Reduce healing rate to realistic speeds

[KorGgenT]

Summary

SUMMARY: Balance "Reduce healing rate to realistic speeds"

Purpose of change

You could heal to full hp from 1 after 2 hours of sleep.

Describe the solution

Reduced the json significantly, with a target of "3 weeks with no bandages heals you to full from 1"
As such, bandages and a high health stat will make it take 5-10 days to heal to totally full health.

According to some of our doctors who are part of the project, it can take anywhere from 3-6 weeks to heal a severe "superficial" wound. This is anything that does not include a broken bone. As such, I picked a time on the lower end of that particular spectrum, and made that the "unaided" healing time. Bandages and such already give various bonuses to healing rate.

We've got the Blob, which is increasing your healing rate, and making it possible for your body to recover from pretty much near anything, given proper treatment. This seems reasonable to me for two reasons: you don't want to sit around for a couple of months in game just to let your character heal, because that is not conducive to a fun playstyle. Also, The Blob is capable of reanimating bodies, as we can see in normal gameplay, and even improve those bodies. It even causes beneficial mutations of various types in the character under various circumstances. As such, I declare it reasonable to pick the lower end of the 3-6 week spectrum, 3 weeks, as the unaided baseline for healing.

Another thing is that your wounds are abstracted to a somewhat unhealthy (heh) degree. In the game an arm at 84 hp is no different from an arm at 38 hp. Of course, this is a larger project and wholly out of scope for the PR, but in my opinion any more complexity added should be related to the wound system project, and making specific wounds have their own heal rates and penalties.

I have additionally made it so there is a minimum of 1 hp healed per 24 hour period.

[Mecares]

It is more realistic than before and I totally agree that healing was way too fast even before turns were changed to 1s. The last time a change like this was attempted Kevin shot it down because it was replacing one arbitrary number with another, would be nice if you could provide a bit of sources how you got to those numbers to avoid that this time. Oh and prepare for people whining that their Rambo gameplay style is no longer a good idea after this change.

[Amoebka]

Can't imagine what kind of sources can be provided when we have neither "1 hp", nor "full hp", nor individual limb healthbars in real life. Healing rate IS an arbitrary number - it's dictated by gameplay needs. Forcing players to take 3 week breaks (that's like 20 hours of real time play, by the way) between fights (arguably one of the more interesting parts of the game) is questionable.

Not to even mention, changing a game constant by a factor of 36 as a first solution without even trying smaller changes in simply insane. A change of x6 is necessary because of the faster turns, but anything beyond that should be gradual and actually playtested on each step.

[ddsaw]

The turn time changes making you heal in two hours from 0 is obviously something to be fixed, but a target of 5-10 days with bandages and good health is ludicrous for gameplay purposes. Remember that the blob canonically enhances healing abilities of all it infects, humans included, or atleast I remember reading that.

[nexusmrsep]

I must agree that that is definitely looking like killing a mosquito with a bazooka. I'm all in for reducing healing speed significantly, but going from one extremum / side of a scale to the other extremum / side of a scale is an overkill.

I will also refer to the lastest PR that wanted to do that and was shot down. The final conclusion there was something along what @Amoebka said - it will never be a objective number, so in effect, to end unproductive discussion, a decision was made by Kevin to postpone any changes to moment of introducing more robust wound system, where the healing rate can be set for every wound type.

Did I liked the decision? No, the increased healing rate before the 1s turns was off. It's still being pointed out at forums and by streamers (for ex. Vormithrax often uses imperceptive healer trait). But was it a sensible decision? Yes. I can agree that under such circumstance that there is no general agreement for the number used it may be better to postpone the matter for later implementations.

That however cannot be the case after 1s turn change, so if my opinion has any meaning I'd propose going for imperceptive healer trait rate as the base healing rate of untreated wounds. It feels natural then overnight heals, promotes using first aid, and doesn't impede the long run play ( it doesn't chain you to the bed for weeks).

