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Katrina Refrigerators


thiosk

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This post is about a mechanic to use the queasy moodle when you discover rotten food (for the first time). I think we are ready for this mechanic because we have bandanas face masks gloves and gas mask equipment items.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katrina_refrigerator

 

A katrina refrigerator is a phenomena that happened after, well, katrina. After the hurricane came through and the city largely evacuated, You had tens of thousands of full, stocked refrigerators in a city that shut down for months in new orleans in the middle of summer. People were fully stocked like normal and then went to power off.

 

These things were disgusting. hilariously dragged out of houses during recovery and abandoned on the street, they were painted with "open if you dare" "trick or treat" "end of the rainbow" and so forth because their contents are VILE. You can't really salvage much inside them, the fridge is basically ruined, and cracking an unopened katrinabomb for the first time is an assault on all senses. 

 

I think exposure to rotten food (OR SURPRISE CORPSES)  should give a large disgust factor in the form of "queasy moodle damage"

 

for example you could give a -1 to queasy per rotten food item- eg a rotten banana has 10 hunger so contributes 10. maybe not even enough for queasy. but a rotten chicken has -40. Might be enough to go all the way to "sick". Finding a chicken, steak, ham in the fridge would make you seriously ill. Because there is nothing causing the illness, it could return to normal kinda quickly. Importantly, i think the damage should occur when the cabinet/fridge/etc is opened for the first time. This lets you move rotten food items into compost or having your own produce rot and not be a surprise. this approach avoids additional trackable statistics about items in the world simply using "magnitude of hunger" as a rottenness factor for smell. 

 

Rotten food in a powered refridgerator does not give this effect. This would prevent you getting sick if it was just a rotten banana or bad milk or something like that. I don't want to punish discovering rot, i want to make katrina fridges a danger for looting. want to imitate the katrina fridge where refrigerators are disgusting stink bombs just waiting to be unleashed not long after the power goes out nationally in mid-late july 1992. Therefore, if the unpowered fridge is opened for the first time and has rotten food items in it you get katrina bombed. Maybe a foghorn sound effect plays and then the moodle pops up queasy or sick) Maybe it has a radius so you can stink out your buddies in multiplayer or attract zombies with smell impulse. (open a window! no! Don't open the windows they can smell us!)

 

The core effect of this is that you don't just get to go around probing grocery store freezer sections with impunity. A single rotten icecream should go to "sick"

I propose that gloves, glasses, bandana, and other optional facemask could block a percentage of it, and a gas mask could give a very strong or complete resistance. because it is applied on discovery you could just multiply like one of the insulation factors or something as a fraction of 1. 

 

The same thing could be applied to bodies found in containers. EG opening a trash bin and finding three corpses in it. BOOSH your character gets sick. Or, even more ambitious, find a human corpse in an enclosed space like a bathroom or closet. This kind of already exists. If you can hear the flies, you should be building towards queasy. Bloody could also make you queasy. Like, you gotta be pretty damn drenched in blood to move towards sick but that would give a real reason for clean clothes and self washing other than just illness transmission. This could make combat "icky" in addition to tiring and dangerous! 

 

Weak stomach or iron gut would give a negative or positive bonus to this (such as a weak stomach would go damn near feverish after a bad run in with too rotten refrigerator and would need to seriously find shelter and recoup. Id also imagine desensitized would be impacted by bloody and smells less as well. 

 

the bad thing about this idea is that fridges and freezers are just regular containers, so just walking into proximity lets you see in them. I'd be asking to make it more deliberate. So maybe its a nonstarter. just a would be nice. But i'd like to see that sickness moodle get more use!

Edited by thiosk
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