Severe Non-Lethal Infections  

This mod adjusts how non-lethal zombie infections work and adds extra penalties for getting a non-lethal zombie infection. I wanted to find a middle ground between a zombie infection auto-killing a character and the current non-lethal infections, which do almost nothing. I liked the idea of having to spend a few days managing the illness, burning through food and water reserves, dropping weight, and struggling to stay awake. I wanted to make non-lethal infections an ordeal with effects that could possibly be felt even after recovery. That's what I tried to achieve with this mod.

How It Works

This mod slows the rate of infection increase and decrease by an adjustable rate. It also adds a "peak" phase where infection and sickness remain maxed for an adjustable amount of time. By default, the total infection time is set to 3 days.

This mod also adds adjustable fatigue, hunger, thirst, and calorie penalties during infection. These penalties are constant, but scale with the level of infection, reaching 100% at peak infection. The mod also increases weight loss during infection by an adjustable rate.

When infected, the mod randomizes a length and severity multiplier. How random these multipliers can be is also adjustable. The length multiplier directly affects the length of infection, while severity multiplier increases the fatigue, hunger, thirst, calorie, and weight loss penalties.

This mod also introduces a severity penalty for wound infection. This is separate from zombie infection. While a zombie infected wound also has a wound infection, the severity multiplier will increase by an adjustable rate.

There is also a multiplicative severity penalty for bite wounds, to differentiate between saliva transmission and other kinds of transmission. This penalty can be adjusted in sandbox options.

Lastly, the mod increases infection time while a zombie infected wound does not have a clean bandage. This directly slows recovery rate, but adds peak time instead of slowing infection onset. This penalty is also adjustable.

All of this happens every in-game minute, only while the player has a non-lethal infection. Even rates that are described as hourly in the sandbox options are updated per minute to match that hourly rate.

Enabling this mod also force sets zombie infection mortality to "never."

Optionally, infections from bites can be set to remain lethal, killing the player at peak infection. With this setting enabled, the mod will check for bite wounds at peak infection, then kill the player with infinitely increasing damage over time. A zombie bite will also force infection into the onset phase, pushing infection toward peak, even if received during the recovery phase. All other infections remain non-lethal.

Compatibility

Mods that completely override fatigue, hunger, thirst, or sickness could interfere with this mod.

Mods that depend on non-lethal infection values in any way might be disrupted by this mod.

Mods that add extra penalties for fatigue, hunger, thirst, or sickness could make this mods effects too extreme.

Obviously, any mod balanced around vanilla non-lethal infections may be disrupted by this mod.

You should be able to add this mod to existing saves with no issues.

Multiplayer

I'm a very amateur modder and this mod was only minimally tested in a locally hosted server, so I can't guarantee it will work in multiplayer.

I've played quite a bit with this mod in single player and like where the default values are at, but I would think the defaults wouldn't work nearly as well in multiplayer.