Temperature Resistances and Adding Heatstroke / Heat Exhaustion

[hologramblue]

Thinking through it from the top....

Cold weather threatens the player during the winter months, via food scarcity and hypothermia. Food scarcity is mitigated through food storage and hypothermia is mitigated through gear, shelter, and fuel. All together, it places pressure on the flow of gameplay through the year; to survive winter, the player needs to reach a certain level of technology and gather up adequate resources within a certain number of in-game days.

(not accounting for playing at high latitudes bc I'm new to the game and haven't don't that yet sorry)

If hot weather were to threaten the player directly, what pressure should that threat put on summer gameplay? My first thought is, it shouldn't demand technology or stored resources like winter does, because summer starts very early into a new game. The long arc of the year is still your preparations for winter; summer should throw some wrinkles and hurdles at you, but shouldn't be a Winter 0.5.

What if the main effect of heat exhaustion in game was to slow down your work speed, and most of the ways to mitigate it were behavioral/location things like jumping into water, getting out of direct sunlight, or standing in one place for a while? It would pressure you to behave in fairly realistic ways for hot weather. There's only so many clothes you can take off, at some point you just have to pace yourself and stick to cooler times/areas. The fewer technological mitigations there are, the easier it is to deal with on year 1 but (as a tradeoff) the less you can insulate yourself from having to deal with it later in the game. And slowing your work speed isn't immediately lethal, but it's a big obstacle to your winter preparations that you'd want to work smart to get around.

Maybe it could also become lethal heat stroke if you're under the effects of heat exhaustion for long enough. Climate differences could make this more or less of a problem; in temperate areas, the nightly cool-off might make heat stroke rate, but in tropical areas it's a serious concern. That could balance out how not having a winter to prepare for takes some of the bite out of a work speed debuff.

Idk how exactly you'd want to mechanically implement this though lol.

[Thorfinn]

Good thoughts. It all comes back to, "Is that fun?"

Or should warmer climes just be left as an easy mode? Similar to the way arctic starts are hard mode.

[EDIT]

Oh, and welcome to the forums, @hologramblue!

[EDIT2]

What I'm saying is that the selector is Polar, Temperate, Subtropical, Tropical or whatever. If it were I'm Too Young To Die, Hurt Me Plenty, Ultra-Violence, Nightmare and Ultra-nightmare, no one would be pondering how to make I'm Too Young To Die more difficult.

Edited November 20, 2024 by Thorfinn

[LadyWYT]

6 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Or should warmer climes just be left as an easy mode? Similar to the way arctic starts are hard mode.

Personally I think tropical and warm climates should be "easy mode" compared to the other choices. The main benefit of living there is that you'll never have to deal with winter. The main drawback, of course, is that the higher temperatures means food spoils pretty fast, but it's also not hard to get food given that crops will grow year-round. And since crops won't freeze, you can just wait and harvest/cook them when you're ready.

Now that being said, I also think the warmer areas could use some kind of "unique" hazard, similar to how winter gives the colder regions their own special challenges. Maybe just more types of dangerous wildlife, like cape buffalo and rhinos to ruin your day, or elephants to stomp through wooden fencing to get to your tasty crops. You could also go with the standard "piranhas in water" trick. And of course, said animals would also provide more incentive for players to visit the tropics Overheating doesn't really do that.

[hologramblue]

16 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

It all comes back to, "Is that fun?"

It would be for me

(thx for the welcome, glad to be here thoughtdumping)

Serious version of reply: I am admittedly probably a specific kind of player, I don't find combat fun (temporal storms and stability stay off) and instead I play VS sort of like a single-player Rimworld or Clanfolk. I like resource management, and my source of fun is figuring out answers to the question "what should I do next to meet my needs/achieve my goals with the tools at hand". I keep having fun as long as I have to put some real thought into those answers; my fun lasts longest when there are many factors to take into account that make the right answer a little different every time.

As it is right now, VS is quite linear and my games so far (caveat: first year, up to bronze tech) have mostly been faster or slower versions of the same progression, with some seeds being objectively better/easier than others because there isn't a lot of horizontal variety in how to meet needs/achieve goals, just compromises I can make when a certain resource is less available. I know there's a lot on the roadmap so I'm not bothered by this linearity so far, but I'm excited for any new features that diversify the game world and what challenges it presents the player with.

