This is THE thing that makes radiation scary. It’s completely imperceptible without technological assistance, even once you’ve been heavily dosed.
There are a number of adjustments you can make to help with this:
Clean up the symptoms to be more representative of radiation dosing.
Audit the places that have latent radiation. I think the main offender previously was that random “craters” had high radiation levels, which was certainly unexpected since the crater size was wrong for a nuclear blast. OTOH if you got dosed because you decided to sleep in a “toxic waste dump”, well Dr. Darwin would like to have a word with you…
Add an explicit self-diagnosis based on first aid skill when symptoms appear.
Add more places for geiger counters or rad badges to spawn.
Add some lore about fallout?
Add dead or dying animals and plants surrounding irradiated areas.
I agree, but the problem was that there was/is very little to differentiate radiation poisoning from, say, a parasite if you happened to miss some of the prompts or just aren’t familiar with them. I suppose the easiest way is a geiger counter, but if you don’t have one or don’t realise you need one, that can be a problem. It’s easy to just forget that radiation exists and get really confused, even though your character has level 8 first aid and should probably have some idea of what’s going on. Then again, at that point you probably have half a dozen geiger counters…
I like all of your ideas, especially the dead animals around wilderness hotspots. I know I’ve had at least one occasion where I wandered into an area (I think it was a helicopter crash site) and randomly picked up 800 rads or so. It really didn’t strike me as somewhere that would have radiation…
I also really like the self-diagnosis part, even if it doesn’t include radiation poisoning. I dislike the idea of “oh no I’m puking for no obvious reason” followed by the player downing random medicines until it stops. That just smells of bad gameplay to me.
There still doesn’t seem to be a ‘hidden status’ message section or the like. An extra tab in @ that lists messages regarding ‘hidden stats’ would do wonders for these kinds of problems, allowing you to see what your character has been noticing about their body over the days/ all the messages over time about this character, including the ones you wern’t paying attention to.
10 days ago > your body feels stiffer and groggier this morning
5 days ago > you feel rather sickly
4 days ago > blah blah body
2 days ago >blah blah blah body hurts alot
2 days ago >you wake up feeling exhausted after a full nights rest
eetc…
Figured Kev or someone was going to add the ‘hidden status’ message section after a similar discussion about the ‘hidden health’ stat regaurding food/sleep and the like.
Alll it really needs to be is a window in @ where a small function copies messages with certain tags. It would keep the ‘hidden health’ stat just hidden enough be be vague, but informative enough that someone picking up on old character, or someone trying to diagnose a current character can glance over the various ailments and information the character would be aware of.
This is honestly the feature I most want to see to this point, due to its relative simplicity to high game play-ability improvement ratio.
Kinda (but not fully) offtopic, but Radiation Scrubber is currently way too OP in the sense it purges rads instantly. You can take 4 rad doses per second and just spam RS indefinitely and be happy. Imo it should be prolonged(hours) purge, noncumulative and with maybe some side effects?