It is possible to contract the zombie virus without taking damage

[peak lichen]

A YouTube playthrough of the game with the option enabled to always show their status effects captured the moment that they caught the zombie virus. Most lets-plays I've seen don't have the always-show-all-statuses option turned on, so it's rare to definitively capture the moment of infection.

https://youtu.be/LVhdVle3MNU?t=519

You can see at the moment they take the hit that they get "0% Sick" added to their statuses, which progresses to "Sick?" and then "Infected" later in the video. However, their health bar didn't appear at the moment they were hit, so they didn't actually take any damage (due to armour).

This suggests that the code tests for the chance of catching the virus whenever you are hit, rather than whenever you are damaged by a zombie, which seems off.

[junior oxide]

I've always understood that any physical contact with zombies will have a chance of infection regardless of if the contact causes damage... this might be intentional

[peak lichen]

My expectations about this comes from PZ, where the chances of catching the infection are based on whether you take a scratch, a laceration or a bite.

But VEIN is a different game, so as you say, it might be intentional that a zombie hitting you but not harming you can infect you.

[junior oxide]

I kinda agree with you, wearing lots of armor/clothing makes you slower and still doesn't protect 100% from scratches so it should really only be contracted by taking damage, which is still possible even when geared up

[peak lichen]

My feeling is that it's probably really hard for playtesters to give feedback on this aspect of the game, because most players don't play with all their status effects visible at 0%, so they're almost never going to know what actually caused them to catch the virus. Like, it could be buggy as hell, but you'd never be sure.

At the very least, it would be great if, when that chance of infection comes up, the game recorded the situation somehow (like captured a screenshot of the instant), and then informed you after the fact (like, perhaps on your death screen). That way you could at least get some closure about how you came to be infected.

[night dew]

maybe the virus is transmitted by fluids and teh zombie was covered in slime, and it got on your skin and absorbed that way?

we don't really have any lore about the zombie outbreak, if it's even a disease (assume so due to CDC quarantine - tho that wasnt effective so maybe it's not?) - and idk where they are gonna get the lore or how they introduce it.

but maybe it will contain an explanation.

[night dew]

on reflection - i agree - zombies shouldn't cause infection if no damage (eg, wearing armour)

[peak lichen]

Yeah, only the devs can say for sure whether this is a bug, or just the game working by design.

I've also heard rumours that you can catch the virus from vomit-inducing smells, and you can see in the video that he was near a bad smell at the time (but not a vomit-inducing one).

But in the absence of concrete evidence, people will come up with superstitions to explain their experiences, in computer games just as much as in real life. Even pigeons do it - they ran an experiment where pigeons could peck a lever to get a treat, but there was only a small chance that it would happen, and it was entirely random (like, a 10% chance that a given lever press would drop the treat). One started always approaching the lever from left, because one of the times it got the treat, it approached from the left. Others developed similar superstitions. They were trying to recreate the circumstances that worked the last time, even though it was just a purely random event.

So because the game doesn't tell us explicitly (unless you play with your statuses always visible, and record it so you can go back and check) we really don't know how the actual implementation actually works, and only the devs know how the virus mechanic is intended to work.

I thought it was worth raising this as a bug report, because it makes the most sense to me if the zombie has to break your skin for the virus to get into your system, so this feels like a bug. And it seems like an easy bug to make in the code, putting the zombie virus check slightly too early, after the hit occurs but before damage is calculated. Getting the virus might have even been implemented before armour was added to the game, and so it doesn't account for the possibility of a zero damage hit.

But if it's working as designed, the devs can just mark this as not-a-bug and move on.

[young forum]

i almost thought it was a timed eventuality since i kept dying every 3 days or so

[young forum]

otherwise, i can see archery and guns being a good way around it

[peak lichen]

Yeah, knowing that zombies can give you the infection despite armour (currently) kind of changes up the game. Like, I feel it's pretty rare to die from losing all your health, so you'd probably be better to wear no armour and move faster, and rely on ranged attacks to kill the zombies.

(although I've tried to shoot a sprinter using a bow while backpedaling, and they get in a lot of hits while you're trying to shoot them)

[young forum]

idk if you feel this way but i kinda lose motivation to meet needs once i'm 'sick?' because i know the end is coming, so why waste food or do much else

but then, it takes a long time to turn

and then i'm just sitting in my living room burning food on the stove and waiting to die lmao

[peak lichen]

Indeed. I've just ended my character's life when I got "Sick?" - injected gasoline with a syringe. They died in agony, so not a great way to go, but they didn't revive as a zombie, so yay?

[young forum]

i too will immediately imbibe gasoline when confronted with the inevitable

i guess i could just go out swinging

[peak lichen]

Jumping from the giant radio tower is apparently another method people use.

[young forum]

aw geez

so it's pretty universal

but is there something we're SUPPOSED to be doing

[junior oxide]

not really... just gather your things in a container so you can find them easily/quickly when you respawn

[young forum]

ohhh you don't turn if you're only 'sick' you have to zombify first

i wondered why i came back last time

scared the shit out of me

[junior oxide]

'sick' is different than 'sick?'

[peak lichen]

It probably depends on whether you're playing on permadeath or not, and whether you have a good base set up. If you're just going to respawn at a secure bed with all your resources, then ending it quickly makes a lot of sense. I play with permadeath, so I want to at least pick my time of death to be early in a day, so my next character gets as much daylight as possible to try to get to my base.

[junior oxide]

sick turns into very sick....which just means you have a fever

[young forum]

thought i had a fever when i kept getting super hot indoors on a cool day. nope just wearing too much firefighter gear

[night dew]

The chance to get infected is "per hit", so it's all working as intended at this stage.

[night dew]

it does say per hit :p
I'm not sure that is mysterious enough for me to develop some fallacy about its operation, but I like the way you think

[night dew]

if you shoot 1 bullet on a 10x zombie server, you end up shooting 40 xD

Idk if it's something i've set in server args but if i get hit and infected - it takes quite a while to die - you can wait til it's 99% to stash ur gear.

But when the female character turns into a zombie, she invariably becomes a guy with a beard suddenly :p

[peak lichen]

Sorry, where does the game say the infection chance is "per hit"?

The Advanced settings just says "from zombie attacks"

In any case, I feel it's worth reporting and pointing the devs at the video, because they probably don't have a lot of examples of the infection event happening so clearly during actual play "in the wild".

Even if they originally decided that a hit without damage should have the usual chance of infecting the player, playtesting might cause them refine their design, so it's good to see how the current implementation feels in actual play.

I'm not sure that is mysterious enough for me to develop some fallacy about its operation
With this, I was talking about the fact that the actual moment where your character becomes infected while playing is often hard to notice, because by default you don't see status ratings until they get above some threshold. So for most players, when they notice that they're "Sick", and especially by the time that progresses to "Sick?", they're unlikely to be able to identify what exact event happened 10 or 20 minutes earlier that gave them the virus.

That's why we get rumours that you can catch the zombie virus from vomit-inducing smells. It's possible the game rolls a chance of infection every second or something when you're exposed to a vomit-inducing smell, but it seems more likely to me that the people who come up with that theory believe there's no way they got the virus from being attacked by zombies (because they can't remember being hit, for instance, or had the same incorrect assumption I did that an attack that didn't damage them couldn't have infected them), so they conclude that it must have been the smell.

[peak lichen]

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be passive agressive?

[night dew]

not interested

can't read it anyway

ur blocked

[peak lichen]

I was just copying the help text I thought you might be referring to