Snuggle Stats: Softly Sleeping Surivors

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I am genetically incapable of avoiding alliteration.

Let’s talk about beds! The noble bed is everywhere in Cataclysm. From the houses you’re (grave)robbing to the war-fortress you nailed wheels to and pretend is a car. Everyone needs to sleep, unless there’s a mutation I’m unaware of, and sleeping is sort of… opaque. The only real feedback that a player gets about their sleeping is if they’re using something to keep warm, and if the place they’re sleeping is ‘comfortable’.

This isn’t really ideal.

My proposal is probably the first one I’ve made that can probably be implemented without dedicating half of a star’s life cycle to the code. Beds should have a comfort rating. A ‘0’ is the bare minimum comfort needed; a hardwood floor with no blankets. Did you pile up a bunch of sharp rocks outside? That’s gonna be a bit of a penalty. And you can only really sleep on a ‘0’ if you’re very tired. Do you have a cot or a rollmat? That’s 3 or 4 comfort. A pillow? +1. A real, actual, honest bed? A solid 5. Comfort of 5 is the average that a survivor needs to sleep normally without too many problems. Warmth would still be determined on the side by if you have a blanket or pile of clothing or not, but comfort would be a series of modifiers that determines how much you happen to not hate napping in that spot.

The stats:
Comfort -1 or lower : Can only sleep here if dead tired, has a moral penalty of 20+10comfort, may wake up sore, stiff, or injured
Comfort 0 : Can only sleep here if very tired, has a morale penalty of 20, may wake up sore
Comfort 1-5 : Can sleep here if tired, but has a morale penalty of 20-(comfort4)
Comfort 6-10 : Enjoyable to sleep here, can nap when not tired, morale boost of (comfort*5)
Comfort 10 or higher : Theoretical levels of comfort that no human has ever lived through (caps at 10, is what I’m saying)

The floor : 0 comfort
Dirt ground : -5 comfort
Rollmat : 2 comfort
Cot or armchair : 3 comfort
Sofa : 4 comfort
Normal bed : 5 comfort
A pillow : +1, +.5 for up to 2 additional pillows
A blanket : +1
A stuffed animal : +.5
Bed squares attached to the bed you’re in : +.5 each (finally, a use for giant beds!)
Battery powered massage bed : +2 while active
Sleeping in your clothing : -2
Clutter in your bed : -2

So, falling asleep on the couch where you’ve been crafting would be… challenging (4 for sofa, -2 for clutter), but taking a catnap in the bedroom that you’ve nicknamed The Land Of Nod after you filled it wall to wall with beds, pillows, and stuffed dinosaurs would be child’s play. Literally. You have too many stuffed dinosaurs. You need an intervention, and are probably ten years old.

So there’s my idea. Maybe something like this already exists, but I’d love to see some in-game feedback on it beyond ‘comfortable to sleep here’ or ‘not’. We already get to see detailed numbers on our guns, so why not our beds too?

2

+3 comfort for the elderly when sleeping in an armchair

3

This would be really good addition to the game!

BTW, as I spied in one of the Project Zomboid’s mod, we could also sleep sitting on the toilet, which is 0.5 or 1 comfort, and in the bathroom, which is 2 or 3.

4

I would love the ability to have closable shower curtains; so that a desperate, sick, dead tired survivor might decide to risk it taking a nap in a bathtub in the middle of a crowded city. And by crowded, I mean filled with dead things.

5

This looks pretty good. I’ve always wondered why a rollmat on a rock floor provides the same amount of comfort as a bed with blankets + pillows.

My only question is, will comfort vary between different types of items? Will there be any comfort difference between regular rollmats and fur rollmats, emergency blankets and down-filled blankets, etc. Also, what about straw beds or makeshift beds?

6

I like the idea.

Except for some details:

Sleeping in clothes shouldn’t be penalized, unless there was an option to undress and dress automatically. Clothing would need comfort values too, not just a flat penalty for wearing stuff.

No penalty for clutter, because you can just shove the stuff off. And if you can “just” do something, it should either be automatic or not required.

Soft dirt is better than concrete floor.

Also, temperature should affect comfort.

7

I thought this was already in the game, sans the soreness.

8

Kinda is, but can probably be improved. ATM it’s largely On A Bed or Not.

9

Currently in the game you can gain up to 5 “sleepiness points” from sleeping on a bed (if unmutated) and up to 10 for sleeping on soil (if a plant) or in thick web (spider).

