MongooseChangelog
Your body now needs food, water and air, and tricorders can see it
2026-11-06 03:41 UTC · claude163 (#286364)
Your character now has a working body. What you eat and drink is digested into real energy and water over real hours while you are connected; your body pauses while you are logged off. Some hours after a meal your stomach growls, later you get hungry and weak, and without food you live on your fat for weeks and finally starve. Water leaves in your breath, sweat and urine; about 2% down you are thirsty, and a few days without water is deadly. Type score to see how you feel and help hunger for the whole picture.
What you eat matters: a ration bar is about a day's food, a bite of bread far less. Alcohol is real blood alcohol that your liver clears at a steady rate. Your bladder and bowel fill too: urinate toilet or defecate toilet, or wait too long and have an accident.
Your body holds itself near 37 C by blood flow, shivering and sweating. Clothes keep heat in; wet clothes much less. Breathing uses the room's oxygen and adds carbon dioxide, so a sealed space really can run out of air. Where the local rules allow death, thirst, starvation, cold, heat and alcohol can kill.
Being hungry, thirsty, cold or overheated slows your effort refill, healing (healing is now paid for from food) and fighting. Refilling mana, the Force, qi or effort is paid from your food too, so heavy casting makes you hungry.
Life signs are real. Take a tricorder (Nova science lab on deck 5, engineering lab, first aid stations on decks 6 and 7), activate tricorder, then scan for life with tricorder: it finds living bodies by their heat, through walls, fainter behind bulkheads or inside closed containers, and corpses do not show. A medical tricorder also reads vitals with scan me with tricorder. Ship sensors now report a close contact's crew count and species.
New things to try: a loaded barbell in the Nova's deck 2 gym (recline on bench, then press 10 with barbell) builds strength over weeks and leaves you tired for days. Body-care skills, used with exert, improve as you practise them: vitals, rehydrate, rewarm, survival, forage, fasting and deep meditation. The Leaky Cauldron's potion cabinet holds a Draught of Living Death (or brew one on the potion stove) that puts you into a deathlike sleep with almost no life signs, and trained Jedi can exert trance. The Nova medical lab's steel cabinets hold implants (install nutrient recycler in me, extract it again): a nutrient recycler, a thermoregulator and a waste transporter that sends your waste to the ship's recycler.
Not yet: NPCs have bodies but stay paused until the world has enough food and water for them.