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Hello, I come to share an idea that personally I would find it very interesting for you to add. -My suggestion was that they add a more intense state of anxiety, it goes from when a player spends a lot of time with the maximum level of the state of anxiety, passes to a new state called "Insanity", I mean that when the character the one we are playing with suffers for a certain time anxiety at the highest level constantly passes to a new state that is that of "madness". -How long does the character take to go from distressing anxiety to madness? The necessary time of constant anxiety to go to madness I think it should be days depending on the character's traits, but I will leave it to you to better adapt it to the game -What consequences should the "madness" state have ?: I have the idea that the "madness" state produces the character hallucinate sounds of zombies that do not exist either grunts or footsteps, that the character has extreme panic attacks for a certain time even if there are no zombies around him. If you want you can add more things. -How long would the "insanity" state last? I think it should be permanent since my idea is that it is not a very easy state to activate -Why would I like this suggestion to be implemented? This way they give more tension to the players and it is something that when they add multiplayer it could give a lot of play Sorry if my English is bad, I am from Argentina

Hi developers. I've played this game for since the first beta version. But some recent changes since build 30.12 I guess really annoy me. 1. The changes on exertion system just take all the fun away because It stops the fluency of gaming. I don't know how long will it take to regenerate again. Average man can run for 1km without any rest and regenerate within less than 3 minutes (How about Marathon). So please don't make this a huge limitation for player's activities. And it is also not realistic. 2.Frequent negative factors. In the newest version, I feel easy to have negative emotion.. anxious, nervous, nauseous...etc. The game is just changed to looking for tea bags, coffee and all kinds of pills. Surviving from zombie and building is the main theme, but not those. You may have bad emotion but not that frequent! The above fact really annoy me and it deprive me of the original fun. Sorry for the poor english.

There's a book by Stephen King called 'Misery', where the main character is held hostage by an obsessed fan in order to write another book of her favourite series. There's a scene (leg amputation aside) where she flies into a rage after he writes a dead character back to life by changing the circumstances already written. She's angry because she considers this 'cheating'. I mention this in terms of this suggestion because I think moodles that state 'depressed' is cheating - depression is a diagnostic label that covers huge range of somatic (physical), emotional, interpersonal and cognitive experiences. These experiences should be shown, otherwise the label is meaningless. I propose: > Include emotion moodle > Depression that is represented by in-game effects and not just a moodle > Schemas - rolled at the beginning that determine characters sensivities 1) Emotion Moodle Moodles currently show physical symptoms (hunger, temperature, pain, tiredness). I think it would be useful to include a semi permanent emotion moodle that expresses the characters current feeling. This would provide information on their state. E.g. content, sad, anger, happy, joy, frustration, surprise, love, anxiety etc. This would particularly come into play within any mental health system introduced into the game, where affective components are generally what defines the experience (even schizophrenia). 2) Depression Symptoms (in game effects): - Low mood or sadness occuring frequently and for long periods - Irritability - quick to anger when interacting with NPCs - Increased, or decreased appetite - Increased, or decreased sleep - Disturbed sleep - difficulty falling asleep or waking in the night - Tiredness regardless of sleep - Lack of energy and low motivation - Slower movement, decreased holding weight, fatigue much faster - Difficulty concentrating - reading skill books is much slower, crafting is much slower - Memory problems - less xp from performing tasks There are multiple cognitive symptoms (e.g. the 'cognitive triad' or low self esteem) that currently can't really be portrayed. I thought about proposing a 'thoughts' moodle to give the topic the character was thinking about, but it may be too much work to include (would be very interesting though!). Severity: Depression should be a continuum from mild, to moderate, to severe. The above symptoms effects should increase appropriately. Severe depression is crippling, and the PC should suffer appropriately. Causes: See the schemas section. Other could include trauma, upheaval (e.g. losing a long term safe house) or long term deprivation of other needs (e.g. food, water, safety, social etc.). Depression does not fall from the sky, so should never occur randomly, but should always been in context of the characters world. Considerations: - Social support - evidence shows support acts as a buffer against negative events. Those in groups with close relationships have reduced chance of developing depression, and/or it passes more quickly - Behaviour - currently the game has boredom. Although this is sort of related: depression tends to lead to self-isolation and withdrawal from activites, and thus from any rewarding engagement with the environment. The lack of activities can lead to, or at least maintain depression. - Suicide - control taken away from the player I consider false difficulty and comes under my 'cheating' category. Suicide should come from the frustration of the player not being able to deal with a depressed charater, and thus reflecting the important element of hopelessness about the future. - Relapse - the biggest factor that predicts relapse is the number of relapses in the past. The more times someone has been depressed, the more likely they'll get depressed (can explain this if anyone wants further info). Recovering: The most obvious treatments include: - Time (no treatment) - called spontaneous remission, one article states about a quarter of people will recover from depression without any treatment after approximately three months, this goes up to about half in a about a year. Of course this means it can take much longer without. - Antidepressants - different strengths depending on depth of depression. Risk of side effects. Only treats current episode of depression. - Self help books - slow recover, but increased protection against future depressive episodes. - Psychological therapy - if an NPC in the group is trained. Faster recover, good protection against future depressive episodes. Variable effects depending on person. 3) Schemas Schemas is a psychological term to describe our knowledge structures. Young developed it into it's own type of therapy (which is brilliant by the way). It describes how our early experiences developed patterns we tend to repeat when we're older, especially in relationships. In the sense in could be used in PZ, is that it could determine how each character is more sensitive to different events, i.e. what makes one character depressed, doesn't necessarily make another. These would be invinsible but used behind the scenes for calcualtions for emotions and onset of depression. Some good ones are: - Loss - losses through death or abandonment are particulary stressful - Rejection - percieved rejection from groups or their members leads to stress - Isolation - being alone too long leads to stress - Separate in a group - part of a group, but not really fitting in leads to feelings of alienation - Mistrust/Abuse - being robbed or used by other people is particulary hurtful - Subjugation - being under an authoratarian leader leads to resentful and internalised anger - Shame - performing acts that the character is shameful of leads later to depression - Unrelenting Standards - being not the best at something leads to stress - Entitlement - not being given what they want leads to resentment These could be rolled on each character creation to determine their makeup. Random may mean mean they are more vunerable to a few things, or none of them.