Guide to Wounds

Chief Medical Officer Kingston говорит: "How on Earth did you manage to break every single bone in your body?"

Wounds are specific injuries that can happen to people if they accumulate large spikes of damage on a specific limb, or in other words, when they get hurt really bad all at once. Most things regarding them are still WIP and up in the air, but here's a rough guide on how to deal with them and what's important about them.

First, some helpful infographics!

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These will give you general insight into how wounds work and how to treat them, but we'll include a bit more information below.

Wounds 101: Oh Shit Wat Do

So you/someone around you is grievously hurt, and you need advice now! Here's each type of wound, what they do, and how to treat each one.

• Bone Wounds: Cause interaction/movement slowdowns depending on the limb
  • Joint Dislocation: Use a bonesetter or get someone to aggo-grab you and click on you with help intent
  • Hairline Fracture: Get surgery, or apply bone gel followed by surgical tape to the limb and wait. Gauze can splint the wound to lower penalties.
  • Compound Fracture: Same as hairline fracture, but both the surgery and gel/tape method take longer. Gauze splints will re-enable the limb until it can be healed

• Sharp Wounds: Make you bleed, worse cuts bleed faster
  • Rough Abrasion: You can probably ignore it
  • Open Laceration: Apply gauze to the limb to greatly staunch bleeding, sutures and cauteries (or anything that can light a cigarette) reduce bleeding directly, emergency medipens help clot all active cuts if you have several
  • Weeping Avulsion: Lower your bleeding ASAP! Apply emergency medipen and gauze, then apply sutures/cauterization as necessary until down to at least an Open Laceration, if not an Abrasion

• Burn Wounds: Attacks deal more damage to this limb, Third Degree and Catastrophic Burns become infected
  • Second Degree: Just apply some ointment or regenerative mesh and wait a bit
  • Third Degree: Debriding surgery takes care of both infections and flesh healing effectively, otherwise use more ointment/mesh along with some spaceacillin or a paramedic UV penlight
  • Catastrophic Burns: Same as Third Degree, but with more urgency

The above steps give you enough info to handle the very basics of CQC first-aid, allowing you to at least look like you know what you're doing when someone gets hurt. If you get a good handle on the above information, congratulations! You have a good enough grip on wounds to deal with most situations that may arise, and be able to render aid to people who get hurt if you need to, or seek out aid for yourself. If you're ever in doubt, find a wound scanner or a health analyzer set to wound mode, and you'll get a big readout of what you need to do to fix them up.

Wounds 305: The Thick of It

Paramedic Jones говорит: "It's bad enough this asshole chose to bleed out and make me piece him back together, but he could've at least limped somewhere public before passing out..."

Welcome to Wounds 305! This is for players who want to learn more about the specifics of wounds, whether you're a medic looking for the best ways to stabilize and treat them, or a nefarious individual looking for the best ways to deal them. The above information in Wounds 101, combined with use of a wounds scanner in game, provides enough information to generally treat injuries and understand their most important parts. The following information is supplemental, and goes into extra detail to help you understand the finer points of treating them, and how to be more efficient in doing so.

Wounds are classified by two things: Type, and severity. There are three types (brute-sharp, brute-other, and burning), and three main severities (moderate, severe, and critical). The higher severity a wound is, the more damage it takes to suffer, and the more debilitating it is until treated.

• BRUTE-SHARP wounds are cuts and slashes that cause you to bleed and are caused by sharp weapons and attacks. The treatment for all sharp wounds is the same: apply a bandage, medipen, sutures, and maybe cauterize it with a burning tool. The difference in severities is that worse cuts bleed faster, and while a moderate cut isn't very dangerous, a critical cut is immediately life threatening if left alone.
  • Standard epinephrine medipens and emergency medkit medipens contain coagulant, a special chemical that greatly increases clotting on all open cuts for a short duration. This makes it excellent for stabilizing patients with multiple cuts, or as a way to immediately reduce bleeding after a serious cut is suffered, without fussing with gauze or sutures.
  • Sharp weapons are usually much worse at dealing cuts against armored opponents, even if it's just a jumpsuit. Sharp weapons can shred jumpsuit protection with a few slashes though, so be sure to bring other armor if going up against sharp objects.