There are a lot of linear difficulty toggles in worldgen that directly increase/decrease ore rarity, combat difficulty, ease of satisfying hunger, seasonality, etc etc etc. Climate being yet another linear difficulty toggle would disappoint me immensely — in the real world and in many other survival/sim games, life in different climates/biomes demands different technologies and different strategies, fit to the resources and challenges of the local environment. And that's exactly the kind of problem-solving that's fun to me! I hope VS becomes the kind of game where when I'm designing my long-term base, I'm thinking about what materials are most appropriate for the amount of rainfall, how to vermin-proof my cellar, whether the local wildlife can climb or not, the best workshop layout to get summer work done without tiring myself out...

And so on.

(And, of course, I hope it stays the kind of game where you can toggle many of these elements in worldgen, so that players who don't want to spend their time outsmarting rats but do want to spend their time gearing up for temporal storms can keep having fun, too.)

Edited November 21, 2024 by hologramblue

[Thorfinn]

I hear you, @hologramblue.

I don't enjoy combat, either, despite the fact I'm quite good at it. I just choose to run from or otherwise avoid basically every combat situation. I'm particularly not a fan of boss battles, though I have to admit the one currently in the game is plausible, unlike in pretty much every other game I've played. (Looking at you, cyberdemon. And you, D'Sparil. I see you trying to hide, daytime Empress of Light.)

Heat isn't a particularly good threat, though. As you note, it has to be solvable from nothing in maybe 15 or 20 days, And whatever the solution turns out to be, once solved that first year, it's no longer a challenge ever again. Not just this world. Every world from here on out. All you are doing from then on is optimizing that process. Even something as trivial as taking a siesta has no downside -- you are under no time constraints, as you can grow crops pretty much year round, and face no "winter" pressure.

And further, it shouldn't get in the way of people who are playing the game of Tyron's vision.

 

6 hours ago, hologramblue said:

And, of course, I hope it stays the kind of game where you can toggle many of these elements in worldgen

Not me. And, as I understand things, not Tyron, either. That's the stated purpose of mods, and why he's put so much effort into making things so mod-friendly. There are people who enjoy games with a plethora of status bars. If you want that in a VS experience, you can create that. IMO, this is the kind of challenge that should be dealt with through Mod Manager rather than World Settings. Rather than just one challenge, you can experience the various challenges envisioned by dozens or hundreds of others.

Edited November 21, 2024 by Thorfinn

[Echo Weaver]

6 hours ago, hologramblue said:

It would be for me

(thx for the welcome, glad to be here thoughtdumping)

Serious version of reply: I am admittedly probably a specific kind of player, I don't find combat fun (temporal storms and stability stay off) and instead I play VS sort of like a single-player Rimworld or Clanfolk. I like resource management, and my source of fun is figuring out answers to the question "what should I do next to meet my needs/achieve my goals with the tools at hand". I keep having fun as long as I have to put some real thought into those answers; my fun lasts longest when there are many factors to take into account that make the right answer a little different every time.

This is a good description of my approach to the game (though I've never played Rimworld or Clanfolk). I'm into this game for problem-solving rather than combat. With that said, I like temporal storms and stability as additional problems to solve, and I love the rich lore of the game.

I had not given much thought to branching strategies based on climate, but I like where you're going there.

5 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Not me. And, as I understand things, not Tyron, either. That's the stated purpose of mods, and why he's put so much effort into making things so mod-friendly. There are people who enjoy games with a plethora of status bars. If you want that in a VS experience, you can create that. IMO, this is the kind of challenge that should be dealt with through Mod Manager rather than World Settings. Rather than just one challenge, you can try out the challenge envisioned by dozens or hundreds of others.

I don't think this follows. VS already has the most customizable worldgen of any game I've ever played. I'm going to guess that Tyron intends to continue to expand the ability to customize within the vanilla game. 

[Thorfinn]

4 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

I don't think this follows. VS already has the most customizable worldgen of any game I've ever played. I'm going to guess that Tyron intends to continue to expand the ability to customize within the vanilla game. 

