How Dehydration Should Work

[FlimFlamm 509]

This thread is a followup to "How Starvation Should Work" .

Currently hydration in-game functions as a meter ranging from -1000 to +4000, and is helpful for preventing over-heating and necessary for regaining health and blood.

When your thirst runs out, you will steadily lose blood until death...

In the real world when you run low on water, the first symptoms to appear are thirst followed by headaches, tiredness, dizziness, and muscle cramps.

When you run very low on water, rapid heartbeat, rapid breathing, and confusion also begin to manifest as symptoms

Delirium and unconsciousness are the final stages of dehydration which finally results in death.

If I was to sit down in the real world with full hydration and was fully nourished (staying seated to not tax my energy levels), I would die of dehydration in about 1 week (give or take a few days given different temp/humidity). If I had water to drink, I would die of starvation in about 3 weeks.

Suggested mechanics based on this information:

- The length of time it takes to die of dehydration should be roughly 1/3rd the length of time it takes to die of starvation (from average nutrition level and not accounting for environmental conditions and physical activity)

- Dehydration should come in stages which apply certain effects as hydration level declines

So, if the total nutrition bar for a player is 30k nutrition points (for example), then the hydration bar should be 10k points (assuming similar point consumption rates)

Based on a theoretical 10k hydration bar, when your hydration falls below 5000, the first wave of status effects should be applied (sweat less/disperse heat less easily, slight reduction in sprint/stamina, increased gun sway), and when it falls below 2500, the second wave of status effects can also be applied (loud heart beat, loud breathing, more fatigue). Finally when hydration reaches zero, random unconsciousness, blood loss, and "delerium" status effects can be applied. Additionally, humans need to be well hydrated in order to fully digest the food we eat. The hydration bar could work as a modifier to proportionally affect how efficiently players digest the food they eat (the more hydrated, the more fully they get the nutrition out of their meals).

Right now the only incentive to stay hydrated is to stave off eventual blood loss or to recover lost blood/HP (and to not over-heat, which is nice). By having status effects to simulate before the outright death phase begins, players will be incentivized to stay hydrated in a more realistic way which actually increases the value of managing hydration well. The penalties that players suffer by not staying hydrated will affect their ability to move around as fast as possible and to engage efficiently in PvP.

Over longer periods of time these mechanics, along with a better starvation and medical system, will inexorably change the way players tend to behave as they refine their habits. Right now you can gear up and run around like Rambo on extended killing tours, taking damage and instantly healing it all, and allowing yourself to nearly starve and dehydrate to death just before taking a short break to max it all out again. Given dehydration status effects, the need to stay well hydrated will need to more consistently be reckoned with in order to make such a play-style effective. Realistic penalties and food/nutrition intake requirements will also achieve the effect of perforating the monotony of running n' gunning. Since the trends in outcomes of PvP encounters will be affected by these kinds of health states, this makes food resource management a much larger part of being a skilled and robust player and an integral part of playing the game.

This fits in with a vision of a more difficult and unforgiving and realistic DayZ. As the suggestions in this thread stand, not dying from dehydration is made a bit easier, but when hydration is neglected it makes everything else more difficult, which makes hydration more important to manage, which makes survival more difficult to manage overall. In a way these suggestions amount to only minor changes from a coding perspective, but the numerous long term effects they could have on game-play are massive.

Edited March 6, 2017 by FlimFlamm

[SacrificeDayz 13]

I think your suggestion is very well written and would definitely be good to see the hydration system work in some way similar to this. The only thing I question is you mention that the average human would die from dehydration in about 1 week when using little energy (sitting down). Yet you fail to mention how this statistic should then apply to the game mechanic, I think anybody including yourself can agree that in order for Dayz to become a harsh survival anti-game the whole process would need to be spaced out in a matter of hours in game time - which personally I think would become more of an annoyance let alone unrealistic.

[FlimFlamm 509]

1 hour ago, SacrificeDayz said:

...you fail to mention how this statistic should then apply to the game mechanic...

Indeed. This was intentional because it's too difficult to say exactly how long it should take to starve and dehydrate to death while in game. As a mechanic, turning up thirst and hunger speed, or turning it way down, really drastically alters how players can play. With long lasting hydration and nutrition players are free to roam far and long focusing on other things entirely, and with short lasting hydration and nutrition players become more restricted due to the more constant health needs. Where the perfect balance actually lies is not easy to fathom without actual in-game testing, and individual servers might be able to tweak such settings.

As a standard though, however long starvation and dehydration takes to actually kill you, dehydration should take roughly 1/3rd the time that starvation takes. Right now dehydration and starvation are already spaced out over only a few hours. If I had to throw out an initial value, I would say that making the processes a bit longer overall than they currently are would be in order. Yes you would need to manage hydration more often to avoid the ill effects, which is more annoying, but it's also decidedly more realistic than suddenly losing blood and dying.

Edited March 7, 2017 by FlimFlamm

[General Zod 1114]

I think we should also adjust the amount of water that has to be consumed in order to get from thirsty to hydrated. Right now it can take 4+ full canteens, there is no way you can put this much water into your body in one go, not that you'd need to. 

Edited March 11, 2017 by General Zod