1.8.0

Seven systems, and one of them is the first thing a body in this mod keeps.

An artery

There were two kinds of bleeding and they were one kind at two speeds. The answer was always the same answer; you simply had more or less time to give it.

An artery is a different injury. Not a worse cut: it is a body that is not losing blood but throwing it away. It goes with the heart, it is brighter - that blood has not been anywhere yet - and it does not clot, ever. A dressing over one soaks through and keeps soaking.

The rate is 4.5% of volume per second against one percent for a heavy bleed. Measured on a live server: an artery in a thigh blacks the leg out in six seconds, has the pulse at 171 and thready by twelve, and puts you on the floor inside thirty.

There are exactly two answers, and both were already in the mod waiting for an injury that truly needed them: a hand pushed hard into it, or a strap above it. While the hand is there nothing comes out at all (measured: eight seconds at zero, and 4.5% a second again the moment it lifts). A strap stops it dead, at the price a strap always charges.

You can tell it from an ordinary bleed without opening a chart, which matters more than any of the rest:

• on the body it pulses - brightening and dimming on the beat, readable across a clearing;
• the particles are thrown sideways in bursts instead of dripping down;
• on the corner figure it flashes twice as fast, in a different red;
• it has its own chart icon: a jet going sideways rather than a drop going down;
• and the pressure game for it is not the same game - no pool with a run, but a jet that arrives on the beat, needing more weight and a longer hold, and lifting the hand does not cost you half the progress, it costs you all of it.

Rare on purpose: 12% of the wounds that would already have opened a heavy bleed, and only in limbs and necks. The mod will not invent an artery in a belly, because there is no answer to one - and that is not difficulty, it is a death sentence with extra steps.

Going out

This is not the same as going down. Going down is a clock counting towards a grave. A faint is a body deciding it cannot keep the head supplied while standing up, so it stops standing up - which fixes it.

Seven seconds and you are fine. Nothing is damaged, nothing is permanent, nothing needs treating. It is the mod's only free warning; everything else here tells you something is wrong by taking something away for good.

What it costs is the seven seconds and wherever you happened to be. In a field it is an inconvenience. On a ledge, in water, or in front of something that was already swinging, it is the whole of the danger - and none of that had to be invented.

Three roads in: volume going (steeper the emptier you are), pain on its own with no blood lost at all - the faint at the sight of a broken arm, usually somebody else's - and the bill for adrenaline. Getting up and running multiplies the chance by two and a half.

The screen goes completely black. Not darker: black. You cannot see anything in a faint, and the mod is not going to pretend you can nearly see.

What it looks like from inside

The mod used to say all of this with vanilla potion effects. Losing blood handed you a bottle of blindness; a rattled head handed you nausea. Those are blunt: tuned for potions, fighting every other mod for the same effects, putting icons in the corner for things that are not potions - and worst of all, the same four effects for nine different states. A body running out of blood and a body with a fever looked identical from the inside.

Now the thing itself is drawn:

• volume going closes the edges in and takes the colour out - grey and narrow from the outside first, then a tunnel, then nothing;
• the heart shows in that narrowing: everything dims and returns on your own real pulse, so a screen that has started beating quickly is a reading nobody had to take;
• a hit head will not hold the horizon, and does not bring it back to quite the same place;
• fever and sepsis wash the room warm and soft;
• cold is the opposite: pale, hard, and a shiver instead of a drift;
• a faint, and anaesthetic, are black.

None of it changes anything about the body. It changes what the body can see. All of it has a strength slider and an off switch in the client settings - the picture and the camera movement separately, because it is the movement that makes people ill and nobody should have to give up the rest to be rid of it.

The splint stays on

A splint used to be a full stop: the bone was set, the item was spent, the stick vanished.

Now the stick stays. It is drawn on the body - two boards and two ties, over whatever else is wrapped round the limb - it is on the chart, and while it is there the limb is held: the bone is left alone whatever its owner is doing.

The clock on it is not a timer, it is a bargain. Walking runs it down. Running puts time back on, every second of it, and it takes longer again the next time. That is the honest version of what happens to a fracture nobody will stay off: you are not sent back to the start, it simply takes longer.

Measured: a twenty second splint with sprinting on went 71 → 74 → 77 → 80 seconds, three per second, and counted down again the moment the sprinting stopped. There is a ceiling, so a bad week still ends.