In a recent discussion in the topic one of the conclusions was "player should treat wounds to achieve further mobility; after right treatment you may return to exploration or daily activities without being bound to the bed, caution would come from the overall health and wound accumulation, and only serious wounds should send a player to bed". That of course is not a final say in the matter but a solid opinion to work on.

[Fris0uman]

Exactly what nexusmrsep just said, while we don't have a more robust heal system the trait solution is a good one.

[nexusmrsep]

Another thought I want to add before it flies out of my mind.

Perhaps if there was a way to set auto-eat, auto-drinking, auto-sleeping zones with activities option "take an auto break for eating drinking and sleeping then continue activity untill finished" would make taking long breaks less tedious due to micro-management. That is with optimized fast forward time passage. Under such circumstance it might be less impactful and less boring to actually force some down time due to poor health condition.

[Amoebka]

Yes, implementing a fast and mostly automatic way to pass a lot of time can allow a lot of cool things that come from treating time as a resource. Long woud recovery, long crafting projects, construction being actually feasible, season changes coming into play more, etc. These systems aren't in place, though, and until they are we maybe shouldn't force the player to wait for weeks, 3 real-time seconds per half hour at a time.

[Regularitee]

If I could make a recommendation: @KorGgenT, you said your numbers were based on 8 hrs/day sleeping. But don't adults average something along the lines of 6 hrs/day sleep? Particularly wounded adults who would be doing a lot less physical activity each day compared to a normal person, and thus may sleep less. (Though I don't know if CDDA properly adjusts sleep needed based on activity like it does with calorie intake)

That said, I do think given the pushback that players are giving that 1-2 weeks would be a more reasonable compromise to keep everyone happy. But then again, Kevin shutdown my PR when I attempted to fix healing, so I don't know if I'm qualified to suggest a number here.

[FrozenSnowFox]

If changing the existing healing time in this fashion is so controversial and likely to be shot down then perhaps a suggestion from the reddit thread would work. Someone suggested adding a world option to tweak the healing settings (A setting for natural healing and one for the effectiveness of medicinal healing). With that people could simply tweak the setting higher or lower as desired. There would be no need to decide on a new arbitrary setting and no need to change the existing setting. If healing times are ever changed in the future or a wound system is implemented it would still be a good option to have for customisation.

[Inglonias]

Referring to the discussion that was had in #25628. I'm not against this in the abstract, but there's really no good way to go about this in the name of realism with the current HP system we've got.

[SirPendrak]

I know Kevin likes to approach things "Better do it once and solid", but if something is broken, then a quickfix is of no harm. Status before 1s turn change was a placeholder that most people believed reasonable in terms of gameplay, and there were traits for people wanting something closer to reality.
But IMHO biggest flaw of older system was fact it made first aid useless. Easy-sleep pils and syroups were 10x more powerfull healing tools than bandages and dissinfectants.
If i had my 2 cents, i would made it like this:
If you got beaten to 1HP, you use highest quality bandages and disinfectants with good skill, and take a standard sleep, then you should be at full HP in 1 day.
If you use worst first aid with bad skills, and sleep twice for about 8 hours, then you will get good in 2 days.
If you dont take care of your wounds and just sleep, then it regenerates in 4 days.
All with average health and no mutations. And then of course add posibility of some hardcore traits for realism enthusiasts.
This system would allow you to recover in similar time to that before 1s change, only difference is you need to take care of wounds. Before you would be good after one sleep on matter if used first aid or not.
I believe something like this would be better than waiting 1 or 2 years for new wounds system, and in meantime heal in 2 hours of sleep, and first aid being worthles.

