Health, injuries & medicine

Healing times are in-game time on default settings. Fast Healer and Slow Healer change them; First Aid makes every treatment better.

1. Stop the bleeding. Bandage every bleeding wound first, neck and torso before limbs.
2. Remove anything stuck in you: glass or bullets, with tweezers or forceps.
3. Disinfect the wound with disinfectant, alcohol wipes or strong alcohol.
4. Stitch deep wounds with a suture needle or a needle and thread.
5. Bandage, ideally with a sterilized bandage.
6. Splint fractures. No skill needed.
7. Change dirty bandages before they cause an infection.

Open the health panel (H) after every fight. A wound you did not notice is the one that kills you.

To sterilize, combine a bandage or rag with disinfectant or strong alcohol, or boil it. Dirty bandages can be washed in water, and since 42.21 in a washing machine. Higher First Aid makes every bandage last longer.

Poultices need the Herbalist trait or the Wilderness Survival magazine and a mortar and pestle. The plants are on foraging and herbs.

First Aid only rises from treating wounds; see skills. Nurses start at 3, Doctors at 6.

The health panel tracks 17 parts: head, neck, upper and lower torso, groin, and left and right upper arm, forearm, hand, thigh, shin and foot. The same wound costs about the same health wherever it lands, but what it stops you doing depends entirely on where it is.

Bleeding is graded by how many wounds are open, not where: one wound bleeds slowly, two cost moderate health and a point of carrying capacity, three are serious, four or more mean death from blood loss is imminent. The neck is the exception, since it drains on its own. So the order after a fight is neck, then anything else that bleeds, then fractures.

Exercise injures too. Each exercise builds stiffness in the parts it works: squats and burpees in the legs, push-ups and dumbbell work in the arms and chest. Stiffness becomes exercise fatigue, which is pain, and arm pain costs melee damage while leg pain makes you clumsy and slow. The Regularity bar in the exercise menu softens it; fitness instructors start at 40 to 59%, everyone else near zero, so build up over several days rather than one long session.

Deep wounds come from breaking a window with your hands, climbing through broken glass, walking on glass barefoot, falling a floor, a hard car crash or an axe. They bleed heavily, and they do not close on their own in any useful time: pzwiki puts an unstitched deep wound at about a month even when bandaged. Stitch it.

1. Bandage first if it is bleeding. Any rag will do for the minute it takes to find the kit; you can replace it afterwards.
2. Take out whatever is in it. Glass comes out with tweezers or bare hands (bare hands hurt more). A bullet needs tweezers or a suture needle holder. The wound cannot close while anything is inside.
3. Disinfect. Alcohol wipes and cotton balls doused in alcohol are the strongest (power 4), a bottle of disinfectant slightly weaker (3). This is the step that stops an ordinary wound infection.
4. Stitch. A suture needle hurts less; a needle and thread works, and First Aid level sets the chance the stitch itself infects. If you have the Herbalist trait, a plantain poultice speeds this type of wound.
5. Bandage over the stitches. Bandaging halves recovery time, and a sterilised bandage lowers the infection chance further.
6. Check it daily. Bandages go dirty; a dirty one raises infection risk, so swap it and wash the old one. Since 42.21 a washing machine cleans rags and bandages in bulk.

If the panel later says the wound is infected, it is not Knox. An ordinary infection doubles pain gain and slows healing but does not kill on its own; antibiotics halve its strength and a wild garlic poultice fights it. Lodged bullets follow the same six steps. Fast Healer trims every timer, Slow Healer stretches it, and a Well Fed moodle adds about 30% to healing on top. Suture needles are only for wounds: they cannot be used for tailoring.

Queasy on day two could be any of four things. Knox infection has a published timeline, so compare it with the alternatives before you spend the antibiotics or write the character off.

Those are pzwiki's figures for default settings; keeping fed and watered slows the loss but changes nothing else, and Resilient or Prone to Illness nudge the speed. Sandbox can make mortality near-instant or stretch it to a week or two, and a latent option makes every corpse rise regardless. See sandbox settings.

Blood on you and your clothes feeds the ordinary infections, not Knox. Wash at a sink, bath, well, river, lake or rain collector; soap makes it about five times faster and is used up on bloodstains. Fear of Blood characters also gain stress while bloody, so wash before you sleep. Since 42.20 hypothermia no longer kills unreasonably fast, but a cold on top of Knox still shortens the clock, so keep an infected character warm and dry if you are going to use the time to say goodbye.