Alcoholism Reborn!

Note: This update reworked and removed a couple of background (profession) IDs, and there's no good way to obsolete these. Existing saves may report an error about invalid profession ID when first loaded, you can safely ignore this and it won't cause any problems.

i hope you like to drink beers

Addiction was a gigantic mess. Addiction effects were running every single second that you didn't have your substance of choice in your bloodstream, and were spamming the player with huge constant morale debuffs that far exceeded anything else in the game and made it impossible to do pretty much anything. Cartoonish withdrawal effects would run any game into the ground, and constant interruption popups made it all very annoying to deal with. Nothing about it was really engaging and it all added up to make a system where the only reason to ever deal with addiction would be for the free chargen points. You'd just sit there and wait the addiction out and then go about your life as if it never existed. Well that begins to end today!

• Addictions now check for their effects every 5 minutes instead of every second. Only Alcoholism has been fully rewritten as I have to do each one by hand, but this should at least make other addictions a bit less spammy.

• If you are an alcoholic with no alcohol in your system, you will experience periodic cravings, which manifest as a message or dream and a morale hit.

• Cravings for alcohol are now capped by the strength of your addiction. They were previously uncapped, and because they were running so often, they would quickly get to -200 and pretty much stay there forever.

• If you go ~8 hours without a drink, you enter the withdrawal phase.

• The withdrawal phase lasts 24 to 72 hours according to the severity of your addiction, and progresses in stages.

• The first 24 hours will see only mild to moderate withdrawals, depending on how bad your addiction is. These cause flulike symptoms (limb score debuffs, stat debuffs, nausea, pain, dehydration). These withdrawal symptoms come and go randomly.

• While withdrawal symptoms are active, your cravings will be much worse.

• Severe withdrawals begin after 24 hours if your addiction is strong enough. They may be prevented or mitigated with benzodiazepines (valium or xanax, aka prescription/fast-acting sedatives), in which case you'll just get moderate/mild withdrawals instead.

• Severe withdrawals periodically trigger shakes and hallucinations. The abovementioned sedatives will prevent these.

• If you're more than a mild alcoholic, it will be generally harder to fall asleep. This can obviously be offset by drugs or alcohol.

• Being in withdrawal makes it much harder to sleep.

• Taking another drink will stop your withdrawal symptoms immediately and fully reset all associated timers. Remember that alcohol takes up to a half hour to take effect after you drink it.

• If you weather the entire withdrawal phase without taking a drink (this can take up to 80 hours since your last drink), you are detoxed. This means that your physical reliance on alcohol has left the critical phase. You are still an addict and will still have cravings and some ill effects, but you will not experience withdrawals so long as you remain detoxed.

• Detoxed status is lost if you ever take another drink.

• The withdrawal popup warning has been removed, as it didn't work properly and was just running every single second that you didn't have your drug of choice in your system. I will try to slot it in more intelligently downstream of where it was, but it's not appropriate for every drug or every withdrawal effect.

• Selecting an addiction in chargen formerly gave you the strongest possible version of that addiction. This has been changed, you will now only get a 75% strength addiction.

• The timer for getting over an addiction has been turned up a bit.

• Renamed and re-described many of the addictions in the background section.

I am sure this is not perfectly balanced yet, but in playtesting it is soooo much less obnoxious than it was. Much more time can now pass between drinks to maintain an addiction, the effects are far less punishing, and come many times less often. It's also just a better model of how alcohol works in real life. Hopefully this helps make alcohol into a tool your character might consider using occasionally for its upsides rather than just a mechanic that punishes you for engaging with it. Also you can roleplay as Harrier DuBois!