[UpgrayeDD]

I actually don't think that the rate of healing KorGenT is a bad rate if it was made to account for the idea that all wounds that happen on a body part happen to the same place. I don't think anyone would dispute the idea of a high damage hit from a brute taking over a week without aid to heal unaided. However the same amount of damage resulting from scraps and bruises from little mutant children should not take the same amount of time to recover.
What if each body part had a number had a number of damage taken slots(invisible to the player).
the first time damage is taken it is assigned to the first slot. Next time damage is taken on that body part there is a percent chance(20-25%) of striking the first wound, making it worse(they add together). If it did not hit the first wound it gets applied to the second slot. Each new wound would make a check against on existing wounds for overlap before being assigned a new damage slot. Each of the different damage slots will heal at the described pace set by KorGenT. The overall health of the arm would simple subtract the sum of these slots as if they didn't exist having no effect on that aspect.
This should allow for those high impact hits to have the desired effect of needed the appropriate amount of time to heal. At the same time it allows for those smaller scratches and bites to not cripple the players ability to act after a few days rest.

[I-am-Erk]

An alternative rate would be something like 10% of current HP per 24h, round up. This would make healing minor injuries similar to our baseline rate until very severe damage... Injuries of 10-20 HP would heal in a day or so with treatment. Larger injuries would take much longer, especially if untreated.

1-10 HP heals over 9 days, then 11-20 over 5, 21-30 over 3, 31-50 over 4 days. After 50hp you'd take about 3-4 days to recover to full. That's without treatment, at 0 health, which is fairly reasonable. This is a little slower than the linear healing option, but leads to less downtime overall because most surface injuries heal in a couple days.

For everyone quoting blob healing factor, speaking as both the person who added that to the design doc and consulted on applying it to a bit more realistic healing time frames... This still implies a healing factor. You can heal from the brink of death to full health without any problems in 3 weeks.

[jeremyshannon]

I dunno, the blob takes zombies from "damaged corpse" to "up and in your face" in 6-8 hours, seems like making the player wait three weeks to heal is still giving him the really short end of the stick.

[KorGgenT]

of course it is: the player isn't controlled by the blob. zombies are.

[jeremyshannon]

I didn't think the blob itself could tell, since it's basically unconscious at that level, relying on the instincts of its zombies to remove the "cancer" cells that are non-controlled humans. If it can differentiate and shut off healing to survivors, it might as well just kill us from the inside out and save a lot of trouble.

[I-am-Erk]

Zombies have between 20 and 1000 times more blob in them by mass, possibly higher, and even the sparse existing in game lore establishes a difference between "active" blob in zombies and "inactive" blob in living tissue.

[esotericist]

@Regularitee

If I could make a recommendation: @KorGgenT, you said your numbers were based on 8 hrs/day sleeping. But don't adults average something along the lines of 6 hrs/day sleep? Particularly wounded adults who would be doing a lot less physical activity each day compared to a normal person, and thus may sleep less. (Though I don't know if CDDA properly adjusts sleep needed based on activity like it does with calorie intake)

most sources of research I've seen indicate americans currently on average sleep closer to 7 hours a day than to 6. research also shows on average americans slept more in the past (nearing 8 hours/day in the 1940s), and it looks like primarily societal/circumstantial pressures that are responsible for the shift over time. many of those sources of research also agree that in general americans are not getting enough sleep, now or then, and I expect it's quite likely that absent many of those societal pressures (as would occur after a zombie apocalypse) that total amount of sleep per day could go up substantially once hypervigilance problems are passed.

also, people who are wounded or sick sleep more, not less. i'm not sure why you would think otherwise. healing the body is a resource-intensive task, requiring a fair amount of energy and materials. convalescence is a pretty intense thing.

as for in-game mechanism: fatigue is an internal stat, which determines your need for sleep. it is in fact tied to activity. do more, you need to sleep sooner. do a lot in a single day, and you might not be able to get fully rested with just nine hours of sleep.

Testable example: use a hand-crank charger until you're too tired to keep charging, and you'll find yourself too tired to be fully rested in a 9 hour sleep cycle. If you're fully rested beforehand (i.e. the degree of 'rested' you start the game with, i.e. 0 fatigue), it takes about 10.5 hours of charging to reach that state.

[foulman]

Since I've been given conflicting information on this, is it now the case that healing takes place at a constant rate all the time, or just when you're sleeping?
I was prevented from creating regeneration effects because modifying the healing_rate effect did nothing when you aren't asleep. Is that going to work now or not?