To some extent, I think that's true. But I highly doubt you will have the choice of potentially hundreds of variations on heat stress. There would be just the one. Just as with anything else in the game, figure out that challenge, and from then on, it's just fine-tuning.

Edited November 21, 2024 by Thorfinn

[LadyWYT]

Something that crossed my mind while watching someone play the Wilderness Survival setting--instead of adding heat exhaustion, what about just changing the temperature tolerance setting that's already there? I'm not sure that it would change much in the tropical regions, but it would make being soaking wet a bigger hazard in that you could still potentially die of exposure outside of wintertime, and would press you a little harder to keep your clothing in good condition.

Of course, it still runs into the same problem of, well, being a rather easy problem to solve. I'm not sure there's any way to get around that without having a mechanic that becomes super annoying to deal with.

[Maelstrom]

On 11/21/2024 at 8:03 AM, Thorfinn said:

Heat isn't a particularly good threat

It's not necessarily a threat, as much as a negative consequence to avoid, like starving isn't really a threat whereas drifters are a definitive threat. 

At it's core, VS is about resource management - making sure you have the appropriate things (inventory, time, items) to manage the negative consequences to not having those resources (forced to leave behind resources for low inventory, not having a harvest due to poor planning, etc).  In this case heat is another negative condition to avoid; similar to freezing for not having the heat resources necessary (heat source of sufficient fur clothing, etc).

[Daggerdoc]

Personally I find having negative consequences (or mechanics at all) related to freezing but no mechanics related to overheating to be quite immersion breaking. It's tonal dissonance with the semi-realistic vibe of the game imo. In my head heat management and cold management are part of the same system and only having cold damage mechanics makes it feel like only half of the system is implemented.

With that in mind, I do think that Thorfinn has a point when they say that managing temperature isn't exciting or more importantly interesting. It doesn't provide an engaging challenge to the player. The interesting part of winter isn't that its cold and you can now also be cold but instead that crops can't grow anymore making food very limited and encouraging or even necessitating the player the plan ahead for it.

So my question becomes why have temperature management at all? I believe it's there for 2 main reasons: it feels right and it further enhances the desperation of winter. What i mean by that is winter, with its snow, freezing water, and dying crops, creates an expectation that players need to care about the temperature now. If that magically didn't apply to them personally it'd feel pretty strange I think. It's only natural that players can freeze if everything else already is. Setting up and then following through on expectations like this is the core of any satisfying game and i think its justification enough for simple mostly non intrusive mechanics to exist. Something similar is also probably the cause of people's surprise when there's no heat management in the game. If you have to care about being cold it only makes sense that you'd need to care about being hot as well. This alone would justify a simple implementation of heat that works exactly like cold damage in my opinion.

However I think the other reason leads to much more interesting implementation. Being cold isn't actually a danger in winter. It takes forever to freeze to death and is solved very very easily, whether that's clothing, a fire, or even a enclosed dirt box. What is does though is add to this feeling of desperation winter is meant to cause, similar to what echo weaver talked about during their first winter. it's meant to be a minor push that ups the tension to 11 as you search for food constantly taking damage from hunger and cold. Managing cold temperatures doesn't need to be difficult or serious cause it's not meant to be the main threat. Its meant to be the last piece that completes the feeling the game is trying to create. 

With that in mind, we can attempt to mirror that over to the other side of the temperature scale but summer doesn't have that same goal. It isn't meant to bring challenges, only winter is. So if cold is meant to add onto winter but heat can't add onto summer I think it should instead be a more consistent problem to manage over the course of the rest of the year. Keeping it a small annoyance at worse and making sure it stays easy to solve will help players not get frustrated over it and allow it to shine in its own place. With proper setup heat wouldn't ever turn into a serious issue, just something that's in the back of players minds pushing them to interact with the other mechanics in a new, and hopefully interesting, way.

