Wounds & Treatment
A bad hit does two things to you. It takes a bite out of your health number, and it leaves a wound on the body part it struck. Health you can win back; a wound stays with you, quietly shrinking how much health you can hold until it closes. This page covers what wounds are, what they cost you while they last, how they close on their own, and how a medic closes them faster.
The short version:
- A wound is a lasting injury on one body part, graded by how hard the blow landed. The bigger the hit, the worse the grade and the longer it takes to mend.
- Wounds eat your maximum health, not your current health. Every open wound lowers the ceiling your health can refill to. Pile up enough and a healthy-looking character is running on a thin margin.
- They close on a timer. Severe wounds take many in-game days untreated. The clock is set by the grade.
- Treatment cuts that time roughly in half. A medic inspects the injury, finds the spots that need work, and patches them one at a time with a check on each.
- Bad medicine makes things worse. Botch a treatment badly and the wound can deepen into a higher grade with more work to do.
How a wound begins
When a hit gets through your defenses, the leftover damage comes off your health as normal (see Damage Reduction). On top of that, the strike leaves a wound on the part it hit if either of these is true:
- it was a critical hit, or
- the damage cleared your grit threshold:
$$ \text{grit threshold} = \text{current health} + 0.5 \cdot \text{grit} $$
High grit raises that bar, so a tough character shrugs off glancing blows that would mark up someone frailer. A critical skips the check and always wounds.
What a wound is made of
Each wound records the same handful of facts: where it is (the struck body part), what kind of damage caused it (sharp, blunt, burning, and so on, from the same damage-type tree used everywhere), how big the original hit was, when it happened, and a grade. In play it reads as a line like "a serious sharp wound on the arm."
Multiple wounds stack independently. Each one is its own injury with its own clock and its own weight on your health. Three moderate wounds are three separate problems, not one combined one.
The grade scale
The grade is picked from the size of the hit: the game takes the heaviest grade whose damage threshold the hit still clears. Heavier hits mean worse grades, which mean longer healing and more for a medic to do.
| Grade | Caused by a hit of at least | Heals untreated | Heals fully treated | Spots to treat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| light | any wounding hit | ~1 day | ~1 day | none (closes on its own) |
| minor | 2 | ~3 days | ~1 day | a few |
| moderate | 6 | ~6 days | ~2 days | a few |
| serious | 14 | ~9 days | ~4 days | several |
| severe | 22 | ~12 days | ~4 days | several |
| critical | 30 | ~12 days | ~5 days | several |
| life-threatening | 37 | ~21 days | ~7 days | many |
The smallest grade closes by itself within about a day and can't be worked on. Everything above it rewards attention.
What a wound costs you
A wound's bite is on your maximum health. Your ceiling is your base health, plus any from augmentation, minus the current weight of every open wound:
$$ H_{\max} = \max!\big(1,\; H_{\text{base}} + \textstyle\sum \text{cyberware} - \textstyle\sum_{w} d_w\big) $$
where $d_w$ is each wound's current weight. A fresh wound's weight equals the damage that caused it, so a heavy blow both drops your health and clamps the ceiling that health can climb back to. Your health can never refill past that lowered ceiling while the wound is open.
The weight is floored so that wounds alone can't kill you: your maximum health never drops below $1$. What wounds do is leave you with a thinner buffer, so the next hit lands closer to fatal. A character covered in untreated wounds isn't bleeding out on a timer, but they're fragile, and they look it to anyone reading them.
This is a deliberately patient model. Wounds turn a single bad fight into something you carry for days, which makes a working medic, a safe place to rest, and the decision to keep fighting or pull out all matter more than any single health bar.
How wounds heal on their own
A wound carries a heal-on time set when it's inflicted. Its weight decays smoothly from the full amount down to zero across that span:
$$ d_w(t) = d_0 \cdot \left(1 - \frac{t - t_{\text{taken}}}{t_{\text{heal}} - t_{\text{taken}}}\right) $$
So your maximum health doesn't snap back when a wound closes; it creeps back up as the wound fades. When the clock runs out, the wound is removed and that part of your ceiling is fully restored.
How far off that heal-on time sits depends on the grade and on how much of the wound has been treated. With nothing done, it lands on the untreated span from the table above. Fully patched, it lands on the much shorter treated span. Partial work lands in between, scaled by the fraction of the wound that's been treated (more on that below).
Your broader recovery rate is tied to metabolism. Staying fed gives a healing multiplier that ranges from a penalty when you're starving up to a solid bonus when you're well-fed, shown on your status (see Food). Eat well and rest when you're hurt; running on empty is the worst time to be carrying injuries.
Treatment
Anyone can try medicine. The command is treat, aimed at a patient, and you can aim it at yourself or someone else in the room. You have to be standing, and your patient has to stay with you; if they leave or die, the session ends. Treating opens a focused mode with three steps: inspect, apply, and done.
Inspecting
A wound is a small grid of spots, and only some of them are the actual injury; the rest are healthy tissue around it. Worse grades have more real spots to find and close.
When you inspect a location, the game runs a perception check for each spot — weighted on Senses, the medic skill, and a little Ego — to see whether you correctly read that spot. Spots you read clearly show up marked: red for "this needs work," a clean mark for "nothing here." Spots you don't read stay ambiguous.
A critically bad inspection can plant a false positive: a healthy spot that looks like an injury. Chase it and you waste effort at best, and risk making the real wound worse at worst. A careful medic with high Senses sees the grid clearly; a careless one invents problems.
Applying treatment
Once you've found a spot worth working, you apply a treatment tool to it. Tools are handled generically: any valid medical item works, and what matters is that you're holding it and it still has charges left. Each attempt spends one charge and runs a treatment check weighted on:
$$ T = 0.4\,\text{Ego} + 0.2\,\text{Motion} + 0.4\,\text{medic} $$
through the usual difficulty curve (see Skill Checks). One attempt covers one spot and takes a few seconds.
- Success patches that spot. When every real spot on the wound is patched, the wound is fully treated and switches to its fast heal clock.
- Ordinary failure just wastes the attempt and a charge. Try again.
- A critical failure (or any failure while fussing over a false-positive spot) backfires: the wound takes extra damage, can jump up a grade, and opens new spots that now also need treating. A panicked amateur can turn a serious wound into a severe one.
Steady hands, then. Each spot is cheap to attempt but the downside of a bungled critical is real, so it pays to have the skill before you have the scalpel.
How much treatment helps
The healing clock interpolates between the untreated and treated spans by treatment efficiency — the fraction of the wound's real spots that have been successfully patched:
$$ \eta = \frac{\text{spots patched}}{\text{spots injured}}, \qquad \text{heal time} = D_{\text{untreated}} + \big(D_{\text{treated}} - D_{\text{untreated}}\big)\cdot \eta $$
Patch half the spots and you get roughly half the speed-up. Patch them all and the wound mends in the fast time from the table. Because the heal-on time recalculates from the current state, every spot you close pulls the finish line in immediately, so the wound's drag on your maximum health starts lifting sooner too.
Here's the payoff for a serious wound, which runs about nine days untouched and four days fully tended:
Securing a wound with a clean dressing is meant to give a further nudge to the part that hasn't been fully patched, so even an incomplete job mends a little faster. That binding step is part of the design but not something you can reach through a command yet, so for now the lever you actually pull is patching spots.
Body parts
Your body is divided into locations — head, face, chest, abdomen, back, arms, hands, legs, feet, groin, and so on. Wounds attach to whichever location was struck, and that's the level the system tracks: there's no separate health bar per limb, just the wounds sitting on each part.
Location still matters in two practical ways:
- Cover hides wounds. A wound under clothing or armor doesn't show up when someone inspects you; a medic only sees what's exposed, and will notice that something seems hidden under your clothes. Strip down to be worked on properly.
- Reinforced limbs can shrug a wound off. Certain cyberlimb reinforcement can absorb what would have been a wound to that limb outright, turning a crippling blow into nothing (see Augmentation).
Working on wounds builds the medic skill, and the harder the wound you tend, the more you learn from it — successes teach the most, but even failures and careful inspections move the needle (see Progression: Skills).
See also
- Damage Reduction — where wounds come from: the grit threshold, criticals, and the leftover damage that hits your health.
- Skill Checks — the engine behind every inspect and treatment roll, including criticals and degrees of success.
- Food — satiety sets the metabolic healing multiplier that governs how fast you recover.
- Crafting — where medical supplies and their charges come from.
- Progression: Skills — the medic skill, and the Ego, Motion, and Senses stats that treatment leans on.