Iron Gut / Healing Factor Synergy

[hazymkii]

How do the two Perks work together? Does Healing Factor have an influence on hunger? 

 

It sounds outlandish, but I am curious.

 

[Uncle Al]

'Natural' healing causes hunger - each hp of damage you heal costs one food.  Normally your natural healing rate is so slow (1 hp per 180 seconds) that you hardly notice this.  Healing factor speeds up healing which also speeds up how fast you're burning food to heal, so you do get hungrier faster if you're injured a lot and have healing factor.

 

Note that the total amount of food required to heal an injury is unchanged.

 

How this actually plays out in game varies a lot.  If you're careful and just taking occasional scratches, the healing you're getting from regular eating is often enough to keep your health topped off.  Healing factor can almost appear counterproductive in those cases as you'll heal the damage and then be hungry and at full health, so not gain healing benefit from the food you have to eat.

 

On the other hand, if you have access to plentiful food and are taking a lot of damage, healing factor is fantastic - you'll heal as you eat then heal again burning up the food you just ate in order to heal.  Then you eat more.  You basically trade additional eating for not having to use up medical supplies to top off your health.

 

Finally, iron gut reduces the food used to replenish stamina, but doesn't affect food burned to heal.  As such it doesn't really interact with healing factor either way.

[hazymkii]

Is there any evidence of this in .xml, that healing causes hunger? If that were true, higher levels of Healing Factor would indeed, cause more hunger over an identical time span.

 

 

Injury healing doesn't really factor in to food consumption in any way, but seems to me the only real benefit of Healing Factor.

 

If I had more time to game, I would test this out.

Edited February 19, 2022 by hazymkii (see edit history)

[theFlu]

16 minutes ago, hazymkii said:

Is there any evidence of this in .xml, that healing causes hunger?

There might; but it does.

 

progression.xml (1050): shows the perks, healing factor changes the heal-over-time value:

 

<perk name="perkHealingFactor" parent="skillFortitudeRecovery" name_key="perkHealingFactorName" desc_key="perkHealingFactorDesc" icon="ui_game_symbol_healing_factor">

  (snip)
  
  				<passive_effect name="HealthChangeOT" operation="base_add" level="1,2,3,4,5" value=".011,.022,.05,.1,.16"/>

 

 

I think the Iron Gut is listed as "perkSlowMetabolism" in there, it does reduce water use when healing, but doesn't seem to touch food:

 

progression.xml (1077):

 

    <perk name="perkSlowMetabolism" parent="skillFortitudeRecovery" name_key="perkSlowMetabolismName" desc_key="perkSlowMetabolismDesc" icon="ui_game_symbol_stomach">
      
(snip)
      
			<passive_effect name="WaterLossPerHealthPointGained" operation="perc_add" level="1,5" value="-.05,-.25"/>