Nerf infections

[Erik Tiber]

A thought, regarding infections.

Why not have (maximum) infection level depend on the extent of the wound. Much like bleeding?

I.E.

Wounds < 10 damage - No/Minor infections only

10 - 30 damage - Minor++ infections at most

30-50 damage - Acute infections at most

50+ damage - Sepsis possible at most

A wound going septic requires fairly severe damage, while lesser but nonlethal infections can happen from even tiny untreated wounds? Perhaps that would help curb infections?

This would definitely help, so much.

[George VI]

Take them away entirely. I recently played a round where I had to just constantly drown patients who ( were shot just once!! ) with spaceacillin because they had infections across their entire bodies. They would all need operations because their lungs and livers would fail. In the time it would take me to get to chemistry and make spaceacillin ( 2 - 3 minutes ) they would go from mild infections to septic. This is insane! It was literally one of my worst rounds and I started making mistakes and lost two nuclear operatives because the people they had shot were all dying of sepsis! This needs an extreme rework and until it's done needs to be removed entirely.

Sorry my post is messy I'm posting from my phone

[Jamini]

In the time it would take me to get to chemistry and make spaceacillin ( 2 - 3 minutes ) they would go from mild infections to septic.

 

I'm... fairly sure that is impossible. You probably took a lot longer making spaceacillin than you thought or they had an acute or acute+ infection. Even going from mild++ to septic takes about fifteen/twenty minutes.

Also, you should really have a stock of Spaceacillin (5-6 bottles. Not pills. Bottles. Pills are a crutch) made up if you have a character with chemistry training in medbay. Preparedness can often save people who otherwise would be unsavable.

[Skull132]

I'll just politely side-step all of the lore related issues.

Anyways, I was balling this idea with Duck. An idea was to nerf regeneration, and nerf infections on the count of that.

Infections

• Slower rate of development
• Less difficult to kill (for example, they take less ridiculous amounts of spaceacillin to kill)
  
• Fix limb revival surgery (on the list regardless, but relevant still)

 

Wounds & Healing

• Any wounds beyond 15 brute will not regenerate unless you have them bandaged and treated.
  
  I'm still trying to figure out how to make them a bit more harder to treat, because with that basic outline, anyone with a single bandaid can still recover from a fully slashed up stomach. Maybe the heavier the wounds get, the more advanced measures of treatment you need (stitches, anyone?).
• Apply something similar to burn.
  
  Burn already doesn't recover without being ointmented, but adding, again, perhaps variable treatment requirement may make it a little harder to recover from.
  
• Potentially touch regeneration rates. Again.

 

So yeh, thoughts?

[duck]

At the moment, brute inflicted wounds are easily disinfected by biogel, which automatically calls the disinfect proc on that wound. The advanced ointment does not do this and salved wounds have a roughly 2% chance per tick to disinfect by itself.

Also note: this is only external organ infections, not internal. I don't feel like looking at internal but it's a little different.

Propose: Bumping that 2% up to like anywhere between 4-10% so applying medicine has actually decent odds of curing you before you start melting; make advanced ointment autodisinfect like biogel or whatever it's called seriously okay.

Infection speed at the moment works like this: It calls an infection check in handle_germ_sync and if you fail it, the wound is infected. Then you start taking a steady germ level + every tick.

Which would be fine. but then it calls handle_germ_effects. Before infection level 1, there's code that periodically removes germ levels to stall it. Once you hit level 1, that goes away. And then things start to compound quickly.

level one: if(prob(round(germ_level/10))) then you gain a new germ level the same tick on top of your once-per-tick from before.

level two: you take a further 100% +1 germ level every tick. plus it has a 30%-100% chance to spread to parents and children of that limb. presumably, once you have a cluster of infected level 2s, they will spread back and forth to each other, compounding the infection speed by up to two more germ levels per tick.

level three: 100% germ level ++ every tick. at this point you are pretty much dead. goodbye.

#define INFECTION_LEVEL_ONE 100

#define INFECTION_LEVEL_TWO 500

#define INFECTION_LEVEL_THREE 1000

these are the numbers where your infection level changes. anything below 100 is level 0, and you take less than 1 per tick. after level one, you take two per tick, which probably advances faster than lv. 0 -> 1. after level 2, you take anywhere between 3-5 per tick and it spreads. after level three you are done.

also, spaceacillin is actually pretty effective at reducing infections so maybe we should make it more effective. i don't know.