Your body: digestion, the toilet and fitness

Your body is more than two gauges. Open the field kit with M and pick Body to see all of it: what is in your stomach and gut, your bladder and bowels, your weight in fat and muscle, what your body gives you, and what you have been eating.

Digestion

What you eat and drink goes into your stomach first, and none of it counts there. It moves on to your gut, which takes it in a little at a time, so your food and water gauges climb over a few minutes after a meal. A drink reaches you in two or three minutes and a meal takes longer. Sugar and starch come first, then protein, then fat, so a fatty meal sits longest.

• Your gut can only take in so much water at once. Drink a lot quickly and the rest goes straight to your bladder, and a gut flooded with liquid gives you diarrhea. Sip, then drink again.
• Being sick brings back everything that hasn't been absorbed yet. If you've eaten something you shouldn't have, look at the ground at your feet with ALT and pick Make yourself sick before it gets into you.
• Eat far too much and your stomach rebels: you get stuffed, then nauseous, and it comes back up. Your stomach stops you long before it could ever tear.
• Spoiled food, rotten food and poisonous mushrooms carry toxins. Once your gut absorbs them you feel queasy and your gut turns loose.

Needing the toilet

Your bladder fills from the water your body uses, and faster when you drink more than you need. Your bowels fill from what your gut can't use, mostly fiber. On a normal day you'll need to pee every half hour or so of play and empty your bowels about once every couple of hours. The HUD shows a word beside your water when it matters: Toilet, Urgent, Bursting or Diarrhea.

• To go, stand still and look at the ground at your feet with ALT: Relieve yourself, or Find a spot to empty your bowels. At a latrine, portable toilet or toilet, use the third eye on it instead. You can also go from the Body page.
• Going takes a few seconds and you can't do anything else. The infected can hear you, and they can smell where you went for a little while. Getting hit cuts it short.
• Emptying your bowels on open ground fouls a camp and dirties your hands. Build a latrine at your base and use it.
• Hold it too long and you lose control. Wetting yourself soaks your trousers, and soiling yourself ruins everything below your waist. Either way the infected can smell you from far off until you change and wash. Sprinting with a bursting bladder makes it more likely.
• With diarrhea, when it comes you have a minute or two to find somewhere. It costs you water and salts every time, so keep drinking, ideally with rehydration salts.

Fat, muscle and fitness

Your body has a real weight: muscle, fat, bone, blood and the rest. It changes slowly, over days of play, not minutes.

• Eat past full and the extra becomes fat. When you're hungry your body burns fat to cover part of what you use, so a little in reserve keeps you going longer between meals.
• Hard work under load builds muscle: felling and splitting, mining, carrying a heavy pack, fighting, sprinting and swimming. It needs protein, so eat meat, fish, eggs, beans or nuts. Muscle you don't use slowly fades.
• Moving keeps you fit: walking, running and swimming, more with weight on your back. Standing about for hours loses it.
• Starve for long enough and your body runs out of fat and starts on your muscle. That is wasting, and it is dangerous: you tire fast and hit weakly, and at its worst you lose health whenever you're hungry. Eat until you're full, every chance you get.

What your body gives you

Your body sets three attributes from 1 to 5, where 3 is an ordinary adult. They are separate from your skills: your skills are what you know, and your body is what you can physically do.

• Strength comes from your muscle. It decides how much you carry before a load slows you, how much you can lift, and how hard you hit and chop.
• Constitution comes from how much you move. It decides how much a sprint costs you, how fast your breath comes back, and how well you fight off sickness.
• Dexterity comes from being lean and fit. It makes crafting, repairs, reloading and treating wounds a little quicker, and your sprint a little faster. Extra fat takes it away, and fat past a healthy amount is carried like extra load.

Meal effects

What you've eaten over about the last day shows in four pairs, one good and one bad. The Body page shows which are on and how you're doing on each.

• Vigor when you're well fed, or Lethargy when you're running on empty: how fast your breath comes back and how hard work feels.
• Mending with enough protein, or Erosion without: how fast wounds heal, and whether your body builds muscle or eats it.
• Resilience with fruit, vegetables, organ meat or fortified rations, or Run down without: how easily sickness takes hold.
• Stability when your salts and water are in balance, or Instability when you're short of either: cramps and stamina. Salted and canned food, broth, sports drinks and rehydration salts help. Sweating and diarrhea cost salts.

Eating the same thing

Eat the same food again and again and it gets harder to face. First you get tired of it, then it turns your stomach and may come back up, and in the end you can't make yourself eat another bite. Something different eases it, and it fades with time. When you're starving, almost anything goes down.

Drink a little and often, eat a mix of foods, go when you need to, and keep moving. Your body will reward you for it.