[Regularitee]

also, people who are wounded or sick sleep more, not less. i'm not sure why you would think otherwise. healing the body is a resource-intensive task

You're confusing correlation and causation. Sleep helps you heal faster when injured, but being injured does not make you more sleepy. If anything it can be the opposite, as pain can often interrupt normal sleep cycles. People confined to bed as a whole sleep more in general (whether healthy or injured), which may be creating the false association with injured people sleeping more -- since obviously most healthy people don't spend days/weeks confined to bed.

And we're not even taking into account the situation as a whole. When in potentially dangerous situations (or even just unfamiliar ones), people tend to sleep far more lightly than when in a comfortable environment, as to be better aware of threats. I'd like to thing a zombie apocalypse scenario qualifies as this.

[I-am-Erk]

You're confusing correlation and causation. Sleep helps you heal faster when injured, but being injured does not make you more sleepy. If anything it can be the opposite, as pain can often interrupt normal sleep cycles. People confined to bed as a whole sleep more in general (whether healthy or injured), which may be creating the false association with injured people sleeping more -- since obviously most healthy people don't spend days/weeks confined to bed.

And we're not even taking into account the situation as a whole. When in potentially dangerous situations (or even just unfamiliar ones), people tend to sleep far more lightly than when in a comfortable environment, as to be better aware of threats. I'd like to thing a zombie apocalypse scenario qualifies as this.

Yeah, you're going to need a source on that. While being injured can lead to poor sleep, it also leads to a lot of fatigue. Healing is hard work.

The overall setting of a zombie apocalypse probably screws with all survivors' sleep, but that's a constant whether they're injured or not.

[Regularitee]

Yeah, you're going to need a source on that. While being injured can lead to poor sleep, it also leads to a lot of fatigue. Healing is hard work.

Are you asking me to prove a negative? That injury doesn't cause prolonged fatigue?

I have never heard of injuries consistently causing prolonged fatigue outside of brain injury, or just acute loss-of-consciousness (i.e., passing out from shock or pain). If you have a good source on that, please share.

[Regularitee]

Something came to mind just now: When I was trying to fix healing last year, a major issue I came across was this: Players only regenerate when sleeping. Which means mutation branches with reduce sleep need suffered much lower HP regen across time than characters requiring normal sleep.

If this change will greatly reduce heal rates across the board... won't mutations that reduce sleep need be completely screwed over? Imagine 3 weeks to heal at 8 hours sleep per night becomes 6 weeks at 4 hours sleep, or 12 weeks at 2 hours sleep. I think sleep reduction mutations must either be given a healing factor increase to maintain healing parity despite less hours of sleep per day, or else someone needs to figure out how to make healing_awake a universal factor.

[jeremyshannon]

Players heal both asleep and awake, it's just much faster when asleep.

[kevingranade]

won't mutations that reduce sleep need be completely screwed over?

More or less.

sleep reduction mutations must

They must nothing. Not all mutation combinations are viable, this means sleep reduction mutations are problematic unless you also get a complimentary healing mutation, that's totally fine.

[Moonsabrt]

Late on the comment party other people have pointed out this feels like shuffling the game from one extreme end to another,
And it doesn't feel fine to be honest, I would suggest that some playtesting at least be put forth so that both new and experienced players can try it out before its pushed out to other people.
I would hate to update my game and be ****** when I find out about the healing rates.

[kevingranade]

Feel free to playtest yourself, or stick with the version you have downloaded now and wait on the results of further playtesting.

[Necrosian]

Late on the comment party other people have pointed out this feels like shuffling the game from one extreme end to another,
And it doesn't feel fine to be honest, I would suggest that some playtesting at least be put forth so that both new and experienced players can try it out before its pushed out to other people.
I would hate to update my game and be ****** when I find out about the healing rates.

Agree 3 weeks is simply too long. In early game it just forces you to do menial forest scavenging, mid to late game reduced healing becomes just "damn failed bionic install, time to wait 2 weeks". I think a week to full health without any help and 3-4 days would be better.