• BRUTE-OTHER wounds are broken and dislocated bones, and are dealt by brute attacks that aren't sharp. Generally, these slow down your interaction speed or move speed, depending on where you suffer them.
  • Bone wounds have higher thresholds than cuts or burns and lack the ability to shred jumpsuits, making them harder to deal than the other types. However, they are likely the most annoying to suffer and heal, and are less affected by armor than the other types.

• BURN wounds are a bit more fiddly to treat than the other wound types, as there are two factors to recovery: flesh damage, and infection. Once both are taken care of, the burn will be healed.
  • Flesh damage: This represents the flesh that needs to be healed, and is the only factor relevant for moderate burns. To heal flesh damage, simply apply ointment or regenerative mesh to the affected limb, and wait! Having a bandage applied to the limb will make flesh regeneration much more efficient, and let a little bit of ointment go a long way.
  • Infection: Severe and critical burns will breed infection, with critical wounds becoming infected more quickly. You can see how infected your burn is by inspecting yourself and seeing if there's any purple text on the wound examine text. Sterilizine, spaceacilling, paramedic UV penlights, and debridal surgery are all effective ways of reducing infection.

Other Fun Facts

• Jumpsuits offer very slight protection against wounds! If nothing else, your trusty grey jumpsuit may very well be the difference between a stray laser shot leaving you mostly unharmed other than the normal burn damage, and suffering debilitating second or third degree burns.
• Burning and slashing weapons generally are much more effective against completely bare flesh. To help with this, they can also shred basic clothing and jumpsuits, with multiple attacks on a specific limb disabling the clothing's protection on that limb. The clothing can be repaired with cloth to reenable it.
• When in doubt, applying gauze to most wounds will either lessen the negative effects of it, or actively speed recovery.
• Cutting weapons have very low thresholds and are easy to apply, especially against unarmored foes, but contribute little to further wound penalties. Bone wounds are fairly hard to apply, with higher thresholds, but aren't as affected by armor as cutting or burning wounds and make further wounds a decent bit easier to deal. Burning wounds are very unlikely to be dealt to covered skin, even if it's only a jumpsuit, but gain very large bonuses against bare flesh. They also apply the highest threshold penalties, making it almost trivial to deal serious cuts and bone injuries to burnt limbs.
• If you're really lazy, you can just throw them in cryo for a long while and they'll eventually regenerate wounds.
• Changelings can instantly heal all their wounds and scars through use of fleshmend and regenerate limbs.
• Regular folk can remove all their scars by ingesting carpotoxin.
• Neckgrab table slams are brutal, neckgrab table slams by a hulk are even more brutal.

Appendix 1: Full Wound Listing

Bone Wounds

Moderate: Joint Dislocation

• Negative effects: Slightly slower interactions with that limb (arms), slight limp with that limb (legs)
• Full Treatment: Use a bonesetter on the affected limb.
• Improvised Treatment: Get a friend to put you in an aggressive grab, target the dislocated limb, then interact with you on HELP intent. They'll start straining your limb and hopefully pop it back into place. Doing this on DISARM or HARM intents will instead try to snap the arm and cause a fracture, but you won't be able to tell which is which until they succeed!
• Improvised Treatment #2: Being crushed by an airlock or a firelock has a 33% chance to pop dislocated limbs back in place. Don't worry, crushing can't wound you, so all you have to lose is time and some brute damage!

Severe: Hairline Fracture

• Negative effects: Fairly slower interactions with that limb (arms), sizable limp with that limb (legs)
• Full Treatment: Three step surgery, requiring a scalpel, a bonesetter/bone gel/sticky tape (one of these), and a cautery. This will instantly repair the bone upon completion.
• Improvised Treatment: Apply bone gel directly to limb, then apply surgical sticky tape to the limb and wait. It's much better to have a friend apply these, as self-applying the bone gel can fail and cause you to pass out briefly (consuming one use of bone gel). The chance to fail and pass out is much higher with compound fractures than hairline fractures, though being drunk, on morphine, or in a combat high from a wound will lower your chance to fail. Lastly, applying the sticky tape will start to regenerate the limb, during which you will randomly take brute/stamina damage around your body. This regeneration period is longer if you apply the surgical tape to yourself, and is also longer for compound fractures than for hairline fractures. After a few minutes, the wound will be gone.
• Triage Stabilization: You can secure the bone with a "splint" by using medical gauze on it. This will lessen your interaction/limp slowdowns, though you'll still need to get the bone treated.