When the clock runs out the splint comes off by itself and the bone is done - and at that moment, and only that moment, the body writes down that it has broken there.

A splinted arm costs the quality of anything done with it; a splinted leg costs speed. Neither is pain, so painkillers do not hide either: there is nothing to numb.

Limbs come off blades now

The mod could take an arm off with a blast, and off with a saw. The gap between them was exactly where it happens in life: somebody with an axe.

A blast is rare and a saw is a decision, so in eight versions nobody ever lost a limb to the thing that actually takes limbs off.

It needs an edge. A zombie's fists do not do this, an arrow does not, a fall certainly does not: it is a blade, swung hard, into a limb - mostly one already beaten past being a limb. Through a sound one is possible and nearly impossible (4%), because that is how nearly impossible it is. Set it to zero for a game where only ruined limbs come away.

What it leaves is the stump a blast leaves: open, unstrapped, bleeding heavily - and the arm on the ground beside you with a clock on it.

Food allergies

The mod's allergies were to three things in your own bag: antibiotics, morphine, anaesthetic. Those are the allergies that matter to a medic, and they are not the allergies people have.

The commonest in the world are foods. There are seven now - fish, wheat, egg, milk, honey, mushrooms, berries - so seven of the ten possible are things you eat, and a spawn rolls food more often than not.

Here is what makes it interesting: a drug allergy is somebody else's problem to remember about you. A food allergy is yours, every time you open your own inventory. Bread is what you eat when you are hurt, when you are bored, and when you are running away from something, and having one item in that set which will put you down is the whole idea.

Nothing warns you and nothing refuses the click. You eat it, you gain the hunger, and then your throat starts closing: anaphylaxis, the same one the wrong blood and the wrong drug cause, and the answer is the same syringe the mod has always kept for it.

Your own is told to you in chat on the day it is rolled, and it still stamps onto a bracelet - "fish" as readily as "morphine".

The body remembers

This one is mine, and it is the largest thing here.

Every injury in this mod healed back into the same body it started as. Somebody who had survived four amputations, a septic belly and a skull fracture was, once mended, indistinguishable from somebody who had never been touched. A mod about medicine was quietly saying that none of it mattered once it was over.

Parts remember now, and they remember three things:

A knitted bone. It is not weaker - and the mod will not teach that it is. But it is where the next fall lands, because whatever broke that femur is the thing this body keeps doing. And it knows the weather: an old break aches before rain, and aches indoors, because what it answers to is the pressure rather than getting wet. Cold does it too. It costs nothing, heals nothing and cannot be treated - the only thing in the mod that is purely a person telling you about their body, and the only reason here to look at the sky.

A scar. Skin that has been opened and closed is not skin: less blood goes through it, which is exactly why the next infection settles where the last one did - nearly twice as likely on that part.

Stiffness. A deep burn closes by pulling its own edges together; a wound closes tight; a limb sewn back on does not straighten the way it did. A stiff arm is not a weak arm - it is one that does not go where it is put - so what it costs is the quality of work done with it, and a stiff leg costs speed.

The counts never go down, and only dying clears them. The stiffness does, and that split is the whole design: the history ratchets and the disability does not. A history that only accumulates turns a long-lived character into one who is quietly getting worse, and the fastest cure for that would be to go and die - which is the opposite of everything this mod is for.

Working it loose

A new thing to do with bare hands, and the only treatment in the mod aimed at something permanent.

Take the joint out to the edge of what it will do and hold it there. Short of the edge nothing loosens - being gentle with a contracture is how people keep one for life. Past the edge something tears and it is tighter tomorrow than today.

The edge is not drawn anywhere and cannot be, because the only thing that knows where it is, is the person whose arm it is. So they tell you: they tense before they say anything, they say something before it hurts, and they shout before it tears. The whole instrument is the patient's face, which is why it is drawn as large as it is - it is not decoration, it is the readout.

Three sets. One session per limb per day, which is not a cooldown dressed up but the shape of the treatment: what loosens a contracture is a short session repeated over weeks, not a slider somebody can drag in a minute.

And on yourself it is worth half. You stop at your own pain. Every time.

Bones move, and bones heal where they were left

For eight versions this mod had one kind of fracture and one answer to it: the bone broke, a splint went on, the bone was set. That is the easy half of what a fracture is, and it left out the half everybody who has seen one remembers: the ends move.

There are three rungs now, and each is a different job.

