Health and status
How health, blood, shock and the hidden immune system work, what the status icon colours and arrows mean, and how to heal faster.
Your character runs on four values: health, blood, shock and an immune system you never see. They feed into each other — low blood slows healing, low food stops your blood coming back, a weak immune system lets diseases grow. Knowing how they connect tells you why you keep passing out or why you are not getting better.
The four values
Health
Health goes from 0 to 100; at 0 you die. Hits, falls, starving, dying of thirst, freezing and some diseases take it away. It comes back on its own, and how fast depends almost entirely on your blood (see regeneration).
Low health shows in how you move: below half your character starts to move like an injured person, below about a fifth you can no longer sprint.
Blood
A healthy character has 5,000 blood. You lose it mainly by bleeding (see Injuries). Two thresholds matter:
- At 3,000 or less you keep passing out (see unconsciousness).
- Below 2,500 you bleed out and die.
Bleeding slows down as your blood drops, down to about a third of the normal rate near the end — so a wound that would drain you in minutes at full blood takes longer to finish you off.
Shock
Shock goes from 0 to 100 and has no icon. You see it as the edges of your screen darkening and closing in. Hits take shock away — head hits far more than body hits — and so do falls, walking on broken legs and very low blood. When shock drops below 25 you go unconscious.
The immune system
The immune system is hidden. It is simply the average of how full four things are: energy, water, health and blood. All four near full means a strong immune system; any of them low drags it down.
| Level | Average of the four |
|---|---|
| Great | above 95 % |
| High | 72 to 95 % |
| Medium | 35 to 72 % |
| Low | 15 to 35 % |
| Critical | 15 % or less |
The stronger it is, the fewer diseases can grow in you. At high or great your body beats a cold on its own. Salmonella and cholera only lose against a great immune system. Wound infections keep growing however strong you are, and so does food poisoning while the bad food is still in your stomach — those need treatment. The details are in Diseases.
One Multivitamin Pills pill puts your immune system at great for 5 minutes. Taking another pill starts the 5 minutes again; it does not add up.
Energy and water
Both go from 0 to 5,000; a fresh character starts with about 600 of each. You burn them all the time, energy and water at the same rate:
| You are … | Burned per second, nearly empty bar | Full bar |
|---|---|---|
| Standing still | 0.01 | 0.02 |
| Walking | 0.11 | 0.22 |
| Jogging | 0.31 | 0.62 |
| Sprinting | 0.61 | 1.22 |
- The fuller the bar, the faster it drains — at full twice as fast as when nearly empty. Topping up beyond what you need is partly wasted.
- Jogging non-stop empties a full bar in roughly three hours.
- Being cold burns 0.2 to 0.45 extra energy per second, being too hot costs 0.08 to 0.18 extra water per second, and a fever another 0.2 water (see Temperature and clothing).
When energy or water is at 300 or below, you lose 0.05 health per second for each of them. Your health keeps regenerating meanwhile (0.03 per second at full blood), so from full health one empty bar kills you in about an hour and a half, both together in about 25 minutes. Eating pauses the starvation damage and drinking pauses the thirst damage for as long as your stomach is digesting. Food is digested over minutes, not instantly — see Food and water.
Status icons: colours and arrows
The status icons show health, blood, energy and water. Their colour tells you which range you are in:
| Icon | White | Yellow | Red | Flashing red |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Health | above 50 | 30 to 50 | 15 to 30 | 15 or less |
| Blood | above 4,000 | 3,500 to 4,000 | 3,000 to 3,500 | 3,000 or less |
| Energy | above 800 | 300 to 800 | 1 to 300 | empty |
| Water | above 1,000 | 300 to 1,000 | 1 to 300 | empty |
Within white the icon itself also changes in steps, so a white icon can still be anything from comfortable to brim-full.
The temperature icon uses its own colours: yellow, red and flashing red when you are too warm, light blue, dark blue and flashing blue when you are too cold. What each step does to you is in Temperature and clothing.
The arrows next to an icon show the trend. Arrows up mean the value is rising, arrows down that it is falling, and one to three arrows show how fast. No arrows means steady. On the temperature icon the arrows show where your body temperature is heading right now, not where it is.
Other icons appear only when something is going on: bleeding (with the number of open wounds), a broken leg, sick, wet, a stuffed stomach, the pills icon while a medicine or treatment is working, and the heat buffer after you warmed up at a fire.
Regeneration and what speeds it up
Blood
- On its own you get back 0.3 blood per second, about 1,000 per hour — but only while both your energy and your water icon are white.
- With one of them yellow, blood comes back at about two thirds of that speed; with both yellow at less than half.
- With energy or water red, your blood does not come back at all.
- While you are unconscious with critical blood, it comes back twice as fast.
- An IV saline bag adds about 500 blood (and some water) over roughly 3 minutes, on top of the normal rate. A blood transfusion of a matching type adds 50 blood per second, so 500 go in within about 10 seconds. Both are explained in Injuries.
Health
Health regenerates all the time, even when you are starving, and faster the more blood you have: 0.03 per second with full blood, so from nearly zero back to full in a bit under an hour. With blood just above the deadly 2,500 it is 0.005 per second, six times slower — many hours. So after a fight: stop the bleeding, then get your blood up, and your health follows.
Resting, sitting or lying down does not speed anything up, and food does not heal you directly — it only keeps your blood regenerating and stops starvation damage.
Legs heal on their own track, independent of your blood. Broken legs are covered in Injuries.
Unconsciousness
You pass out when shock drops below 25 and wake up once it is back above 50 and your heart beats normally. Shock comes back by itself — vanilla refills 5 per second while awake and 1 per second while unconscious (the server overview shows if a server changed this). So even a light knockout lasts around half a minute.
- A friend doing CPR on you adds 5 shock per second, which wakes you several times faster.
- Epinephrine Auto-Injector fills your shock up at once and gets an unconscious player back on their feet immediately.
- Passing out while swimming kills you after about 20 seconds.
- Shock does not refill at all while your heartbeat is irregular — a Defibrillator switches it between normal and irregular — so a player knocked out that way stays out until someone uses the defibrillator again.
The low-blood loop
At 3,000 blood or less, shock drains on its own while you are awake — you pass out within about 15 seconds. After waking you get one and a half to two and a half minutes of peace (the better fed and watered, the longer) before it starts again. While you are out with low blood, your blood regenerates twice as fast, so with full food and water you climb out of this loop by yourself — slowly. Saline or a transfusion gets you above 3,000 at once.
When you feel bad: the order of things
- Stop every bleeding wound first.
- Eat and drink until energy and water are white, so your blood comes back.
- Speed up blood with saline or a matching transfusion if you have them.
- Watch for the sick icon and treat diseases early.
Health takes care of itself once blood is up.