The Downward Spiral - Timed Relic Sickness Death

A race against the Relic. Sickness increases in stages until triggering the final malfunction, periodically reducing total health until you either finish the main quest or die trying.

An experimental mod that adds a hardcore challenge by expanding the game's native Relic sickness system into a passive but deadly threat counting down in the background and features edits to the game's quest logic in order to support this change. Playtesting and feedback on ways to improve the mod are welcome.

There are a total of six Relic Sickness Stages which determine how often sickness effects are triggered, ranging from every 3 days at Stage 1 to every 12 hours at Stage 6.

Each time a Relic sickness event occurs, there is a chance for the Sickness Stage to increase equal to +1% per stage, ranging from 1% at Stage 1 to 5% at Stage 5. This makes it a little more likely for the condition to degenerate faster the further it progresses and introduces an element of uncertain risk that prevents the system from being too deterministic.

When your sickness stage increases, it will trigger a Relic sickness event from the pool of effects available to the new stage whereas, if your sickness stage does not increase, only a Relic malfunction from the current stage will be triggered. Tying this into the vanilla sickness effect schedule also allows players to use these visual effects and scenes as a feedback mechanism to increase their dread gauge how far along they are.

Keep in mind that Relic Sickness events won’t always occur exactly on schedule because the system is intentionally blocked by the game under a variety of circumstances, such as while in combat, operating vehicles, on holocall etc. so the actual time between stages may vary.

Once the sixth and final stage is reached, Relic Malfunction status is triggered, as seen seen in 'Don't Fear The Reaper', depleting a quarter of the player's maximum health and reducing it over time by an additional 1% every 6 minutes of gametime (or 45 seconds realtime at the game's default timescale), indicated by recurring "Relic Malfunction Detected" notifications. The longer it takes to finish the game at this point, the harder it becomes to survive. Dying in this state will end the game prematurely, rolling credits.

There is no cure.

Uses cyclical game time (not real time) cooldown timers that are affected by the current time scale (this mod doesn't modify time scale, so 8 in vanilla by default unless changed by the u