Hot Springs should heal you... but only when the water is allowed to cool

[williams_482]

In some (all?) versions of Terrafirmacraft, hot springs are very helpful resources because they heal you when you go swimming in them. This is an idea based in realism: hot springs contain many minerals which have positive health benefits. There are a handful of natural hot springs around the world which draw thousands of tourists (and for some of them, local monkeys) to bathe in their warm, mineral-rich waters.

Vintage Story leans hard in the other direction, helpfully reminding us that most hot springs will not improve your complexion, but instead boil you alive and dissolve your corpse. This is a more realistic default behavior, but it does make those pretty hot springs pretty useless except for aesthetics. I feel a middle path might be best.

What if the water runoff from hot springs cooled a little bit for each block it travels outside the radius of the spring itself, and once given enough space to cool off, it gives a powerful healing boost? I'm envisioning something comparable to poultices in HP/sec, with the same armor-based slowdown and no initial delay or direct material cost, but only available in a prepared space near a conveniently placed hot spring. It could even slowly damage clothing and armor (a further nod to it's corrosiveness) while healing the player, encouraging birthday suit bathing as circumstances allow. 

This would be an extremely marginal benefit in practice, not mandatory in any way and severely limited by where these springs happen to spawn. What it does is give a practical benefit to building aqueducts and bath houses, which I for one think are fun. 

[InternetDragon]

I would prefer if you could extract resources from them like sulfur. It would make them much more useful than the dangerous curiosity they are now.

[Bumber]

They're highly acidic with bacterial mats growing around them. I wouldn't soak an open wound in that, no matter the temperature.

Edited February 21 by Bumber