Fatigue System
Our players are adults with jobs, other hobbies, and families, scattered across different timezones. While we want to create a challenging, apocalyptic sandbox, we also want to respect people's time. However much time you have, we want it to be enough to engage with the world and community and tell your character's story, rather than feel you need to disconnect from that to mechanically compete and progress. With that philosophy in mind, we designed the Fatigue System.
The fatigue system exists to promote intentional decision-making and to help maintain balance in the game’s economy. Players must choose how to spend their character’s energy rather than attempting to gather all available resources indiscriminately, the intent being to create natural scarcity and encourage trade, preparation, and thoughtful play.
A normal session should use up your fatigue by gathering resources and/or doing select jobs. From there, you head to a rest area to relax, roleplay, and recover if you want to keep going.
This is not built around all-day grinding. If that's still something you want to do, there are ways to make it work. Resting in-game, engaging with certain skills, and using items provide avenues to let you push further.
Basic Overview
All player characters have a Fatigue pool, with a maximum value of 100. Fatigue represents a character’s available physical and mental energy for performing labor-intensive or skill-based actions.
You can check on your Fatigue at any time via the Codex, or the Status bar:
Fatigue Usage
Fatigue is consumed when a character performs any action that yields resources. This includes, but is not limited to:
Most of these actions consume one point of fatigue per successful attempt, and will not consume fatigue on failure. Resources that exist in static locations will usually incur a higher cost.
Natural Regeneration
Fatigue regenerates automatically at regular intervals (approximately every ten minutes), even while your character is offline. The exact amount of regeneration is influenced by several in-game conditions:
- Hunger and Thirst: Characters who are well-fed and hydrated will regenerate fatigue more quickly.
- Nutrition: Characters with good nutrition levels gain additional recovery benefits.
- Stimulants: Active stimulant effects can further enhance regeneration.
- Addiction: Stimulant addiction reduces regeneration benefits, and in severe cases can nearly negate them.
- Storms: Fatigue regeneration increases during Storms, encouraging players to stay online.
- Rest Areas: Natural Fatigue regeneration is increased while you are in a Rest Area.
- Certain Adaptation Traits provide boost to your regeneration when certain criteria is met.
Even under poor conditions, characters will continue to recover fatigue gradually. The system is designed to avoid situations where a character becomes completely stuck long-term due to lack of energy.
Active Regeneration
Fatigue can be actively regenerated by consuming Common Intoxicants for an instant boost, or once every three hours by listening to Music in a Rest Area by someone with playin while using the Harmonious Rest ability.
Offline Regeneration
Fatigue still recovers while you're offline, just more slowly than resting in-game.
We also understand that life happens. If a character is offline for 72 hours or more, fatigue continues to build past the normal cap, up to 200.
So if you can't play for a few days, you'll come back with extra fatigue banked, letting you make the most of the time you do have. It won't be a 1:1 make-up for the days you missed, just a little something to give you a leg up when you return. When above this normal cap, fatigue won't regenerate again until you've worked it back down below 100.
Quick Tips
There are a few ways to work smarter, not harder to stretch the resources gained from your fatigue:
- In the apocalypse, the scavenger is king. Those skilled in Scavenging will get better yields when processing salvaged items in the Salvage Machine, stretching the resources gained via fatigue further the higher your skill is.
- Crafters can stretch materials further at high levels. The higher your skill, the more efficiently you can process components, stretching your resources even further. Bulk recipes unlock at higher skill percentages, letting crafters process materials at even better efficiency.
- Set out with a goal in mind: Rummaging through nondescript rubble is going to yield you a larger pool of randomized scrap items, but you may be too tired once you see the exact resource you need. Like a fabric tent, or metal tanker.
- Equipping appropriate tools (shovels, pickaxes, etc) while harvesting a node gives you a 50% chance of secondary resources on many nodes where it makes sense. The game rewards discovery and playing your character sensibly for a post-apocalyptic setting, without locking anyone out of progression. Want to break down an old metal tanker with your bare hands? You can. But if you've got a crowbar, that fatigue cost will stretch further, getting you more resources for the same effort as a bonus.
- When in doubt, throw money at the problem! The Public Market is always open for anyone to list items for sale. Sell off surplus goods and resources you don't need, then use that coin to buy what you're actually after. It's a great way to make the most of your time, especially once you've run out of fatigue for the day.