Critical: Compound Fracture

• Negative effects: Your limb is outright disabled, and cannot be reenabled by healing the brute damage on the limb.
• Full Treatment: Six step surgery, starting with the standard incise/clamp/retract, and ending with the standard cauterize to close. Step 4 is to reset the bone, and is best done with bonesetters, though surgical sticky tape or standard sticky tape can do in a pinch. Then step five is to repair the fracture, which is done with either bone gel or surgical sticky tape, with normal sticky tape working as an alternative. Truly, duct surgical sticky tape is a miracle fixer that no self-respecting paramedic should be without.
• Improvised Treatment: Apply bone gel and surgical sticky tape to the affected limb, same as with hairline fractures. Having a friend help you is even more important than with hairline fractures, as your penalties for successful gel application and tape recovery time are more punishing than for hairlines.
• Triage Stabilization: You can still secure the bone with gauze, same as hairlines. In addition, a splint will reenable the limb, though you still have severe penalties.

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Sharp Wounds

General notes:

• Unlike dislocations and fractures which have different properties at different severities, cutting wounds all function the same and use the same treatments, just with different levels of severity and urgency. As such, their mechanics are described below, and each severity will have a short note for how to approach them.
• Cuts are based off a blood_flow counter that is initially set when the cut wound is gained, with worse cuts having higher blood_flow values. Every tick, you lose that much blood, and your blood flow is modified based on a few factors (hopefully lowered), noted below. When your cut's flow goes below a certain threshold, it is demoted to the level below, but while it is possible to increase the blood flow, you cannot raise the severity directly by doing so. The factors for modifying your bleeding rate are:
  • Clot rate: Moderate and severe cuts will slowly clot naturally on their own (severe more slowly than moderate), while critical cuts slowly open up more over time. Just another reason that reducing the severity of cuts as soon as possible is important!
  • Bandaging: Wrapping the cut with bandages significantly amps up your clotting rate while active, providing a potent buff to recovery speed.
  • Coagulants: Epipens and emergency medipens contain a coagulant reagent that reduces bleeding on all open cuts, excellent for when you need to immediately slow down bleeding or are dealing with a patient with multiple cuts.
  • Suturing/Cauterization: Sutures and cauterization provides a more immediate solution to stopping bleeding, rapidly reducing blood loss each application. Sutures are great because they reduce bleeding and heal brute damage at the same time, but if you don't have any available, you can cauterize the cut with a cautery or (almost) anything that can light a cigarette. It'll hurt a bit, but you won't use up any consumables.
  • More Cuts: Not only can further slash attacks upgrade the wound severity, they'll also directly increase the blood flow by a percentage of the damage dealt.
• Remember: A stitch in time saves nine! Your blood_flow is both a tracker for how serious your wound is, as well as how much blood you lose every tick, so sinking it as soon as possible is important. Immediately applying a bandage, jabbing a medipen, or even managing one or two sutures/cauterizations can make a big difference in the total amount of blood lost by the time the wound is healed.

Moderate: Rough Abrasion

• Notes: Not very threatening on their own, and will seal themselves up shortly if not made worse. While you won't lose much blood by leaving them to clot on their own, they're very vulnerable to further attacks which can cause more severe cuts and other wounds.

Severe: Open Laceration

• Notes: Worth worrying about, at the very least you should get it bandaged or apply a few sutures or cauterizations before you lose too much blood. As noted above, reducing blood flow is better done sooner rather than later, and if you're not busy dealing with an actively hostile environment or treating patients in worse conditions, you should be prioritizing reducing the cut to moderate severity before losing too much blood.

