Yeah - the whole intention of letting us do our own play-balancing and modding is to allow us to do much faster experimenting.
So I've been getting by on bandages, because I can't be arsed to go buy the other stuff, and I hold onto the small stock of medikits I have for emergency use (which means I leave them in cargo somewhere and never have them in the event of the emergency, which is typically being gangraped by multiple spawners worth of enemies) Already bitched about how bad the recipes are in the food thread so won't bring it up here but I will add, considering the vast amount of alien parts and lesser but significant amount of teeth that tend to clutter my inventory, I'd like to see them be more useful. I don't care if it's for meds or food or biofuel but something. The traders just won't buy enough of them. Also the various specific remedies, most of them are too much trouble to bother with, coupled with the loss of inventory slots, not to mention usually easier to find plants that do the job on the go. Again, they tend to sit in cargo and collect dust because except for parasite injectors (which I'll carry for the big POIs). If we had extra slots just for medical items that would make them worth going through the trouble of acquiring. So like a stockable medkit built into the suit.
I would love to see a rework of the medicines system, seeing that internal list gave me the idea. All status effects would have a grade between 1 and 5 with varying degrees of severity. ex. Food poisoning 1 would be 30 seconds of stamina drain and some health loss, cant take health under 50% Food poisoning 3 would be similar to what it is now. Food poisoning 5 would immediatly drain health to zero in 30 seconds. (rare, severe reaction to something really bad. like mis-click on rotten food bad) All plants would have 1 - 3 properties from that list. Could be set, could be randomized each game. ex. Plant A could have Anti-food poisoning and Anti-biotic Plant B could have Anti-biotic and Enhancing effects A medical crafter could mix up to 3 DIFFERENT ingredients using one effect from each. It then makes a pill ( no decay) or injection (+1 strength, decays fairly fast outside a fridge) Using the example above I could use plant A to make anti-foodpoison pills of str 1, or an injection of str 2. Using plant A and mixing Plant B's enhancing one could make a str 3 injection. Or they could make a pill thats str 1 anti food poison AND str 1 antibiotic pill, good against simple annoying things but have no effect vs something more serious. The lab equipment, instead of curing conditions could suppress them by 2 points for 30 seconds. So a case of str 4 food poisoning couldnt be cured by the above injection. But if you went to a medbay, used a machine to supress that condition to str 2, then its treatable with that same injection. This gives lots of options for phamacuticals with different ingredients, and eliminates raw ingredients and lab equipment all but nullifying the importance of having a good stock of medicine, while still keeping lab equipment valid and very useful. Esp since a lvl 5 condition would be all but un-treatable without a medbay AND medicine. It also opens the door for things later on if devs add more status effects or ingredient traits. It would also be nice if those medlockers worked as a fridge for medical stuff, fer the aesthetics.
A much more logical way to deal with the poison bite etc is harvesting enemy poisons for venom, which a medical station could convert into antivenom. Probably need 5 doses of venom for a single antivenom, meaning they require a little work, but we're not at the mercy of the plant spawns. Medkits should be a single click item that cures things on an as-needed basis; an actual medical KIT that you would stock with supplies. Maybe make it a container that you open, and has dedicated slots for each thing you need (bandages, anti venom, anti parasite, anti radiation, etc) but the medkit serves to a) condense all necessary medical supplies into a single inventory slot in your backpack, and b) make it EASIER to isolate a medical item from your inventory because you know exactly what space it will be in. A small medkit might have only space for 3-4 things, a large one space for all of them. Perhaps a medkit stores all contents as a single item instead of stacked- sort of how warp fuel tanks do.