This idea would be use the internal temperature system we already have, allowing it to go above 37.8 degrees C. Eventually, getting too hot would start to effect the player's work speed, things like attack speed, smithing speed, the speed they can rotate a quern, etc. The effect wouldn't start occurring till a bit over natural body heat and would be a gradual onset until reaching the player reaches a temperature that's too hot and begin taking damage similar to cold. Off the top of my head the effects could start about .5 degree past normal temperature and damage could start at around 40 degrees. Definitive numbers would require some testing but I think with the right ones it could work really well. This also might seem like a small range but it would also have a very slow build up mitigating that issue. Again that goes back to testing for which numbers create the correct amount of concern in a player.

So how does a player get hotter? Well to start off with the temperature of their environment would effect them in the same way cold does now. If the temperature is too cold (by default 0 and below) the player will lose heat over time and being taking damage once their temperature is 33 degrees C or below. The same idea applies too heat, if its too hot the players gains heat until they start feeling the effects of overheating and eventually take damage. However most biomes shouldn't get anywhere neat hot enough to trigger this naturally. Only in extreme circumstances should players be overheating doing nothing.
Players would also gain heat through several actions. Standing in direct sunlight, being next to a hot object, and anything else that'd be naturally assumed to heat up a player would but in addition to that I think having work related tasks raise your heat as well would lead to some really cool interactions. Every swing of your hammer while smithing, every sword swing as battle foes, and every second you're spinning the heavy stone of a quern, theoretically, would add heat which, slowly over time, could cause you to overheat and start losing time from inefficient work. If you overheat you need to take a break, find some shade or head someplace cool. Or you just could ignore it and keep going pushing through your exhaustion if you don't think stopping is worth the returned speed. Since the effect is ignorable but noticeable it lets the player decide if its worth it in this given instance to take a break from their work or not. 

Cooling down would work in an equally intuitive way with several actions a player can take when making their work environment to mitigate the effects beforehand. For example making your workplace outside in a shade spot keeps the forge from blasting its heat into an enclosed room, lets you get any wind passing nearby to cool you off, and keeps you out of the sun. The idea of passive ways of cooling off that can be done beforehand without stopping what you're doing should naturally lead experienced players to making those changes beforehand and feeling rewarded for it. This way of implementing the mechanic also allowed it to fade into the background naturally before it becomes an annoyance, as players gain automation cool and cut down on the amount of work they have to do themselves. 

Incorporating clothing would require a slightly more significant change. Instead of the current system where clothing subtracts its resistance from the external temperature at which your internal temperature begins starts (+2 degrees C max warmth > -2 degrees C externally before internal temperature starts falling), the clothing would have 2 different metrics, heat resistance and cold resistance. Cold resistance would function like the system already in the game, allowing for an easier transition to the new system, while heat resistance would function as a mirror, adding to the temperature where overheating starts (+2 degrees C heat resistance > +2 degrees C before overheating starts.) The heat resistance numbers would need to be quite a bit smaller than the cold resistance numbers as the range is smaller. I think this should be fairly easy to build onto the current clothing system but I could be wrong as I'm not a programmer. This would also allow the exact same mechanics for handling cold weather while also allowing players to interact meaningfully with hot weather. Things like smithing aprons could be added to reduce the heat adsorbed from workstations and hats could be given new purpose of protecting from heat build up caused by the sun as well. 

Summer, and in general the temperatures of your environment, only come into this system as a byproduct of raising background body temperature. It's should very rarely be hot enough for internal body temperatures to be raised and the effect should remain minor. Summer heat, at its worse, should have a small but noticeable impact, winter should help to a small degree with staying cool, and other seasons shouldn't really impact it. This would also still allow warmer regions without winter or excessive heat to exist preserving the "easy mode biomes" some people had been concerned about losing before. 

To summarize:

Core Idea

Allow internal temperature to go above 37.8 degrees C, minorly punishing players who allow their temperature to go too high by slowing the speed they can perform actions.

Effects

Overheating would gradually increase its effects once the players internal temp is past a certain point, eventually leading to damage exactly like being cold does. The speed players can swing a hammer while smithing, attack at, spin the wheel of the quern, and perform other actions that would require focus irl would be the main thing effected. As the player gets hotter the decrease to speed should increase making them slower and slower. I don't think movement speed should decrease as its level of annoyance isn't the positives that change would bring. 

