Updates 4-26-2026

Opioids

• Opioids have had their effects and addiction rewritten. They now use the same system as alcohol and cannabis, tracking the actual concentration of the stuff in your system rather than just an arbitrary effect.

• Opioids start off mild but start stacking speed and stat debuffs as intensity increases. At the upper levels, you may vomit or start nodding out.

• At intensity 5, 6, and 7 (of 7), you are in mortal peril and may simply die at any time. This should almost never happen at intensity 5, but just know that it can.

• Most of the time, you should be trying for intensity 2 or 3, which is where most of the drugs will put you.

• Tramadol is a weaker form of the drug that takes longer to kick in, but lasts a few hours longer. Codeine is moderate dose in pill form. Oxycodone is a heavy dose in pill form. Morphine is a heavy dose that comes as an injectable liquid. Because of this, morphine takes effect almost instantly, whereas pills may take up to a half hour to start working.

• Heroin is much stronger than morphine but far more addictive. It's horrible for you because it's cut with who knows what.

• Removed mutated poppy plants. These were old and kind of weird.

• Added poppies. These can be found growing in gardens and can be harvested in summer and planted in your own yard.

• Poppy pods can be used to make opium tar if you have the recipe. It requires only a few points of science and medical skill, and is fairly easy to throw together. Opium tar is a weaker form of opioid, but maybe it will be OK if you just take more of it to compensate...

• Because these items are frequently critical to survival, it may behoove you to test them out and get familiar with them before you really need them.

Naloxone

• Naloxone is a drug you can find in pharmacies, hospitals, ambulances, first aid kits, drug stashes, and a few other spots. It is used to treat opioid overdose. It instantly reduces the amount of opioids in your system by a large amount, and continues to reduce them over time for about an hour after. You can stack up to 3 doses of naloxone at a time. The only side effects, other than the pain that's likely to come back when the opioid effect goes away, are nausea and a loss of existing morale buffs from drugs that you may have going. It also kills food morale buffs, but that's due to a code limitation and will be fixed eventually.

• Added a newspaper article about naloxone which will hopefully alert some players to its utility.

Other Drug Stuff

• Fine-tuned and improve the effects of alcohol and cannabis.

• It is now possible to die of alcohol overdose. This only happens at the highest intensity, dead drunk, and is rare enough that you stand a decent chance of surviving even if you get there.

• Renamed several drugs to be called what they are rather than a vague description of what they do. "fast-acting sedative" is now alprazolam. "Prescription sedative" is diazepam. "Prescription stimulant" is dextroamphetamine. "Heartburn Medication" is bismuth subsalicylate.

• "low-grade methamphetamine" and "high-grade methamphetamine" are now crank and crystal meth.

NPC Doctors

• The NPC doctor and nurse at Tacoma and the doctor at NECC have had their medical services reworked. The doctor at the refugee center now also offers these new services.

  • You may ask these characters to treat you, for a cost. This will cause them to administer a saline infusion if you are at moderate or higher hypovolemic shock and naloxone if you're in opioid overdose territory. They bandage and disinfect all of your wounds, and will splint any broken limbs.

  • They will also attempt to diagnose a number of medical issues, rolling their skill against the difficulty of identifying each particular problem. If they are able to spot it, they will give you advice on how to treat it, but will not treat it themselves. In almost all cases the cure is "eat a pill" or "wait a couple days" so it's just like real doctors.

  • After that, they will evaluate your cardio fitness, body weight, and lifestyle, and give some more general medical advice. This is mostly intended to help players organically learn how to keep these admittedly mysterious stats in a good range.

  • Getting treated in this way teaches you a small amount of Medicine as you are learning by observing. This caps at rank 4.

Other Stuff

• Molt warnings for chitin mutations now come as popups rather than just breezing past your message log. This is because someone wasn't reading and they started molting while driving and crashed their car and almost died.

• Crustacean carapace is now a post-threshold mutation.

• Fencing masks are no longer made of solid steel.

• LIXA was still (again?) able to rotate, causing it to sometimes show up in its buggy east-west orientation. I believe I have finally (again?) fixed it.

• Autodrink will now make characters drink from autodrink zones whenever they get thirsty, rather than waiting until they are very thirsty. This prevents players having to micromanage to avoid speed debuffs.

• Hostile NPCs should be a bit more adventurous about investigating sounds and opening doors. I say should because NPC code is really complicated and it's often difficult to pin down what is causing a given NPC to behave in a certain way.

• Removed the leftover unused generic gun names from the 9mm guns. This is not the same thing as the generic guns mod, it was just dead code that was causing some unwanted behavior.

• Harmful coughs (like from heavy smoke) now only damage you half as often.

• Cleaned up and standardized scarves and keffiyeh. There are no longer long/short variants, scarves fit on all characters, and you don't have to adjust them. They all have the HOOD and COLLAR flag so they will automatically warm your head and face when needed if there's not already an item on that layer on that body part.

• Crossbow bolts no longer add an arbitrary amount of noise to your shots. They all have 0 loudness, so crossbows are much quieter overall and it doesn't matter what kind of bolt you use.

• @SD-5600 has submitted yet more updates to the simplified Chinese translation.