Would it be possible to make clothing filthy over time? I had an idea that clothes worn on the layer next to the skin could get filthy after a certain amount of time spent being worn by the player, but I’m not sure if that’s actually something that’s doable. An alternative I guess would be to allow certain attacks or environmental factors to make clothing/items filthy, like a boomer explosion or sewer water.
I could see an argument for some environmental attacks having a chance, depending on the piece of clothing, but I think the over-time element would just be kinda busywork?
It would be more realistic - if you sleep in the same clothes you wear day after day, it’ll start to feel pretty awful - but also it would give a reason to either swap out under clothes frequently, making the huge amounts of clothing available more useful, or provide incentive to invest in cleaning tools outside of stripping the dead
It would be a no - All it does is create busywork for the player with no real mechanical advantage. Comes up often enough that its in the Frequently Made Suggestions section, any sort of bathing, hygiene or filth accumulation system falls for the same problem.
Bear in mind that the goal of the simulation isn’t realism, its verisimilitude - so many things are cut out because they don’t provide any interesting interactions with the world, nor do they provide any meaningful constraints. Having clothes on zombie corpses be tainted makes sense, and it provides an early game inhibitor to immediately getting higher tier gear. Laundry day meanwhile is just annoying busywork at any level of character progression, with no real system or mechanical benefit.
Huh, I don’t know how I missed that. I searched the board a couple of times looking to see if anyone else had this suggestion too. Thanks for pointing it out!
I know that laundry day doesn’t really add that much progression wise, but since the game already monitors vitamin intake it felt like it would fit, though obviously that’s not shared by others. I guess I just sort of like the post apocalyptic stories about a person setting off to find something that was relatively easy to come by before, like tampons
What’s mentioned in the Frequently Made Suggestions is bodily hygiene, not about clothing.
If the player character can automatically wash their equipments, and the only thing the player needs to worry about is providing tool, water, and soap, then imo this suggestion is not a bad one.
This is really unnecessary
Completely incomparable systems, vitamin tracking is a roundabout “food quality” tracking, because its an actual serious threat to your life if you end up vitamin deficient. Modelling the accumulation of skidmarks on the players underwear doesn’t actually provide anything of benefit.
Again, verisimilitude is the goal here, not realism - There’s a reason we don’t also model cooking devices getting dirty, utensils getting dirty, or the need to wash out hard containers from their previous contents. Busywork isn’t fun, and the goal is to focus on the interesting challenges of survival, not tedium. If clean water is a scarce resource for the player at any given time, they’re liable to die of dehydration, not of onset effects from stinky socks.
If you can’t extrapolate how “Clothes I wear on my skin should get dirty” relates to Bodily Hygiene, this discussion probably isn’t for you.
If the entire system ends up automated, then it is irrelevant beyond providing an annoying piece of busywork up until the player has whatever automates it - place that gate behind something difficult and its just mindless wasting of time and clicks, place that gate behind something easy and its just boring homework at character start.
A day one shelter survivor with a starter pocket knife and who smashes one bench already has the tools and materials required to produce a washboard, which can clean soft items. Soap or detergent is equally abundant in any world that doesn’t crank monster lethality or massively depress item spawn rates - The very first house you dart into will almost certainly have one thing of soap and 2-4 bottles of liquid soap. Unless your wearing an iron codpiece under your jeans day to day, its already at the point of mechanical irrelevance on day one.
Clothing is not part of the body. Wearing clothing is only a minor factor here. Boomer juice, enemy blood, dirty terrain are the main contributors. So it’s not the same topic as bodily hygiene.
Getting tools and materials to get a task done is a typical mode of game play. Be it boiling water, or washing clothing, or killing different kinds of zombies. Some of the tasks are easy, some difficult.
Already tried back in March, and immediately reverted - feel free to review Kevins comments on the last discussed attempt with this
I’m not just throwing out “No this probably won’t happen” on a technicality, its been tried in the past and now the recent present repeatedly, and ultimately infeasible every time. “Routine” soiling of clothes isn’t in the cards, because busywork tedium suck, and not in the “Damn I need to raid more dangerous locations for rare materials” kind of that has the player go do interesting things.
That github comment indicates that the frequency is the problem. Boomer attack shouldn’t turn a clean clothing into a filthy one every time it hits.
It should be noted that the premise of all these filthy clothing features is that laundry can be done automatically and easily.
I’m sorry to hear that you’re struggling with reading comprehension, I’ll take out the relevant element for you.
There’s been a very very long history of people proposing that “X should cause filthyness” and consistent pushback that it’s difficult to work it in without causing a repeated chore that players have to deal with, making things that cause it annoying rather than challenging. For a rare effect that can be dealt with rapidly it’s a possibility, but this seems pretty common and does nothing to make it easier to deal with.
“For a rare effect that can be dealt with Rapidly its a possibility” is the key statement here - Having the player have to go back home and do laundry to deal with this is not aligned with this. Having the player naturally generate “filthy” clothes is not aligned with this.
Rare: X doesn’t cause filthyness everytime when it happens, but only when it happens enough times.
Rapid solution: automatic laundry.
Basically this is exactly what has been considered about the suggestions in this thread.
This is a discussion about game mechanism. If this frustrates you personally, then I won’t carry it any further.
And this is where we strongly disagree, telling the player “stop adventuring, get in your car, drive home, do laundry” is not “rapid”. Please understand that words have specific meanings, and pay attention to them and not what you want them to say.
Oh don’t misunderstand, I’m not particularly frustrated. Its just if you’re not going to try and put in the effort to think about what you’re reading, I’m not going to try and be polite about it.
Edit: Right, forgot, I was trying to point you in the direction of checking the github because with a few moments of searching you mighta found more context, and recent changes. But where the Boomer Juice example ultimately went was not soiling clothes, but applying separate debuffs that fade rapidly, in about fifteen minutes - Enough to make the existing combat encounter more dangerous, not so long as to completely end a day of adventure.
It is usually a good idea to search some of the terms of what you’re thinking of in the Github, both in the issues and the pull requests section, as you’ll frequently see the same content brought up over and over, which is why the FAQ doc I referenced exists in the first place.
An adventurer doesn’t go home when their clothing gets dirty. It is exaggeration to say that dirty clothing stops or ends an adventure.
After they return to their base, laundry would be done rapidly, at least rapidly enough for the player.
edit: Be noted that boomer will never be the main reason why clothing gets dirty. They’re slow and are not the most common type of enemy. Dissecting large corpse, butchering, wrestling regular zombies that are bleeding, crawling in pool of blood, in swamp, in sewer… These should all make clothing dirty, regardless of how boomer juice works.
I think wading through sewage at the very least should confer some sort of filth status, maybe provide an incentive to bring a spare change of clothing when getting down in the muck and grime.
When people talk about ‘automatic’ washing, are they talking about setting up a washing machine? Because that is technically almost automatic