Ways to heat up

1. If the environmental temperature is too hot. Generally this shouldn't occur except in extreme circumstances.
2. Being exposed to the sun. This should only increase temperature by a very small amount so that it only becomes a problem in cases of extreme exposure.  
3. Anything that can increase player heat right now, except being in a room. The mechanics we have for increasing heat in the cold already work perfectly for this, only the cap to internal heat needs to be removed.
4. Doing intensive labor such as smithing, grinding grain, mining, digging, and fighting. 

Ways to cool down

1. Staying in shade. This should be an active effect, making players lose heat instead of just not gaining heat from the sun. 
2. Being someplace cool. Certain rooms should have natural heating or cooling effects, like cellars and greenhouses. This could be trouble as room definitions are vague and rooms players wouldn't consider as cellars could be accidentally. A manual way to define a type of room if it meets requires might help.
3. Eating or drink anything cold or cooling. 
4. Going for a swim.
5. Standing in wind. The system already in place for this could probably achieve this. 
6. Taking a break from things that are heating you up. Bodies have natural heat dissipation methods and your body should naturally return to normal temperatures. As long as you've removed the thing that's heating you enough time should return your body to 37.8 degrees C.  

Regardless of if this idea or something like it is the one the devs go with, I still feel like the temperature management system is incomplete without some consequence for overheating. As I understand it, your internal temperature can't rise above 37.8 no matter what which I find that very unintuitive. It goes against many of the expectations the devs set up which makes it feel wrong. It's obviously not a huge deal or anything but it does feel really strange to me and hope it'll get addressed in the future. 

Edited July 29, 2025 by Daggerdoc
added a summary for the idea and cleaned up some of the wording to hopefuly make the post clearer

[Xefjord]

New to the forums, but this is one of the first things I was looking for after I started playing this game, was if and when we might see mechanics tied to overheating as much as freezing.

In some cases, I think the mechanic is being discussed in a way that is a little overcomplicated. The stuff I think we can mirror from cold exposure is just that being outside during high heat can give a visual effect until the point it starts to damage you, you can make and wear specific clothes to decrease your body temperature, and overly high heat already stunts crops in the same way overly high cold stunts others.

I think the idea of being overly hot causes you to work slower is good, but I would say you can apply the exact same mechanic to being overly cold. And that isn't a bad thing, I think this should apply to both mechanics.

If the heat were to produce serious environmental issues, then perhaps summer should just be drier than the other seasons, so the moisture in the soil becomes really hard to maintain without watering, and the effect of adjacent water blocks on the moisture level of soil is decreased proportional to the excess heat. This would imitate a bit of a rainy season vs dry season you see in the tropics. Rain becomes less frequent, and animal spawns decrease because its too hot for them to thrive.

If you really wanted to imitate thirst in some way, I would say just have the hunger bar decay at an increased rate in tropical climates. No need to make another bar for it or anything. But I don't really think this is entirely necessary.

Standing in water or being wet can help you quickly cool down in the same way that being next to fire can help you warm up. I don't think we need a detailed hydration system or anything. The most detailed I would probably want to see is maybe the exposure to daylight impacting how quickly you heat up, and thus shade being a little bit better.

I just don't want playing on the equator to feel like playing on easy mode, and I think that some of these mechanics can apply to especially hot days in temperate areas that could be interesting as well. As someone who hates hot climates, I want the things that bother me to make living in overly hot climates similarly difficult.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Xefjord said:

In some cases, I think the mechanic is being discussed in a way that is a little overcomplicated. The stuff I think we can mirror from cold exposure is just that being outside during high heat can give a visual effect until the point it starts to damage you, you can make and wear specific clothes to decrease your body temperature, and overly high heat already stunts crops in the same way overly high cold stunts others.

That seems like a fair implementation, though I would say limit the heat penalty to temperature that are above 90 F(32 C). As for summers being drier...I think that's already somewhat of a thing.

 

1 hour ago, Xefjord said:

If you really wanted to imitate thirst in some way, I would say just have the hunger bar decay at an increased rate in tropical climates.

I actually disagree here--it should be the opposite, since your body has to burn more energy to stay warm in cold weather. Which, that's also already implemented in the game--the player's hunger rate will increase when they are out in the cold, causing their satiety to drain faster.

