Hygiene / health / living in nature

Would you consider taking personal hygiene / long term health effects on forced survival into account?

It may not matter within a 3 day span. Yet I've found military survival guides that put some focus on personal hygiene.

With a realistic perspective foraging and harvesting from/gutting animals at least are bound to be messy and could be considered. Longterm I imagine there is a wide range of things that would matter after a couple of weeks:

Any of these could be randomized just to keep each run

Ideas could be:

- washing up (face/hands) in boilt water

- clean tools/backpack?

- wash and dry clothing?

- brushing teeth, minimal and only relevant for +30days etc. / random loosing teeth for any reason could slow down calorie intake and lower condition

- long term effect of loosing health due to lack of vitamin-intake

- minimal amount of exposure to sunlight necessar for spirit/willpower/to fight depression

- hair care: cut off or keep combed for sake of optimal longterm hygiene

- danger of lice, insects, poisonous spiders, other "bugs", not sure which could be common in Northern Canada

- danger of smaller animals living inside the buildings (agressive, friendly, injured, infected, ...)

- smelling less like a fresh human could make you less noticeable to predators and prey

- running around with freshly harvested meat would make you more noticable and may attract wolfs easier

- effect of climate on skin condition

Just a couple of thoughts. Thanks.

Am looking forward to spend some more time with the update tonight.

I can see this working, but I wouldn't say the game needs it right now, concidering the current balance issues in the game.

Are you suggesting mechanics like in the gmae "The Forest" where if you get covered in blood and need to wash it off or something?

- danger of lice, insects, poisonous spiders, other "bugs", not sure which could be common in Northern Canada

The very far north of Canada (more northerly than the game takes place in) literally has

I the far north, once it freezes over, there isn't a bug problem at all.

This would be an excellent addition, I would say.

Just to jam it in, select it's option in a menu and count out however many minutes it would take and you'd be done.

For a finished game, panning out with the camera (while the timer counts) to a 3rd person view and an animation would really drive it home.

Az

While I can see the benfits of this, I doubt that even half of them would make decent additions to the game.

Washing up might work, as could maintaining your tools. But what would you suggest on the cleaning tools part to be negative effects if you don't do it?

Washing clothes seems okay, but why would they drop condition so quickly, if we were able to wash them? Part of why clothing degrades so quickly, is because we keep on wearing them.

I don't like the idea of brushing teeth nor of losing your teeth altogether.

Bugs in this icy climate? I think not.

Small animals inside? sure, but they'd probably hide once you go in there. And why would they be infected? And with what?

So the question for me is not only why should we add them, but also how should this be implemented.

Az, you suggest adding a shower. But the water in the pipes would probably be frozen, wouldn't it? So how would you be able to get a shower in the first place, other than running out to the weak ice or standing under the waterfall in Ravine?

Instant shower...

Take bucket, make holes in bucket. Warm other bucket of water. Suds up with washcloth and soap, Fill religious bucket with warm water and hang it up quickly. Rinse off.

Tada!

Holy bucket.... dear god, that is a pun so bad my father could have made that one!

Vitamin is something that has been suggested before and it makes sense. Perhaps the player would need to find some vitamin food (for example berries). But please no multi vitamin tablets.

And I assume it would be possible that one could buff condition / morale or whatever on a one time basis by using any of the suggested things, like washing with soap gives you a time bonus of 10% to your condition or something, once in a week. Possible, yes. Relevant, no. There are also a lot of really stupid ideas in the same vein as depression / smell / urinating / vermin / masturbation / sanitary towels / and so on and so on. I think none of those should or will be in the game sorry. I have seen this before in other games that people seem to be fascinated with the option of going to the toilet and such baloney. Honestly can make no claim how many people want this, but I'd bet the majority would just facepalm.

I supose hygiene could make it more difficult for wolves to track you. The lack of smell may be harder to detect in the snow.

Actually, that's a common miss perception. Animals can smell you much better if you are clean. Nothing in the wild smells clean, so if you do they will detect that.

On the other hand, if you smell heavily of human sweat they will notice that as well.

Eh, this is why rifles were invented. I like being clean, and no impending threat of being eaten by wolves will stop me taking daily showers.

Urination and defecating can be considered both silly gameplay-wise and also irrelevanr - too easy, takes very little time etc.

Washing yourself - yeah I could actually see this part having some sense in the game - using 1 liter of water for washing yourself daily to get a reduced chance to flal pray to some diseases.

Should it be a prirotiy for the game devs? Nope, not in my opinion. Even for very long term survivors in this game, so far I have yet to see anyone live for more than 3 months, in fact I think they guy who survived 71 days holds the record. In this timeframe hygiene while has an impact, is not critical for survival.

Sorry for a drastic example, but GULAG standards were at times very low- sometimes prisoners were left without any options other than a bucket of cold snowmelt water for all the winter months living in unheated barrack-style houses. Many

declined to wash anything other than their arms and faces during the winters, as they feared the cold and pneumonia more than anything else.