[Moonsabrt]

Feel free to playtest yourself, or stick with the version you have downloaded now and wait on the results of further playtesting.

Will do famalam 'w')
Hope this personal issue can be solved, and glad that you replied was having bit of a anxiety attack for a few minutes.

[lgordon85]

During my recent play through I had thought that healing seemed a bit extreme. But this even worse.

I'm just a player and don't contribute code, so ultimately its not my baby to mess with. But this is clear statement that C:DDA isn't a game at all.

Its a bizarre reality simulator that still bears no similarity to real life. So now you have a situation that still isn't really realistic (zombies, blob.. really?) but isn't really all that fun, especially for new players who won't even progress beyond the initial stage before rage quitting.

Again, its your reality simulator to do with as you please, I'm just disappointed as I've really enjoyed the ride and development over the past couple years, but I can't see having combat essentially removed from the game for all but the most extreme min/maxers (ESPECIALLY in early game) as being remotely entertaining.

Edit: Fully willing to admit I'm wrong if things playtest ok. But this seems like clearing a stump with a B52

[esotericist]

I've been playing this for much of a week now, and I've found it to work just fine. Even 0 first aid bandages help quite a bit, and you just need to make slightly different threat appraisals.

[esotericist]

To be clear: I am not having to stop playing at any point. While wounded I change focus, do things that need doing that aren't just "throw yourself into mortal peril", and I keep productive.

Gameplay doesn't end when you're hurt, it just shifts focus.

[KorGgenT]

Just to be clear, for anyone reading this thread after the fact. There is a fast healing mod. If you do not like the current healing rates after trying it, you may install that mod. It lets you heal overnight with no bandages just like before.

[lgordon85]

To be clear: I am not having to stop playing at any point. While wounded I change focus, do things that need doing that aren't just "throw yourself into mortal peril", and I keep productive.

Gameplay doesn't end when you're hurt, it just shifts focus.

Absolutely correct, and I'm all for a gameplay that creates a "lick your wounds" period after you screw up. I didn't like that things healed overnight.

But having I don't think a situation where a slip up means weeks of "forage, eat, wait, forage, eat wait" gameplay is great either.

I may be completely wrong, but its just the shock of such a drastic change that has me caught off guard. Basically any character who gets roughed up early game feels like a delete and start over rather than a heal up and fight back.

But we'll see, perhaps I'm entirely wrong.

[esotericist]

You are entirely wrong. Use bandages.

I play fragile/frail characters - which have implied slow healing- , and I am not losing a month of scavenging after every fight.

[anothersimulacrum]

If you read the PR, you will see that will only need to spend weeks healing if you get down to 1 hp. Getting minorly injured, and actually treating those wounds, will not force you to spend weeks healing.

[Moonsabrt]

If you read the PR, you will see that will only need to spend weeks healing if you get down to 1 hp. Getting minorly injured, and actually treating those wounds, will not force you to spend weeks healing.

Would you mind showing me exactly where that is?
I need to know for sure in this case as scanning through the code simply shows that the healing rate is reduced by a large amount.

[nexusmrsep]

Edit: Fully willing to admit I'm wrong if things playtest ok. But this seems like clearing a stump with a B52

I may be completely wrong, but its just the shock of such a drastic change that has me caught off guard. Basically any character who gets roughed up early game feels like a delete and start over rather than a heal up and fight back.

Problem here is that me, you and everybody else got used to fast healing, taking it for granted, and that warped our perspective of the gameplay style, in favor of taking huge risks and getting involved in fights you'd realistically never gotten into if you could avoid it.
It comes as a shock, I can believe that. This change is big, because - in a way - it invalidates such play styles by definition. It turns the table by 180 degrees - you become hunted, not the hunter. Like in life, you can't lick of a few stab wound overnight. It's even more roguelike then before.

So my advice here would be: rethink your approach to the gameplay, ALWAYS use bandages and disinfectant if possible. And maybe even test it on a test character to get the feel of it.