Critical: Weeping Avulsion

• Notes: While moderate and severe cuts usually aren't immediate matters of life and death, critical cuts are by far the most dangerous wound you can suffer. Not only have you likely suffered large amounts of damage to your limb, you're also losing blood at a dizzying rate that is actively getting worse rather than better. If you don't think you can win whatever fight you're in within the next 45-60 seconds, now is probably the time to disengage and hide for a bit, or at least jab yourself with a medipen before too long passes. Your top priority, whether you're treating someone with a critical cut or are the patient yourself, should be to do everything you can to lower your bleeding, starting with applying bandages and sticking yourself with a medipen, followed by sutures or cauterization. Otherwise, you'll be flirting with passing out before too long.

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Burn Wounds

General notes:

• While you can technically get burn wounds from any burning type weapon, in reality the mixture of a general lack of high damage burning melee weapons and the high thresholds required to deal burn wounds means that the vast majority of these will come from lasers. In addition, since undirected/general damage don't qualify for wounds, you cannot suffer serious burns from being set on fire or being exposed to space. Lava can though, so I've heard...
• Unlike cutting wounds, serious burns have very high threshold penalties (the highest of all three types in fact). This means a limb suffering from bad burns is almost trivial to cause bone wounds in, and the penalty for a moderate burn is actually higher than the threshold for a moderate cut, meaning any sharp attack that does enough damage to roll wounds (5 force) will automatically cause an abrasion, if not worse, without strong armor. Combined with the fact that burns increase all incoming damage on that limb, lasers make for an excellent way to soften up lightly armored/unarmored targets for melee fighting.

Moderate: Second Degree Burns

• Negative effects: Fairly easier to deal wounds to this limb, take 10% damage on incoming attacks on this limb.
• Full Treatment: Slap on some ointment or regenerative mesh and wait a bit.

Severe: Third Degree Burns

• Negative effects: Significantly easier to deal serious wounds to this limb, 20% extra damage on incoming attacks on this limb, slow infection.
• Full Treatment: Two step surgery with hemostat/scalpel and bandages will resolve all infection and some flesh damage. Otherwise, infection can also be treated by spaceacillin, sterilizine, or paramedic UV penlights. Ointment and regenerative mesh can heal the rest of flesh damage.
• Improvised Treatment: Miner's Salve is fairly effective at both healing flesh damage and sanitizing any infection.

Critical: Catastrophic Burns

• Negative effects: The limb is incredibly easy to cripple with serious wounds, takes 30% extra damage on incoming attacks, and becomes a hotbed of infection.
• Full Treatment: Two step surgery with hemostat/scalpel and bandages will resolve all infection and some flesh damage. Otherwise, infection can also be treated by spaceacillin, sterilizine, or paramedic UV penlights. Ointment and regenerative mesh can heal the rest of flesh damage.
• Improvised Treatment: Miner's Salve is fairly effective at both healing flesh damage and sanitizing any infection.

Appendix 2: Wounding Table

Wounding table

Wound Name	Threshold Minimum	Threshold Penalty	Base Atk Force*
BONE
Joint Dislocation	35	(+15)	~15 force
Hairline Fracture	50	(+30)	~15 force
Compound Fracture	115	(+50)	~25 force
CUTS
Rough Abrasion	20	(+10)	~10 force
Open Laceration	50	(+25)	~15 force
Weeping Avulsion	80	(+40)	~18 force
BURNS
Second Degree Burns	40	(+30)	Lasers!
Third Degree Burns	80	(+40)	Lasers!!
Catastrophic Burns	140	(+80)	Lasers!!!

*Base Attack Force: Assuming a weapon/attack has 0 wound bonuses (cutting weapons may need more vs armor, less vs flesh), how much force it will take to have a decent chance at dealing this wound assuming either no existing wounds, or only the lower tier version of this wound type.

• Note that some wounds, critical bone wounds especially, may require multiple types of active wounds to be feasible.
• Burning wounds are simply listed as Atk Force "Lasers!" since lasers are the main source of them by far anyway. Continually lasering the same limb with no armor will probably deal critical burns within a half dozen shots, maybe plus a few.