Updates 4-19-2026

Addiction Updates

• Alcohol and nicotine no longer proc withdrawals while you are sleeping, though the timer still runs, so you are likely to need a pick me up as soon as you wake up.

• All addictions now have their own timers, rather than using a universal 1 hour timer. The base timer is 2 hours since the drug was last in your system. It is 4 hours for caffeine, 6 hours for alcohol, benzos, sleeping pills, amphetamines, and opioids, and 1 hour for cocaine. The result is that basically all addictions except cocaine should be waaaay less annoying, and if you are hooked on cocaine, I'm sorry but annoying is what you signed up for.

• These timers scale with addiction intensity. You may experience cravings sooner if your addiction is very strong.

• The time scale for shaking off an addiction is now many times longer. A 15 intensity addiction (15 is what you begin with if you select an addiction in your background, it's on the low end of severe) takes about a month of abstinence to cure, losing about a point of intensity every 2 days. If you relapse during this time, this is not reset. That means that provided you don't binge too hard during your relapse, you may be able to quit again and get back on track without a lot of overall time lost toward your recovery, though you will of course have to go through withdrawal again.

• The nonaddictive and addictive traits change this time scale to about 3 and 5 weeks.

• Addictions come on gradually. If you happen to accidentally get hooked on pain pills, for instance, you may be able to get out of it with just a week or so of abstinence, after which you'll be able to use them as before.

Non-narcotic Analgesic Updates

• Over-the-counter pain medication (aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, willowbark tea, and wintergreen) has been overhauled.

• Aspirin, naproxen, ibuprofen, and willowbark tea are all NSAIDs. This means they do not stack effectively together.

• Taking one NSAID gives you a flat(ish) reduction to your pain that hovers around -15. This is persistent for the entire duration that any of these drugs are active in your system. It does not matter if you were hurt when you took them, it does not matter if you got hurt after. You have 15 less pain than you otherwise would until they wear off. So think of them as an anti-pain buff, rather than something with removes pain.

• Aspirin and willowbark tea cause slightly increased bleeding. This is a VERY slight effect, which caps out at 15% longer bleed duration. Note that duration and intensity are currently tied together, so it may cause bleeds to be one intensity level higher than they would be in some cases. This effect lasts 5 days.

• Acetaminophen is not an NSAID. It is its own class of drugs. That means you can take it with NSAIDs and you will get the benefits of both. Acetaminophen also reduces pain by up to 15.

• It can take up to 30 minutes for a swallowed pill to enter the bloodstream. Remember that if you vomit before it does so, you don't get the benefits.

• NSAIDs last up to 6 hours once absorbed, acetaminophen lasts up to 5.5 hours.

• All NSAIDs and acetaminophen currently give you their full benefit with one single dose, with the exception of willowbark tea, which requires two for the full effect. "Topping up" after a couple of hours can keep the effect going, but there's no point taking e.g. two ibuprofen at a time instead of one. Expect this to change in the future as the underlying code is improved.

• Wintergreen is very short-acting and mostly topical, so it can stay on the older/simpler system as it's unlikely to have any pertinent drug interactions.

• There are at present no overdose mechanics or drug interactions for any of these medications. That will change in the future.

• Added a couple of title screen tips that help explain how these medications can be used.

Tileset Updates

• Updated a bunch of tileset stuff with help from @Steady Gaze. This backports many random items from DDA's MSXOtto+, including overlays for different held lights, autoinjectors, generators, and a new tile to differentiate the SWAT zombie from the standard police zombie. SWAT zombies are tougher and have better loot, so keep an eye out for them!

Translation Updates

• @SD-5600 submitted several updates to the simplified Chinese translation.

  • @SD-5600 对简体中文翻译提交了多份修改意见。

• @SSZY submitted some updates to the simplified Chinese translation.

  • @SSZY 对简体中文翻译提交了多份修改意见。

Bugfixes and Minor Changes

• NPCs will now complain more frequently about dirty wounds. If you have their complaints disabled, you're not going to hear anything from them until they're very seriously infected, so make sure you give them antiseptic to clean their own wounds or regularly check up on them after combat.

• Removed the Lifestraw. This item didn't really work like the real things do, and would need to be redone to make it a more reasonable simulation. Moreover, it just sort of negated all the water purification mechanics without any cost or interaction, which is generally grounds for removal of just about anything.

• Fixed the Fruiting EoC related to Plant's Fruiting mutation. This was running checks every second for all characters, and while this was a very cheap check, it's always good to find optimizations.

• The EOD tech profession now spawns with its helmet.

• Attached and makeshift earplugs now properly have their intended flags, and can be worn with helmets and by huge and tiny characters.

• @Steady Gaze removed some unused item variants.

• Backported a fix from DDA for the "switch does not handle case f_null" error you'd get popping up once in a while, especially around apartment buildings.