask or long range weapon. Maybe using a breather of any kind (asthma cure, emergency oxygen packs) should shorten the duration of the effect considerably, or maybe the damage is only caused by “badly poisoned”, while the “poisoned” stat debuffs persists for half a day.

[JayThirtySeven]

Did you first notice this problem around a week ago? Because the current experimentals are having many problems with things happening too slowly or too quickly. I never felt like poison lasted too long but I don’t think I’ve been poisoned in a recent build.

[Mantar]

Seconding on asking what version you’re playing.
Edit: Nevermind, I see you were huffing bloated zombie gas. That stuff is supposed to be pretty deadly. I used to just hop into a car or behind a glass store window so they’d blow themselves up harmlessly on the other side.
Is it worse due to the recent time update? Should oxygen tanks clear it, do you guys think?

[Agoelia]

Experimental 9158.
I don’t know if it’s worse, I’ve nearly always had a mask on when fighting those, or I sniped them.
I first noticed this yesterday, but I hadn’t played in months.
It’s just frustrating managing to clear out the horde, pulp the zombie, and see that you’ll be dead by night. And there’s nothing you can do to prevent it. My character was STR 11, and the poison took more than half my torso’s hitpoints. It took almost 12 hours, but in the end I died while frantically trying to sleep to cure the damage.
So the problem isn’t how long it takes, it’s how much health it takes away. I’m pretty sure it would one-shot a strenght 4 character.
I wasn’t cold or hot, irradiated, infected, hungry, thirsty, or came in contact with flaming eyes or fungal spores. I also did not have CBMs or relevant mutations.

[JayThirtySeven]

It’s weird because I was just playing earlier today. Practically tripped over a bloated zombie while sneaking around in the dark. I switched to run and sprinted out of the cloud as fast as I could manage. The poison effects only lasted around 3 hours, and I was only taking damage for less than a full hour.

[Trigon]

I would be okay with oxygen tanks alleviating it. Clearing it would make it no worse than smoke really. Maybe datura should help with it, like it does with asthma attacks.

[Mantar]

That makes sense. If I can manage to find the time, I’ll take a gander at it and see if I can figure out a way to access the effect’s duration, maybe take a quarter off for every oxygen charge you use. It could probably use a max duration too, stacking indefinitely is likely part of the problem.

[Trigon]

Yeah, and most of these effects seem to be a reaction of the turn length being reduced to one second, so it’s well beyond anything I can even guess at.

[TheZoneWizard]

As of 8505, healing takes place gradually. So unless someone borked the code for the grins. You should be healing besides sleep time. If this has changed since. Let us know so we can unanimously bitch out who would do such silly thing.

[Mantar]

Gave it a quick look before lunch today, something is definitely out-of-whack. In a prior version, I loaded up my Testworld (starring Ronnie Test!) and spawned a bloated zombie next to him. He got poisoned for a duration of about 80, after a couple of runs. In the latest experimental, the same exact setup leaves him with close to 1000, or roughly 12x the duration. I’m not sure what’s going on there.
Adding in the ability to mitigate poisoning with oxygen tanks looks fairly doable, but I’d have to also split venom out, otherwise oxygen would be effective against spider and snake bites, too.
That would be a bandaid, though, because the real problem is the duration lunacy.

[Agoelia]

I didn’t know that. I can’t confirm that healing while awake works, but it is very probable that I just didn’t notice it. It also doesn’t really matter in this scenario, since (I suppose, I don’t know the numbers) poison probably works an order of magnitude faster than the healing.
Also I had the Imperceptible Healer trait, so if I didn’t notice normally, I’m really not surprised I didn’t notice I was healing while poisoned.

[TheZoneWizard]

OK, well that is my favorite trait to take. I guess it is working

[Mantar]

Looking through the code, there are a ton of places where things are hardcoded in ticks, and others where they’re sensibly coded to clock time, and the disparities are where all the problems are coming from.
For example, while digging around the code looking into the poison gas, I spotted the problem people were having with cigarettes – you smoke them for one minute for an average character, (no change with the time update) but the effects and the smoke were calculating in ticks and now you get six times the effect and six times the smoke from every cigarette, which is how people are filling an entire basement with smoke from a single joint.
It’s gonna be a huge task to track down all these cases and fix them, I reeeeally want to just go over the code top to bottom so I can get them all and not leave weird hard-to-track bugs behind, but between IRL pressure and health issues I don’t think I can find the time.

[TheZoneWizard]

I dunno man. My neighbor smokes a joint and I swear gets half the block stoned. Seems legit lol

[Mantar]

Tell him to stop smoking those giant Cheech and Chong joints, then.