 

1 hour ago, Xefjord said:

I just don't want playing on the equator to feel like playing on easy mode

I don't entirely disagree, but I do think that the warmer climates should be easier overall to survive in, since there's no need to plan for winter and the growing season is year-round. I think perhaps a better challenge is adding more dangerous wildlife, like hippos, lions, and elephants, that the player will need to contend with when out and about. Which if I recall correctly, both hippos and crocodiles were teased for a coming update, so the tropics should be getting a bit more hazardous sometime soon.

[Xefjord]

I do agree that playing in extreme heat should still be easier than playing in extreme cold. That is kind of how it is in real life. But I don't think that playing in extreme heat should necessarily be easier than playing in temperate. Your idea of having many more dangerous animals is also good. If we can get that, it would be great, but at the same time, modeling, rigging, and creating loot tables with useful items from their drops. I dunno if that's easier than making a heat exhaustion system.

[MKMoose]

I have to echo the sentiment that having freezing in the game and at the same time not getting any consequences for staying in extremely high temperatures can be quite immersion-breaking. The goal of adding overheating isn't just making hot climates more difficult, it's also to make them more engaging, more immersive, and more accurate to what one might expect from an "uncompromising wilderness survival". If someone wants easy-mode, somewhere between temperate and hot climates could still be space for a pleasantly warm mediterranean region.

How would it make the game more fun, one might ask. And how does freezing make the game more fun? How does hunger make the game more fun? How does temporal stability make the game more fun? How do rifts or temporal storms make the game more fun? In a couple days with the game I've already seen complaints about each of these systems, some think they are tedious, some think they are uninteresting, some think they are not engaging, some think they lack depth.

Overheating has the advantage of having very clear and easily accessible solutions which naturally guide the player to behaviors which make intuitive sense for the climate they're in, similar to preserving food and preparing warm clothes for winter. It's not as annoyingly persistent as regions of temporal instability due to the day-night and seasonal cycles. It is deeply ingrained into the game's core systems, unlike rifts and temporal storms which can feels tacked-on. It's always engaging, because it can't just be solved forever (if implemented well) - it can only be partially mitigated to extend the time that can be spent in direct sunlight during the day and accelerate recovery.

I would be in favor of simply extending the temperature system to allow increasing body temperature above the current limit and adding cooling benefits to loose clothing and light hats and perhaps penalties to warm clothing.

With the goal of keeping cold and hot climates distinct, I think that overheating should be a more frequent but momentary threat (not unlike wild animals and rifts), to contrast with winter being more focused on sufficient preparation for an extended resource-dry period.

If the temperature is high enough, body temperature would increase, causing exhaustion, dizziness and eventually fainting, in part to amplify the threat of carnivores in the tropics - and you would generally be guaranteed to wake up in the evening as it gets colder if you're not killed. Perceived temperature would naturally be greatly affected by fire and sunlight, incentivizing open-air but shaded homes and workspaces while in hot climates - matching the expectation for these regions. And to avoid making it an excessive threat, the values would have to be tuned to only pose a significant threat near the equator during the day, while in other regions usually being at most a minor inconvenience unless using an excess of interior heat sources or wearing an excess of warm clothes.

This could also create an interesting balance where the player may be more incentivized to travel or work at night when it's colder.

On the topic of thirst, instead of being a constantly ticking timer in all climates, it would arguably be much better to make it a nutrition-like hydration bar which instead of (or on top of) increasing health would improve heat resistance, incentivizing but not outright requiring the player to stay near a source of drinking water. It would also be partially filled by soups, juices and some raw foods. Ideally, it would deplete much slower, if at all, in colder temperatures. This approach largely eliminates the issue of just being another bar to keep filling, especially outside of the tropics, since it serves as a reward for extra effort integrated together with the hunger system instead of as just another layer of constant pressure which adds nothing to the fun of the game.