Broken, in line. Two pieces, and the pieces are where they were. A splint is the whole answer, exactly as it always was.

Out of line. The limb is the wrong shape, and nobody needs a chart for that - everyone in the clearing can see it. On the body it is a shoulder of bone standing where no bone should be; on the chart it has its own icon; and on the splint screen the bone is drawn as it actually is, two halves apart, instead of the one picture that used to be drawn over every fracture whatever was underneath.

And this is what changes: a splint stops being the answer. Strap a stick to a bone that is out of line and you have held it precisely where it should not be. The mod does not refuse - "no time, no hands, splint it anyway" is a real decision and taking it away would take away the rung - but it says out loud what will come of it.

Bone through the skin. The worst of the three and the only one that is also a wound: it bleeds, it cannot close while there is bone in the way, and it is the fastest road to infection here, by three times. No splint goes on it and nothing is set: a surgeon first, to clean it out and close it. What is left afterwards is an ordinary displaced fracture.

Setting it

A new thing to do with bare hands, three moves in order, and on screen it looks like nothing else in the mod:

1. Pull along the bone and away from the body until the ends can pass. Not enough and they grind against each other - which is drawn. Too much and something between them tears.
2. Line it up while the pull is holding: the far half back under the near one.
3. Let it down slowly. The ends seat as the pull comes off, and a hand taken away all at once drops them together however they were lying.

Three outcomes rather than two: set; seated out of line (nothing spoiled, try again - much the commonest first attempt); or torn, and in one case in five the end of the bone finds a vessel, which is the artery from this same version.

It is also the only treatment in the mod the room can hear. A bone being pulled back through a limb that can feel it is not quiet. Measured on a live server: a zombie with its follow range zeroed - unable to find the player at all on its own - sat at seventeen blocks and did not move, then closed to touching distance within six seconds of the scream. A patient under the mask makes no noise, and so does one deep enough into the morphine, which is the first reason to carry that mask that has nothing to do with quality.

Healed crooked

A bone left out of line knits out of line - and it is the only permanent loss of health in the mod: the part is worth less for good (measured: a leg at 14.0 becoming 12.3 the moment the splint came off). It walks slower, and it aches on the weather louder than any straight bone ever did.

There is one way out and it is the real one: a surgeon breaks it again, on purpose, so that this time somebody can set it straight. It is the only treatment in this mod that is the injury.

The guide: thirteen sections

The guide had grown to a flat list of seventy-one pages, in the order they were written over eight versions - which is the order they happened to the mod, and not any order a reader has.

Now the list has a level above it: one heading open at a time. Somebody looking for what to do about a burn wants the four burn pages, not the other sixty-seven.

Bleeding	blood, the artery, the arrow, the strap, volume, the trail, reperfusion
Bones	a crack, a break, out of line, setting it, bone through the skin, wearing a splint, healed crooked, the skull
Open wounds	dressings, infection, a blacked part, the theatre, mending
Burns and cold	depth, pressing on one, smoke, going cold
Chest and belly	a crushed lung, organs, illness with a place, referred pain
Illness	the course, catching, viruses, worms, rabies
Losing a limb	dying, gone, taken off by a blade, sewn back, prosthetics, wear
On the floor	going out, the airway, arrest, the position, shock, carrying
Readings	pulse, breathing, temperature, thermometer, where it hurts, out of ten
The bag	painkillers, needles, the mask, allergy, taking things off
The head	concussion, deafness, the blast, adrenaline
You, and the room	what you can see, a second pair of hands, tired arms, sleep, cold, tags
What it leaves	a scar, aching on the weather, stiffness, working it loose

Shut the open heading and the card holds thirteen rows and nothing else.

Try it, over nobody

Every procedure in this mod is learnt in the worst possible place. The first saw a player ever holds is over a friend who is losing the leg anyway. The first time anybody meets the syringe game is the first time somebody's heart has stopped.

So a page with a procedure behind it now has a line at the bottom: "Try it, over nobody." It opens the same game with nothing on the other end of it - no patient, no packet, no item spent, no outcome. It cannot go well and it cannot go badly, and you can go again immediately, which is the one thing a patient never offers.

It is the manikin in the corner of every teaching room, and it is here for the same reason that one is: so the first time is not the time it counts.

Thirty-eight of the seventy-one pages have something to run. Nothing is unlocked by it and nothing is refused without it, because a mod that made players practise before treating would have invented homework.