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Sleep, lack of sleep, and mental health.


deprav

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I've been thinking about sleep and how certain moodlets should have more impact on its quality. Physical pain, anxiety, depression, fear etc... Those are all sleep depriving factors and I think they should act more as such.

It could work like this : you go to bed with a high level of pain, you sleep for 6 hours ; instead of recovering 100% of what you would have recovered if you weren't in pain (or took painkillers), you only recover 75% of your "sleep level", and the higher the pain, the less you recover for the same amount of slept time.

Sleep is as essential for the body/brain as water and food. A zombie-apocalyptic world is a scary and exhausting place, peaceful sleep should be just as hard to find as other necessities imo ! Being tired would actually be a real tangible issue in that environment, going through days with the tired moodlet never fully going away.

Poor sleep quality is also an open door on our characters' mental health going down to dark places, and I hope that's something we'll see again sooner or later. Sleep deprivation is an infernal spiral that could havefer beautiful game outcomes :3

I remember the old days of green-zombies when the character's sanity was an actual thing, auditive and visual hallucinations when you'd stay locked up for too long and such (or was I too baked?). That was just brilliant. I'd like to see this back, there should be no moodlet indicating to the player that his character is losing it, but long periods of anxiety / depression / sleep deprivation would mess with your character's mind... Imaginary moanings or bangings, brief apparitions of zombies in your field of view, imaginary survivor running away from a house you're about to enter, chasing him like a mad man, other players wondering what the feck's happening as they see you chase something they didn't see.

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This would be. F**king. Amazing. I have always loved delving into the physological side of the human brain. I've always loved stories or movies where the main character would end up becoming insane, Thinking he sees things, and ends up taking his or her own life.  lol but anways I have always liked the more dark side of human nature. Would pay copious amounts of money three dollars because i'm broker than 2009 american economy to have this implemented. 10 / 10, would do again.

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I like the hallucinations and such if you don't get enough sleep, but I think my character is already getting the tired moodle too often as it is.

 

I just started a new game. On day 1 I spawned in an area with few zombies. I looted 8 houses, killed 3 zombies and was "tired" after 11 hours. I thought my toon was in her 20s. Get up at 7 am and tired at 6:30 p.m.? Doesn't seem realistic to me, especially on a day of light activity. I did have to fight one zombie while encumbered, that put me out of breath and I stayed that way for about an hour cuz I was a little slow unloading my burden so I could catch my breath. Maybe that's what did me in, not sure.

 

But the next day, after 7 hours of sleep, I did some more normal levels of zombie killing and I was tired after only 7 hours of work.

 

I think you get tired too easily in the base game, and it shouldn't take literally forever to catch your breath if you get out of breath while burdened.  I've posted before about how digging with a trowel makes you need 14 hours of sleep after being awake for 5 hours.  20 year old construction workers and rangers don't get sleepy from a few hours of hard labor. Physically tired, maybe, but not sleepy. 

 

While I like the idea of adding in some of the features suggested here, I think the baseline needs a bit of tweaking as well.

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Yep the basic sleep mechanic does need some tweaking. Getting up at 7am and being tired at 6:30pm sounds about right to me if you spent your whole day standing and killing zombies, and never took a nap ;o

But yeah, the rest migh be a bit weird ! Though, did you know the way we actually sleep now (long nights of sleep and long awake periods) isn't natural for us ? we've been sleeping like this since Industry and work hours took so much place in our society, our previous sleep pattern was something like sleep 3 hours / awake 4 hours.

As for PZ, maybe a good thing would be to make a clear distinction between weariness -which is psychological- and tiredness/sleepyness - which is physiological and related to your "internal clock" and sunshine/moonlight.

Having messed up nights of sleep could make you feel weary after a while, feeling tired all day long but not sleepy, and later prone to hallucinations and mind snapping. So weariness would be a thing after a period of bad sleep and harsh conditions, but exhaustion (and passing out) would be a thing just after a couple days of sleepless activity. (maybe less if you're weary, and more if you're in awesome shape).

 

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Getting up at 7 and being tired at 6:30 never once occurred to me at age 20 in real life. But it did in game, and it was NOT a day of solid zombie killing. It was a day where I killed 3 zombies.

Ah yeah sorry I misread the "3 zombies killed".

But has it ever occured to you to live during a zombie apocalypse tho ? ;o I mean it's a dangerous environment and you spent 10 hours walking around, looking for material to survive, it's probably more exhausting than a normal working day or a school day. Starting to feel some fatigue after 10h of scavenging doesn't seem that weird to me. What you described after does seem bizar tho.

Plus, you can still be active for quite some time after you got the first fatigue moodlet !

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I don't know what the proper terms are for sleep-deprivation tiredness and physical-exhaustion tiredness, but both of these phenomena could definitely be implemented more intelligently. If they were, I think sleep quality would be an awesome addition. In fact, right now, you have to sleep on a bed, couch, or chair, but all are the same (right?); I think with sleep quality as a metric you could just turn it into a system something like:

 

sleep-potential = tiredness + comfort

 

...and have three thresholds: spwake_up, spfall_asleep, and sppass_out. That would make it so that:

  • If you're exhausted, you could literally right-click and select, "Sleep On Floor".
  • If you sleep in your clothes without a blanket in a chair in a cold warehouse, you'll wake up tired (but not as tired as if you lay on the floor).
  • If you're tired and hungry, getting indoors someplace warm and eating some food might just make you zonk out spontaneously.

and so on.

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