KoviBat Posted August 20, 2025 Report Posted August 20, 2025 I definitely think the health and healing systems need a rework. For one, I don't think healing should deplete your hunger bar, as this just leads to spam eating berries in your sleep as you heal, but your level of satiation should control how fast you regenerate, and decrease at a fixed rate. I like the idea of a more complex health system, I really do. But it's something that would have to come after a lot of reworks. Healing items need to be easily accessible, as if they're too rare, you're more likely to just come back and retrieve your stuff with a fresh body. But if you make them too easy to make, it just becomes tedious. Flax tends to be the main limiting factor for almost everything in this game. You need it for windmills, sailboats, bags, gambesons, bandages, and likely sutures and tourniquets. This means really only splints and horsetail poultices would be accessible in early-game. It's possible this could work if a few existing systems were reworked. Making wolves less aggressive, bears less common, and flax more abundant in some way, I'd argue by making scythes increase seed drops, so you can get a sort of delayed gratification. I do, however, like the use of herbs to deal with minor ailments. Actually having to mix some herbs to treat an infection or food poisoning would be neat, but you have to balance it out. If the herbs are too easy to find, it becomes tedious very quickly. If they're too difficult to find, you'll spend most of the game not engaging with that mechanic. Having played with a body-health mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly, I found it engaging, but it works in that game because you don't have an option to get around the wound. If you die, you lose progress and get sent back a save. In Zomboid, if you don't heal, the game ends. Being able to just come retrieve your stuff with a fresh body makes the system matter less, because it removes the consequences. But those games also tend to give you more open-ended rewards for winning a fight. You can even get healing items out of it to recover any health you lost. In Vintage Story, your only reward is pelts for leather and fat for mechanical power. And meat, I guess. It is possible to make it work, but it'll require a lot of checks and balances that we don't have right now.
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