What if we had sanity in this game? As your sanity drops, you start hallucinating with worse hallucinations as you go gradually insane. If you reach rock bottom for sanity, there are two things that can happen. If you're alone in a poorly lit area, the lights start to flicker and you get a warning to find a brighter area or a buddy before you are devoured. Otherwise, you can randomly start to attempt suicide, and if you don't resist out of suicide in time, you are made to go through with it.
You lose sanity when:
- in poorly lit areas (more when alone and even more when there's no light at all)
- around a lot of blood
- around gibs
- around dead bodies, especially mutilated ones
- when covered in blood or when you can see someone covered in blood
- when you're around someone else who is insane that isn't wearing a muzzle
- you're suffering from withdrawal for an addiction
- looking at a zombie, changeling with obvious changeling traits, morph in morph form, revenant, nar'sie constructs
- attacked by one of the above
- you take large amounts of damage at once (oh the pain!)
- You eat hot food such as hot donk pockets (small sanity gain) or food from the chef (good sanity gain)
- You sleep on a bed/in a sleeper/in a cryotube
- Randomly whenever you're near certain growing plants (sunflower?) These would have to be in a tray/pile of dirt
- Be a podman in good light
- Consume drugs such as space drugs or meth, but chems like meth would give you a massive boost to sanity that will fade once you're off of meth
- The chaplain could be given a channeled ability that lets them give a sermon to heal sanity to everybody in the area
- Drink hot chocolate/consume chocolate
Antags could be somewhat resistant to sanity loss, with horror based antags such as blood cult (they're already insane!), changelings, morphs, and zombies immune to sanity loss while also dealing sanity damage to those they attack. Mindshield implants could also protect from sanity loss. If possible, certain jobs could also have resistance to certain sanity loss sources such as the Janitor towards blood and gibs (he's cleaned up worse messes), medical crew towards blood and corpses (they have to deal with these things), and the clown/mime to everything.
Blood cult could be altered to deal with sanity more. Blood cultists are immune to all sanity losses, and they gain tools to deal sanity damage. Conversion runes could convert people with low sanity that look at them (might need to take out stun talismans though), and almost every form of obvious blood cult stuff could deal sanity damage just by looking at them. Looking at Nar'Sie is instant insanity, of course.
This will probably be a lot of stuff to implement, but it could answer issues with people never eating the chef's food, station cleanliness being largely irrelevant (the janitor can be a true hero!), botany not having much helpful stuff to do, and staying forever alone being the best option for safety. Also, it could be interesting if people killed others by driving them insane instead of just clicking until the sprite was horizontal. A chemist could inject the crew with enough drugs to get everybody addicted so that the sanity drain from withdrawal would kill them. Theoretically, you could kill someone by RCDing them into a dark room and letting darkness slowly drive them insane until they committed suicide or got devoured.
