Bearing

Bearing 0.2.0

A full day of playtesting turned this into a noticeably different mod. The headline: a third of the conditioning system did nothing, and now it does.

A third of the tracks were doing nothing

Thirteen of the forty conditioning tracks trained, filled a bar, and had no effect on the game at all. Every one of them now pays off as the thing it is about.

• fire hardened — fire and lava hit up to 45% softer
• out of air — drowning damage halved, and air comes back while you are under
• out in the rain — the cold gets out of you faster
• digging — soft ground gives way up to 45% quicker
• crafting — the offcuts sometimes make one more
• making fire — a practised hand spares the steel
• handling animals — your stock grows up and re-breeds sooner
• shearing — sheep in your care regrow their coat
• trading — the village thinks better of you, so the prices follow
• riding and boating — your mount and your boat go faster because you are the one on them
• tilling soil — ground you have worked is readier for seed
• head for heights — knockback resistance, and see below

Bulk and cut

Muscle protein synthesis has a hard ceiling that eating more cannot raise. Past a modest surplus you are not building faster, you are only storing the difference.

• Keeping your bar around 14/20 builds exactly as much muscle as keeping it full, for a third of the fat
• Training in a deficit no longer loses you what you have. Work a muscle and it stops decaying
• Muscle memory — rebuilding something you once had comes back at three times the speed, tapering as you reach your old peak. It never decays and it is never shared

The set point

Your body slowly decides what weight it is, and then defends it.

• Weight you gained recently comes off nearly five times faster than weight your body has accepted
• It ratchets — about two hours of play to accept a gain, nine to accept a loss
• A binge costs you nothing. Two continuous hours is where it becomes yours
• The castaway starts far below his own set point, so his first stretch back is fast and then it slows hard. Which is how coming back from starvation actually goes

Over-eating

Nothing stops you eating any more. The game never takes the fork out of your hand — it only makes you regret it.

• Slow, then queasy, then you cannot run, then genuinely unwell
• Nausea comes in waves rather than constantly, because that is how feeling sick works
• The overflow turns into real weight. This is the fast way to put it on, and the price is a bad twenty minutes
• Feed other players. Right-click someone with food and it goes in — bar, then reserve, then fullness. It counts as Hearth for you, whatever you meant by it

Reading your own body

The panel was showing internal variable names and unitless numbers. It now speaks in things a person recognises.

• Weight in pounds, height in feet and inches
• Stomach and burn rate in calories — you hold 2,750, you burn 2,810 a day, and those two lines can be read against each other
• Muscle against fat, the way anybody actually tracks their own body
• Forty conditioning tracks renamed from identifiers to names. gloom_sight was two different dark tracks and no way to tell them apart
• Food shows the vanilla drumsticks; the panel carries the one-line key. The translator is the thing already on your screen

Presence

• Nerve now resists dread and awe — 35% and 25% at full. The first thing in the mod where your body defends against somebody else's presence
• Bloodshed counts the undead. Most vanilla hostiles are undead and they used to feed only Decay, so a player who fought constantly ended up rotten rather than bloody
• Quiet is earned by sneaking, not by standing still with shift held, and not by simply not fighting
• Archery pays off — draw strength, which buys flatter arc, longer range and a harder hit from one number
• Landing and long falls pay off — free blocks and a damage cut

Big-pack compatibility

• Armour is classified by its defense values, not by matching material names. Modded cloth used to weigh nearly as much as plate
• Fire, furnaces and milk all detect modded versions now
• Food calories are read live from each item, so anything any mod adds or rebalances is correct automatically

Fixes

• The sticking bug. Bounding boxes only updated when vanilla happened to refresh them, then jumped to full size in one step without checking for collision — so growing while against a wall put you inside it. The two sides also adopted the new size at different moments
• Body setup screen text no longer draws through the mannequin
• Panel no longer runs off the edge of the screen
• Eating rotten flesh no longer crashes the game
• A grown stomach is no longer a penalty. Counting the reserve was missing, so a big stomach on a full bar scored worse than a small one

Alpha, honestly. The multiplayer half — feeding, regard, kinship, the stare-down — still has never had a second player in the world. Thirteen new payoffs shipped in this build have not been balanced by anything except judgement. Bug reports from anyone running it with a friend are worth more to me than anything else.

No library dependencies. Forge 1.20.1. MIT.