[Xefjord]

I still think adding more bars is overcomplicating things a bit. I feel like in the 8+ years this game has been in development. A lot of people have requested thirst, and with it being such a core mechanic, if it was going to come, it would have come already. Which is why I am more focused on how we can work our way up from small victories and easily actionable items to more detailed overhauls that take advantage of currently existing systems to try to implement hot weather hazards. My concern is that over fixating on thirst might just dissuade looking into the topic further if they have already added a thirst mechanic to their absolute no-go list. 

 

All of this said, I think we are all still on the same page that extremely hot areas need drawbacks. I just think we need to focus on what fits in with existing systems more or seems easy to implement. Like more dangerous animals in tropical Climates may be easier to implement. Given they already have an animal development pipeline. Tigers and hippos and venomous snakes, etc.

Edited October 10, 2025 by Xefjord

[Echo Weaver]

I'd also argue against an explicit thirst bar. It seems to me that overheating can be accomplished mostly with tweaks to the existing body temp system. Most folks are proposing some variation of core temp increasing above normal, which seems like the no-brainer best way to go -- it's immersive, fairly accurate to reality, and mostly already implemented. Rather than tracking hydration directly, drinking beverages can just lower core temp slightly when one is overheated, along with being soaking wet and wearing a brimmed hat. Being in a room should cool one down the same way it warms one up, i.e. just move the player's core temp toward normal. So should going underground, as in caves. Wearing clothing with heat benefits in cool weather should increase overheating, and there can be clothing added that has negative heat bonuses instead.

I rather like @Daggerdoc's idea of slowing actions before going full-on into taking damage, in the way shivering works when you're starting to freeze. @MKMoose's point about cooling in open-air but covered rooms rather than enclosed rooms makes a lot of sense, but it could start getting fiddly for the user. Perhaps open-air/well ventilated shelters are more cooling than enclosed, but enclosed can get you there. Having windows that can open for cooling also seems nicely immersive.

It really seems like most of the bits you'd need to do this are already in the game.

[Thorfinn]

Heat stress will be far easier to handle once the status effects are implemented. It's a little premature to be thinking about what effects to add to heat before finding out what effects there are to choose from.

That said, the default start is temperate, like it or not. Should be self-evident that this is probably the most tested set of game parameters. Any change from the defaults in a pre-release game is likely to have a lot of gaps. We recently went through exactly the same thing with oceans. The defaults in 1.20 were still no oceans, likely because they were not well fleshed out. So people went to higher ocean percentages (I've heard of up to 70% and 80%!) and found that since there was no ocean content but the sailboat, that it was boring as heck.

But mods that do things like add effects for heat are not nearly as popular as you might think. I can't even find the mod that did heat -- you sought out shade in the heat of the day, even in the temperate summer. Even the "wildly" popular Hydrate or Diedrate probably has a dedicated core of under 1000 players. The highest ever downloads was just over 10k, and odds are good that was mostly people trying it out, or checking it out on a server. But the lack of sustained interest suggests it's pretty niche. Compare that to Expanded Foods, which likely has somewhere around 25k users. Primitive Survival is likely around 15k.

It makes a lot more sense to incorporate the things people demonstrate that they want in the game before adding "nice-to-have" options that cater to a small niche group.

[Tabbot95]

On 4/23/2024 at 3:33 PM, Maelstrom said:

With freezing, there's a remedy.  What would the remedy be for overheating because adding this mechanic has downstream implications that have to be coded.  One such mechanic is a thirst bar in addition to the hunger bar which has been mentioned multiple times in the past year alone.

the remedy would be siesta and/or sitting in a bin/barrel filled with water

[LadyWYT]

3 hours ago, Tabbot95 said:

the remedy would be siesta

Honestly, with as irate as some players get over "sleep at night" as a solution to deal with monsters, good luck convincing them to take a nap as a solution to intense heat. 

[Tabbot95]

On 10/20/2025 at 7:07 PM, LadyWYT said:

Honestly, with as irate as some players get over "sleep at night" as a solution to deal with monsters, good luck convincing them to take a nap as a solution to intense heat. 

problem I find with monsters is that the rift activity doesn't seem to be effected by sleeping, only daylight; so I'll go to sleep when it's calm and dark and wake up to apocalyptic or high and cancel that day's away mission in favor of making more charcoal from the nearby tree farm... 

Edited November 6, 2025 by Tabbot95