This isn’t much. You get a random roll from -8 to +8 to sleepiness for every attempt and also -2*stim points. Cheap wine gives -2 stim, meaning that one swig of cheap wine is the difference between sleeping on bare soil and sleeping on a sofa.

The difference between “tired” and “dead tired” is 12.5 points.

10

Okay, yeah. You’re totally right on not making it too complicated. So, drop the clutter and dress rules. I do think there should be some downside to sleeping on dirt. Maybe actually just getting dirty? We’ve got soap, and, unless I’m crazy, we’ve had water for a long time. Perhaps it’s about time to add “take a damn shower” to the list of potential morale penalties. Sure, sleeping on the ground is better than the damp concrete basement floor, but you’re gonna wake up covered in bug bites and dirt.

11

This would require implementing the whole hygiene system, which was rejected due to its low profit/effort ratio.

12

I don’t think you’d need a whole system. A “dirty” counter that ticked up by one each turn or each day, could be reduced by being wet or reset to 0 when using soap & water, with appropriate morale penalties if ignored would be all you’d need. I’d personally add a simple Kalman filter to the dirty and subtract that when considering morale, so that eventually being filthy wouldn’t bother you as much, but even with that it shouldn’t be too complicated.

13

Liking this. seems like a reasonably simple way to implement a ‘dirty’ moral penalty. maybe even make a ‘shower construction’ using two by 4’s and some kind of tank and a faucet. that way you could still get clean without waiting for rain or having to have soap… hell you could MAKE the friggin soap.

I want to say that I half-remember an old recipe for soap involving dried, powdered oak bark,dried, powdered flowers and vinegar… vinegar is pretty effective at personal hygiene by itself. I use it instead of shampoo.

14

Personally I feel that if dirty would be just a morale penalty it would just add a morale sink which need micro management. Not much else on gameplay side.

In reality biggest issue being dirty is getting infections from bacteria or allergens, not the feel or social stigma.

Problem with these kind of suggestions is that while they do add to a gameplay usually once you are a bit into the game these kind of things can become trivial and just add another thing player just needs to do just because.

15

I do like the side effect of “dirty” being that despite healthiness, wounds become more likely to become infected.

Maybe just keep everything simple for the time being and “unclean wound” penalty to all wounds received, and they need to be washed with water or “semi clean water” (such as out of toilet tanks) and add an ability to wash wounds with water to nock off the penalty before patching or cauterizing the wound. The rest of the cleanliness system could be thrown on the back burner and maybe never implemented, but filthy wounds should definitely be something that can almost certainly cause infection. Showers could be added later just to give moral boost at the cost of water instead of energy/battery (mp3) but are a one time thing. Other than that I think poor survivors just going to develop a “screw it, Ill never be clean again attitude” and not worry about it… although… early characters could suffer minor (or large) penalties for being in a strange new world with zombies and having to scrape together a living instead of enjoying everyday pre cata life, (depending on scenario of coarse)

16

Well, it IS a simulation game. We’re supposed to be playing a character, not a minmaxed block of stats. Modern cityfolk would probably still want to take regular baths, “just because.”

I think it was in Book of Eli that someone traded for a significant amount of stuff using those individually-wrapped wet napkins as currency.

17

i would like to see this for managing other survivors but not the one i controle.

18

perhaps as a penalty or a buff in the character creation. Definitelysomething that should be Optional… Or maybe just make it an option Hygene on/off… Or both. Make it a buff/penalty if hygiene is on other wise it serves no gameplay affect.

19

Repetitive behaviors do get really boring. It may be exciting to care about character’s well being at first, but then it becomes just another “‘e’->‘y’->wait 10 seconds->done” that you have to do every x minutes.

DDA has a lot of wonderful stuff for new players already. But 80% of all this stuff becomes meaningless when you realize it is just another variable to track.
So if hygiene is to actually mean something, it should be considered not just as something people do, but something ‘@’ (or a sprite) on the screen does.

For example: health system (vitamins beat everything), martial arts (2-3 are good, rest is filler and a noob trap), armoring (almost everything below 90% coverage is a noob trap).
Except the above aren’t very tedious - once you figure out how to do it, you can do it right. It only hurts new players who don’t know the best solutions. A badly implemented hygiene system (ie. one concerned only with simulation and not gameplay) could hurt everyone by being a major annoyance.

tl;dr Simulators also need gameplay

20

Could always just follow the path of goat simulator and throw so many bugs and glitches into it that people will love it because of flaws :smiley: