Survival

The Basics Don't Forgive

There's no XP bar softening this. Your body tracks blood, health, hunger, thirst, and core temperature in real numbers, all the time, whether you're paying attention or not. Let any one of them run out and it starts eating into the others — a starving survivor loses health, a freezing one starts losing blood. Go unconscious from any of it and you're at the mercy of whoever finds you first.

BloodLost to wounds, restored by transfusion or time

HealthDrops when blood, hunger, or temp bottom out

ShockSpikes from damage — enough of it drops you

TemperatureWet clothes and cold wind will kill you as fast as a rifle

A survivor reviving a downed player near a radio tower — Unconscious isn't dead — if someone's willing to stop and help.

Going Down

Blood loss or shock past a threshold puts you out cold, not dead. Bandage the bleed, get blood back into you, and a downed survivor can be walking again in minutes — or left where they fell for whoever else shows up. Every revive is a decision someone else made about you.

Three Ways to Get Sick

Disease here isn't a debuff you shrug off. It's a slow, spreading consequence of a choice you made hours ago.

Cholera

Drink from the wrong source and this is what finds you. Freshly-spawned water bottles and canteens carry roughly a coin-flip's chance of being contaminated before you've ever filled them — boiling water or sticking to a known-clean well is the only real defense. Once it's in you, it spreads through anything you share: canteens, food, close contact.

Cold & Influenza

Stay wet and cold long enough and your body stops being able to argue about it. Prolonged exposure with a dropping core temperature brings on sneezing, coughing, and a fever that saps your stamina right when you need it most — and like cholera, it passes player to player. A sneeze in a crowded stash house is not nothing.

Wound Infection

A dirty rag over an open wound, or a wound left alone too long, festers. Left untreated it tracks toward sepsis — by then you're not looking at a debuff, you're looking at a death sentence that started days earlier with a bandage you didn't have.

Staying Clean

Disinfectant, clean rags over dirty ones, boiled or chemically-treated water, and not sharing food with someone you don't trust — none of it is guaranteed, all of it matters.

Living Off Chernarus

Deer drinking from a stream in the wilderness — Fresh meat, if you can track it, kill it, and cook it before it spoils.

Apples and pears off trees, mushrooms and berries in the treeline, fish in the rivers and coast, and deer, boar, and rabbits moving through the wilderness — all of it real food, none of it marked on any map. Hunting means tracking blood trails and knowing the land; farming means finding seeds, tilling, and waiting days for a real harvest. Cooking meat over a fire isn't optional either — eat it raw and you're rolling the dice on your own stomach.

Surviving is the baseline everyone here shares. What you do once you're good at it — who you start trusting, who you start working for — is a different question. Read the story →