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 If the environmental temperature is too hot. Generally this shouldn't occur except in extreme circumstances. 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. 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. Doing intensive labor such as smithing, grinding grain, mining, digging, and fighting. Ways to cool down Staying in shade. This should be an active effect, making players lose heat instead of just not gaining heat from the sun. 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. Eating or drink anything cold or cooling. Going for a swim. Standing in wind. The system already in place for this could probably achieve this. 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.