[Moonsabrt]

Edit: Fully willing to admit I'm wrong if things playtest ok. But this seems like clearing a stump with a B52

I may be completely wrong, but its just the shock of such a drastic change that has me caught off guard. Basically any character who gets roughed up early game feels like a delete and start over rather than a heal up and fight back.

Problem here is that me, you and everybody else got used to fast healing, taking it for granted, and that warped our perspective of the gameplay style, in favor of taking huge risks and getting involved in fights you'd realistically never gotten into if you could avoid it.
It comes as a shock, I can believe that. This change is big, because - in a way - it invalidates such play styles by definition. It turns the table by 180 degrees - you become hunted, not the hunter. Like in life, you can't lick of a few stab wound overnight. It's even more roguelike then before.

So my advice here would be: rethink your approach to the gameplay, ALWAYS use bandages and disinfectant if possible. And maybe even test it on a test character to get the feel of it.

That...
That doesen't really help with anything,

[anothersimulacrum]

Would you mind showing me exactly where that is?
I need to know for sure in this case as scanning through the code simply shows that the healing rate is reduced by a large amount.

The first sentence under 'describe the solution'

Reduced the json significantly, with a target of "3 weeks with no bandages heals you to full from 1"
As such, bandages and a high health stat will make it take 5-10 days to heal to totally full health.

[paulenka-aleh]

After playing with these changes sometime I finally felt like bandages and disinfectant became really useful (they didn't make much difference before). Finally healing trait and mutations become more attractive and feel like something making difference rather than flavor stuff. Finally it made me rethink the way of combat: insteas of going full melee my character looks into other creative ways of killing zombies and, mainly, avoiding them if there's a risk of getting wound.

I can't say for sure but all my previous successful characters were killed by boredom of the late-game where you can handle in melee anything except toughest things (like fungal towers or shaggots). Current character finally has chances surviving it.

[Moonsabrt]

Would you mind showing me exactly where that is?
I need to know for sure in this case as scanning through the code simply shows that the healing rate is reduced by a large amount.

The first sentence under 'describe the solution'

Reduced the json significantly, with a target of "3 weeks with no bandages heals you to full from 1"
As such, bandages and a high health stat will make it take 5-10 days to heal to totally full health.

Oh...
'w') well i still have a problem with it

[esotericist]

Would you mind showing me exactly where that is?
I need to know for sure in this case as scanning through the code simply shows that the healing rate is reduced by a large amount.

The first sentence under 'describe the solution'

Reduced the json significantly, with a target of "3 weeks with no bandages heals you to full from 1"
As such, bandages and a high health stat will make it take 5-10 days to heal to totally full health.

Oh...
'w') well i still have a problem with it

And that problem is?

[Inglonias]

Then open up GAME_BALANCE.json. Find this:

{
    "type": "EXTERNAL_OPTION",
    "name": "PLAYER_HEALING_RATE",
    "info": "Set base player healing rate per turn. Default: 0.0001",
    "stype": "float",
    "value": 0.0001
},

and make it say this:

{
    "type": "EXTERNAL_OPTION",
    "name": "PLAYER_HEALING_RATE",
    "info": "Set base player healing rate per turn. Default: 0.0001",
    "stype": "float",
    "value": 0.01
},

Problem goes away. Bonus points if you put this in a mod instead.

[esotericist]

Then open up GAME_BALANCE.json. Find this:

Problem goes away. Bonus points if you put this in a mod instead.

[Moonsabrt]

Would you mind showing me exactly where that is?
I need to know for sure in this case as scanning through the code simply shows that the healing rate is reduced by a large amount.

The first sentence under 'describe the solution'

Reduced the json significantly, with a target of "3 weeks with no bandages heals you to full from 1"
As such, bandages and a high health stat will make it take 5-10 days to heal to totally full health.

Oh...
'w') well i still have a problem with it

And that problem is?

The worry that if i get conked/hit once or thrice that I'll have to spend two days trying to heal it up.
And noted on the mod thanke for the help on that 'w')

[KorGgenT]

ok this is going nowhere. install the fast healing mod. or don't.