So your character can heal very quickly in game form wounds when compared to real life healing.
If someone really had the ability to heal this quickly in the real world wouldn’t this take a lot of calories for the body to do so?
Should this be something that gets implemented in game?
Should a mutant with quick healing mutation that sleeps off multiple bullet wounds in a night wakes up a couple kilograms lighter as their body partially cannibalized itself to get the energy needed to heal the wounds?
The increase in metabolism that such rapid healing would require would lead to an increase in body heat generation. Should this give a warmth bonus to the body part that are healing depending on healing mutations?
Try the trait of imperceptive healing for a slower rate. Just in case you may have missed it. It helps with realism.
Perhaps the heat could also be applied to eating in general. The body warms up after having a bite of food. It would be a good way to stay a little warmer in the cold climate.
Pretty sure having a slower rate of healing would make for better realism anyway. But that would open the door to mutations like Wolverine or something. Ya know, as a scale. So if the entire healing mechanic were normal real world like. The various traits and mutations could give levels of faster healing?
In game healing rate is caused by The Blob that infests us all If it weren’t for that tweaking everything to be better. This is also the explanation for why mutations are ‘semi-stable’ and not just you becoming a cancer puddle, and why zombies don’t stay dead unless you chop/smash them into small enough bits.
More Lore:
The blob (alien entity from another dimension that wants to consume all like the borg, or a skynet controlled self replicating nanite swarm) pushes entities it infests to evolve faster and controls them after they die, reforming any and all damaged bits as long as enough of it is inside the bit of biomass.
That don’t make no damn sense, considering evolution of a species is a byproduct of reproduction, and blobthings don’t tend to reproduce, except for actual blobs. Individual organisms don’t tend to “evolve” much. A better term would be “morph”, but Pokemon embedded the idea in the heads of society that metamorphosis is evolution.
I mean in the sense that they cause zombie ‘Evolution’ mechanic and simmilar effects on the living
more spoiler for THE LORE
Lore wise, they are the reason behind all of those mechanics as they push things to be…more perfect variations of themselves. more specialized. There is no active effort on the blobs part mind you. only an effort to spread itself and many autonomous actions taken by any and all divisible components of itself towards that goal. It is currently engaged in a multidimensional war with the triffid and the mycus
we are insignificant ants climbing around inside its mechanisms and war.
It is in the water table and all living things on earth before the game starts. making DNA more pliable, until the nervous system dies allowing it to gain control of the body and actively change things, instead of mixing whatever bits it comes in contact with with you. AKA mutagens
The blob taking over earth life has more to do with earth environment being unhospitable to blob in its native form. This is why it can only really exist in some sort of spore form in the water table or needs native earth life to survive otherwise it will perish. It also seems limited in the creatures that it can actually influence and how it can influence them:
Mammals can be zombified and mutated after death or can be mutated while still alive in a more limited fashion via mutagens.
A limited number of invertebrate species can be mutated while they are alive but those mutations are mostly focussed on increasing and supporting the size of the creature. The creature itself is also still in control so this is probably why the creatures still look the same and have the same anatomy as any exotic mutations would be fairly useless if the creatures does not know how or isn’t really going to use it.
The effects on fish and reptiles seem to be the same for now. They do not turn into zombies or mutate except that some individuals increase significantly in size with fish also becoming more aggressive if this happens. The exception to this is (bull)shark who we know is always a zombie and revives but doesn’t seem to mutate (probably not implemented yet).
Some universal effects we do see is that any organism that is mutated is also a lot more aggressive than its normal counterpart. Another is that any creature also heals a lot quicker than they would in real life (not just the player, NPC’s and zombies but also normal living animals and mutants)
its relevent in that we have to take that bit of lore into consideration for how injuries heal. It PROBABLY shouldn’t effect the thermodynamic heat waste made from the effort needed to do the healing. which means that a lot of excess heat would be very reasonable.
But that might be a very undesirable mechanic for the game to implement, so it can be hand waved off if necessary as The Blob not using typical biomechanical/chemical means to create the necessary effects. Which is probably even desirable since it would make zombies much more efficient and need minimal energy input to continue. AKA zombies don’t starve to death and make the world more boring, and The Blob breaks conventional wisdom, though maaaaaybe not physical laws that we can tell… which makes it really interesting mysterious force to continue to ponder at and question.
We know that zombies are run with energy provided by the blob form other dimensions. No such luck for us we need to cough up the energy required for cleaning up damaged tissue and remodelling ourselves. If made more efficient (which would reduce total energy spend on the process since the immune system is taxed less) via the blob itself taking over or assisting most of the process, there is still the issue of lost/damaged tissue being regenerated and the stuff that that tissue is made out of still needs to come form somewhere.
yeah, but if a hand wave is considered necessary, then the heat created shouldn’t be a problem only the calories, unless the energy provided is decided to not be that specific. in which case everything can be hand waved.
Ultimately the final resolution to me seems to be, increased calories needed for heal, probably not as much (over time) as would normally be necessary, but hunger going up faster while healing.
OR
just brushing it under the rug as ‘its sci-fi stuff don’t think about it too much’ but that seems less likely
Edit: I guess, heat created from healing could be implemented to, but the gameplay effect would be that players would have to deal with limbs trying to overheat unless uncovered, and the game punishing you if you don’t keep your weakest limbs exposed doesn’t seem like a good idea.
I would like to see calories for healing as it would be a nice trade off and up the level of realism. Sure, you do heal faster but there is a price to it in the form of more body heat and more calories needed than normal. This would work especially well for quicker healing mutations as those as of now are just pure benefit with no drawback. But if you made healing come at a cost than suddenly those regeneration mutants couldn’t just get severely wounded, heal in a few hours and rinse and repeat without losing kg’s per day or chuging lard all the time.
