What is the cause and treatment of sickness w/o food or zombie infection?

[Frederick White]

It started as Queasy and end up died of Fever. My character got Queasy without a single scratch or bite for weeks or any bad food/drink. My first guess is b/c I was being around rotten corpses for too long. I tried every way possible to treat the sickness; eat until the food moodle become dark green, sleep and take vitamins to decrease fatigue, even taking antibiotic and sleeping pills to be able to sleep more but to no avail. The sickness didn't get any better and I finally died of fever. Does anyone has any experience about this?

[Greb]

Pretty much just lemon grass, at the moment, I think. Gotta forage for it, and build up a stockpile, and whenever you get sick just chug like 5 pieces or whatever, get yourself below the threshold for taking damage.

Once the sickness builds up too much, you start losing health, faster and faster as more sickness continues to build. Sickness does wear off over time, but if you've got an affect that is currently adding sickness (I.E you're sitting on a pile of corpses, or you've just eaten three raw steaks) then it will continue to build up for a while, making waiting it out dangerous or potentially not even possible.

Keep an eye out of the Queasy moodle, which isn't dangerous, but should serve as a warning that you're getting sick because of something (eating raw / rotten / burnt food, drinking tainted water or yes standing around too many corpses for too long are common causes) and then move away from corpses or find some lemongrass to eat.

The other form of infection is the zombie virus, which can be gained from scratches and lacerations from zombie attacks if you have infection from scratches etc turned on, otherwise they come from a bite which is 100% an infection transmission, unless you've turned off the virus entirely. At that point nothing can save you, in vanilla anyway.

I'm not even sure what antibiotics do at the moment, infected wounds are a non-issue right now and can actually be ignored, but even if you want to treat them using disinfectant is the way to go.

[Frederick White]

@Greb Much appreciated the information, so if i understand correctly, lemongrass can currently treat any non-zombification sickness? Not only from eating bad food, but also even from rotten corpses?
Just one more question please, do standing out in the rain for a long time or sweating until soaking wet cause anything?

Originally posted by Greb:

Pretty much just lemon grass, at the moment, I think. Gotta forage for it, and build up a stockpile, and whenever you get sick just chug like 5 pieces or whatever, get yourself below the threshold for taking damage.

Once the sickness builds up too much, you start losing health, faster and faster as more sickness continues to build. Sickness does wear off over time, but if you've got an affect that is currently adding sickness (I.E you're sitting on a pile of corpses, or you've just eaten three raw steaks) then it will continue to build up for a while, making waiting it out dangerous or potentially not even possible.

Keep an eye out of the Queasy moodle, which isn't dangerous, but should serve as a warning that you're getting sick because of something (eating raw / rotten / burnt food, drinking tainted water or yes standing around too many corpses for too long are common causes) and then move away from corpses or find some lemongrass to eat.

The other form of infection is the zombie virus, which can be gained from scratches and lacerations from zombie attacks if you have infection from scratches etc turned on, otherwise they come from a bite which is 100% an infection transmission, unless you've turned off the virus entirely. At that point nothing can save you, in vanilla anyway.

I'm not even sure what antibiotics do at the moment, infected wounds are a non-issue right now and can actually be ignored, but even if you want to treat them using disinfectant is the way to go.

[Shurenai]

Originally posted by Frederick White:

@Greb Much appreciated the information, so if i understand correctly, lemongrass can currently treat any non-zombification sickness? Not only from eating bad food, but also even from rotten corpses?
Just one more question please, do standing out in the rain for a long time or sweating until soaking wet cause anything?

Originally posted by Greb:

Pretty much just lemon grass, at the moment, I think. Gotta forage for it, and build up a stockpile, and whenever you get sick just chug like 5 pieces or whatever, get yourself below the threshold for taking damage.

Once the sickness builds up too much, you start losing health, faster and faster as more sickness continues to build. Sickness does wear off over time, but if you've got an affect that is currently adding sickness (I.E you're sitting on a pile of corpses, or you've just eaten three raw steaks) then it will continue to build up for a while, making waiting it out dangerous or potentially not even possible.

Keep an eye out of the Queasy moodle, which isn't dangerous, but should serve as a warning that you're getting sick because of something (eating raw / rotten / burnt food, drinking tainted water or yes standing around too many corpses for too long are common causes) and then move away from corpses or find some lemongrass to eat.

The other form of infection is the zombie virus, which can be gained from scratches and lacerations from zombie attacks if you have infection from scratches etc turned on, otherwise they come from a bite which is 100% an infection transmission, unless you've turned off the virus entirely. At that point nothing can save you, in vanilla anyway.

I'm not even sure what antibiotics do at the moment, infected wounds are a non-issue right now and can actually be ignored, but even if you want to treat them using disinfectant is the way to go.

To Greb's last comment, Antibiotics halve the time it takes to recover from an infected wound.

Once a wound is infected, disinfectant doesn't actually do anything- Disinfectant is for prevention in situations where you're forced to use a dirty bandage, or where you might have to leave a bandage on for an unknown period of time after it gets dirty for whatever reason. So, If you can, take an antibiotic...but as you noted, yeah, wound infections currently aren't much of a danger to begin with.

To the OP's question here, Whether it's from sweat or running around the rain, staying soaked for too long can/will eventually make you sick unless you have the outdoorsman trait. It also has a negative effect on body temperature which can be dangerous in colder months.

[Greb]

Originally posted by Frederick White:

@Greb Much appreciated the information, so if i understand correctly, lemongrass can currently treat any non-zombification sickness? Not only from eating bad food, but also even from rotten corpses?
Just one more question please, do standing out in the rain for a long time or sweating until soaking wet cause anything?

I think so. Lemongrass takes big chunks out of your built up sickness level, but that might just be food sickness and not other forms of sickness from corpses and things - unless that's one and the same. I have to admit, I've never used lemongrass for any nausea from corpses, I've always used it to treat drink tainted water or eating bad foods. It's possible you could even survive drinking bleach if you eat a lot of lemongrass immediately after, but I don't know for sure lol.

I imagine corpse sickness and sickness generated from eating bad food are the same thing though, but I'm not 100% sure. It'd be easy to test in debug mode, though.

As for standing in the rain, it'll make your character cold, which increases the chance of your character catching a cold or getting the flu, which while I'm not sure can kill you it can make you sneeze constantly, which attracts the undead. I've never had a problem with this kind of illness though because I always take the Outdoorsman trait.

Originally posted by Shurenai:

Once a wound is infected, disinfectant doesn't actually do anything

Has that changed recently? In all my time playing Zomboid, whenever an infected wound has showed up I've dabbed it or dosed it a single time with a form of disinfectant and it has vanished about 10 seconds later. We're talking about infected wounds, right? With the orange text?

[hardy_conrad]

For corpse sickness just move away from the corpses. With respect to infection I've noticed it disappearing myself ten seconds after applying disinfectant. The description is (as is so often the case in this game) pretty vague so I'll leave it to others to figure out what's going on there.