As it stands, the health stat determines how you get sick. Certain things add to the counter, while certain things subtract from it.
Unfortunately, the counter is broken. Withdrawal can cause horrifically broken negative values leading to infinite colds and flus.
Now, maybe the cold/flu is a symptom of the addiction, I guess, fair enough, but there’s no one left to give you the flu. Maybe the zombies, I guess. But they ought to more so transmit gangrene, or some sort of bacterial infection of their own. Not the could
I wish the disease system were more realistic. You don’t get the cold from drinking bad water. You get some water borne infection.
I wish you could get like, Ebola from going too deep into the labs and smashing the wrong vial. Or smallpox. This is the end of the world we’re talking about here. Let people go out with notoriety. We’ve got all the visible monsters of the end times. Why not include horrific diseases? Now, they should be appropriately difficult to find and contract, in a high risk/reward scenario, but it’d be cool, wouldn’t it? You’re in a lab, and suddenly, it’s The Hot Zone. Shouldn’t have breached the quarantined area, dumbass.
Mostly though, I’m just sick of being caught in a series of unrealistic colds. I shouldn’t catch the cold from eating nothing but candy and potato chips. I should get some malnutrition issues and become a fatty. Or some metabolism issues of some sort. If you eat nothing but candy and soda you will probably die but you do it in game and you’ll only catch a cold.
So… If you’re open to the suggestion, please, give the health system some love. It needs it.
You shouldn’t catch the flu because of how many chips you eat or beer you drink though. The flu and cold shouldn’t be the end all be all of unhealthy disease. Make vitamins more valuable with things like malnutrition. Make some sort of needle borne ailment for heroin users…
Make the system more real. I want to cough up blood if I’m dying from smoke to the torso, or if I’ve smoked too much. There’s no such message. You just cough a bunch. Give a message of how congested one is, and have some more unique blood analysis diagnosises.
Things like pneumonia would be a good addition. You can catch pneumonia pretty easily. Pneumonia is more believable than the common cold, in fact. You can catch it by inhaling food, or drink accidentally, or by inhaling drug particles. You ought to change your catch all negative health stat disease to that.
If you really do have a mutant variety of the common cold, the blood analysis ought to indicate it. As it stands, blood analysis is pretty under utilized.
I’ve always figured that it would make more sense to replace the cold and flu ailments with a ‘malnourished’ ailment when your health stat gets really low.
As it stands now, lack of food eventually leads to a starving status, but there’s nothing to represent a state wherein you eat regularly but aren’t getting enough of the proper nutrients - which is exactly what your invisible health stat is all about, right? Swapping cold and flu for a malnourished state that gradually weakens you overall would make more sense than a phantom cold that shows up with no vector. I know, ‘it’s a mutant cold that just flies around everywhere unbidden,’ I’ve heard it repeatedly, but even still it doesn’t make much sense.
Keeping the cold and flu would be great, just make it so that you have a small random chance of catching them when you make contact with other people, so that it’s no longer such a ridiculously folklore-styled take on such common human diseases.