Updated healing system, healing consumables and healing-related traits

With all the recent changes to healing, I have a few questions:

  1. Do characters naturally heals when NOT sleeping, or do you need a trait/mutation for that?
  2. Are healing consumables (bandages, etc) multiplicative or additive? I.e. if you bandage a wound, does it simply speed up natural healing, or does it add extra healing over time (that works even if your “natural” healing is not active).
  3. How exactly consumables interact with traits? If a character has “-90% healing when sleeping” trait, are bandages also 90% less effective in general? Or are they 90% less effective when sleeping? Or are bandages unaffected, since healing from bandages is separated from natural healing when sleeping?
2 Likes
  1. Yes, but very slowly. Like unnoticeable. Certain traits/mutations can enhance it or reduce it even further. Sleeping is much faster, but…if you don’t bandage and/or disinfect your wounds it’s still pretty slow.

  2. As far as I know, each item has a disinfectant or bandage ‘power’ which seems to interact with your medical skill to determine the quality of disinfecting/bandaging. The quality determines how much of a boost you get to healing over time. Some items have a ‘heal’ quality that gives a one time, instant health boost to the affected body part. This can come with or without disinfectant/bandage ‘power’.

  3. I don’t know enough to weigh in on this one, someone with more knowledge of the actual code will have to chime in.

My rule of thumb for wounds is this: If I’m hurt enough to change the color of the health bar, bandage and disinfect asap. I keep an eye on my layers menu when I’m hurt and make sure the body part is sufficiently warm, cold can and will negate any benefits you get from bandaging. Wounds reduce your insulation by quite a bit, especially severe wounds.
Generally I bandage everything immediately to get the healing bonus asap and it also seems to give the zombies another layer to beat on before they damage your flesh more.

Someone who knows the actual numbers and interactions on the code side, please chime in. :slight_smile:

What I’m trying to figure out is how detrimental “slow healing speed while sleeping” traits are for a character with high first aid.
Let’s say there are two characters:
One with just basic first aid (can bandage up to “poor”) and normal healing rates and another one with 10+ first aid (bandages all the way to “outstanding”) but with “poor healer” trait.
Who will heal a bandaged wound faster?

Probably the second guy. Poor healing is less than the bonus from outstanding bandage quality.