Health Care (Classes) / Disease and plagues

I know its still very early, but are there any plans for settlers getting ill from eating a limited diet?

E.g. if your villagers live exclusively on corn, they get pellagra, or if they don’t consume fruit/berries, they get scurvy.

Aside from discouraging mass production of whichever crop has the highest yield, this opens up the possibility for things like droughts/moulds killing off many crop types, raiders pillaging/burning farming areas, or locusts eating all of a certain crop type. Your villagers lose stats from consistently eating whatever few foods you have large stores of.

Any thoughts?

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Interesting idea. After all, a surprising amount of digestion does not seem to happen on a one-food diet.

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Nice! It punishes you for lack of food diversity. Love the scurvy example, this could be extended for sailors. (Remembering to pack the correct foods). However, that might be too micromanagy. :blush:

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NOTHING IS TO MICRO MANAGY! That is lies! Micro master raaaaace!

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Warning: if you’re not intrested or don’t have the guts for icky stuff, don’t read this article!

After reading that wonderful yet gruesome book “How They Croaked” I realized… could disease possibly be the most lethal thing in Stonehearth?

Let me explain. From the medieval ages to about the 1800’s, doctors had no clue what they were dealing with 90% percent of the time. Your average life expectancy was about your mid 30’s thanks to this. Besides some basic medicine made of herbs, the only strategy doctors had for curing major illness-related emergencies was “Bleeding people out,” which means draining what was supposedly bad blood out of the body. For example, George Washington, despite the doctors attempt to bleed him out, died of something that could easily be fixed today with some antibiotics. Thus, since bleeding was so unsuccessful, and I don’t see it being a thing in Stonehearth anyway, disease could easily slaughter your hearthlings like pigs.

So, what do you guys think? Herbs and magic to the rescue? Or simply let disease do its thing in order to make Stonehearth more realistic?

First a pendantic note, the average age if you reached maturity was actually a bit higher than 30 (outside periods of bubonic plague), the insanely high child mortality rates brought the averages down alot.

I think disease would be an interesting idea, but as a mechanic it runs the risk of being too random and uncontrollable to be “fun”. If disease was to be a part of Stonehearth there should be conditions that control the chance of disease outbreaks. There should also definitely be solutions, as there were even in the medieval period (even if having access to any kind of healthcare depended on your societal status and whether or not you lived in the islamic world.)

Drawing some inspirations from the belief in ‘miasma’ could make the rotting food you’ll get in stockpiles be one risk factor. Then there’s always traders that could bring in foreign diseases. Oh and we mustn’t forget the dreaded Goblin’s Pox that goblins tend to spread… :smiley:

As far as solutions go, an apothecary or simply a priest class come to mind as healers!

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Actually taht was based on the belief that there exist 4 base liquids (Blood, yellow bile, black bile and Phlegm.) in the body an sickness was caused by an imbalance of these. It was further believed that these tied into your behavior and feelings, so making people angry could for example help cure a sickness.

Allowing a wound to rot to remove certain liquids was not to rare either.

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I’m in favor of natural laws, it’s much more important to live short but intense than long and bored/boring :wink: !