¶ What is Wasteland Medical?
Wasteland Medical is a custom system that was made to make doctors, medics and other medically-inclined characters more useful to the community. Drugs have been altered to have longer lasting effects and an addiction mechanic has been built into the system. First-Aid has been renamed to “Medical” for the sake of this system.
Conditions are a new concept included in this overhaul. If you become stricken with a Condition, you will not be told so. Instead, moodles that are related to the Condition itself will start to show up. You may suffer from a headache and shortness of breath, which will allow you to make an educated guess as to which condition you may be suffering from. Blood tests are required to diagnose a condition with certainty.
Some conditions can have positive results for your character – like cocaine increasing your movement speed – though many are negative. Dysentery is one such example, which can be acquired by drinking unsafe water. Some can be a mixture of both, with positive and negative effects.
¶ Blood Testing
Blood testing is a method used in-game to identify a Condition. To do a blood test, you will first need a clean syringe to take a blood sample. Currently people can only draw their own blood, so you'll have to give the syringe to the patient and ask them to take one. This produces a blood sample and dirty syringe. Blood samples can degrade outside of freezers/fridges if you don't use them quickly. Blood samples can be labelled if you have a pen or pencil in your inventory.
To test a blood sample you need 7 Medical skill and an LC-MS (Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry) System. The LC-MS System can be crafted by a character with level 8 electrical and requires a rare Mass Analyzer component. Once constructed, it needs to be placed down and powered by a generator. You can then feed in blood samples and it will spit out a report with blood type, blood alcohol levels and other existing conditions. It won't show zombie infection progress.
After diagnosing a patient, you will need to give them appropriate medication. Every type of medication has been added to hospital and clinic loot tables. As to which medication you need to give them, there is a feature called Skill-based tooltips. These are tooltips which appear only if you have the minimum skill requirement. The new tooltips will clearly explain which conditions the medication treats, but this is only visible to characters with high enough Medical skill.
¶ Drunkenness
- Drunkenness now lasts three times longer than before (4.2 times longer than vanilla Zomboid).
- Your screen now blurs up as you get progressively more drunk, and you have a chance to fall over.
- Slurred drunk speech has been reworked to be more understandable and slightly less random.
- Shows up on blood tests.
¶ Other Medical Changes
- Dirty water has a small chance to give you dysentery, influenced by traits such as Iron Gut and Weak Stomach.
- Stiching deep wounds now has a chance to fail, depending on your Medical skill and if you are trying to stitch up your own butt or if someone is helping you. Failure causes the wound to worsen and suture needle to be lost.
- Dirty in game wound infections can now sometimes become blood infections which will have effects such as fever even after the wound has healed up. You will need to treat this with medicine such as antibiotics.
- Consuming random medicine you don't understand will have negative side effects and possibly death if you take more than one type.
¶ Syringes, Drugs, and Injections
All injectable drugs, once placed in a syringe (other than recreational drugs), are useable on yourself or others via an "Inject" menu when right-clicking the syringe.
In addition, the precision of the dosage depends on the character's Medical skill at the time of the injection. The lower the Medical skill, the less precise the dosage will be e.g. you may accidental overdose someone with sedatives or morphine. If you have a high enough Medical skill level to see the skill-based tooltip on the syringe, you are at no risk of an imprecise dose when you use it and will always apply the precise dosage.
Being 1-2 skill levels under the required level is no longer a big deal as you won't be far out of the ideal dosage. As such, the minimum Medical level for tooltips on morphine, epinephrine, lorazepam, and naloxone are now 7 instead of 5.
¶ Recreational Drugs
These are now exclusively made in the drug lab workplace. We may add better crafting for them later, for now you just pay workpoints to get the end product. Recreational drugs don't spawn in the world loot tables. Most of these drugs are now addictive after prolonged use, higher doses or just bad luck.
If you become addicted, you will notice after roughly 4 hours / 1 game day that you develop cravings and negative moodles. These will go away again if you take the drug. If you ignore it and go cold turkey, then the negatives will get progressively worse for a long, long time. Eventually they will improve and your addiction will disappear, however this can take weeks of playtime.
¶ Magic Mushrooms
Psilocybe cubensis can be found via foraging. They will show up as unknown mushrooms unless you have the Mycologist trait. You will trip out if you consume them. They are nonlethal at maximum dosage.
¶ Death
Dying will remove all your conditions, but addiction will remain.