I think what we discussed here should be relatively clear feedback, the top line being the primary parameter, and the other two below it the "derived" parameters in that category which lag behind when being restored, the same way they lag behind when the primary parameter is dropping.

Yes, it's parked right in front of the hab I'm exiting from, within view as the external airlock door opens.

Ok, after having completed a test run, driving all the vitals down until organ failure warning then drinking/eating/resting, it turns yout you are right, currently everything, all lines in each category, except organ integity itself goes immediately back to green, which I don't think is the correct behaviour and I'm almost certain that's not how they used to behave earlier. That's why I insisted they shouldn't be doing that, but with the balance changes I haven't seen them go anywhere low-ish lately so I didn't know how they behave now.

I still feel dust devils have gotten way too rare with that change to their frequency back a few months. I hardly ever see any, in my current game I've seen the first (and so far only) one after 11 sols.

"Charge" is not the right word here as the portable panel no longer charges, only slows drain. Unless it behaves differently in his specific case.

Maybe this could be extended to also mention that it is possible to set 0 rest time to just save progress without also advancing the in game time, but obviously not recovering any exhaustion when doing so either, since it's not entirely intuitive that you can "sleep" for no amount of time.

I suspected something like this, that's why it was more of a question. The "misbehaving" line in exhaustion, for example, is blood pressure, which I'm sure is affected by hydration to a notable degree, so it appearing to be influenced by the hydration state in the game too does make sense.

Not having to maintain anything for up to a week would effectively remove the whole equipment maintenance gameplay element from what little challenges still remain in the game, the same way as having changed the vitals balance from the previous faster rate (death in 3 sols after having had the vitals at very low levels for most of the duration) to the current extremely slow one (death in maybe 10-12 sols), which is so slow you can all but ignore it and just eat/drink once in a while when it occurs to you that you didn't for days.

There's a point where trying to achieve "realism" would impact gameplay very negatively, and where gameplay needs to come first so that it still remains a game where you have to face at least some challenges and manage limited resources, including your in game time, which needs to be split between various tasks that are in odds with each other.

Spending an hour or two per sol with maintenance, and having to return to an online hab every 2-3 sols to prevent losing components really isn't that much of a hassle. Actually, as far as "realism" go, it represents the mundane maintenance routine which is a huge part of the daily activities of the ISS crew.

I'll have to try not to eat for a few days to see how it behaves compared to how it used to, but it sounds like something might have become broken somewhere along the line, and (some of the) vitals no longer work, or at least display, the way they did and should.

With the previous balance and shorter (in real time) days it was easier to see all this in action and notice if there's something off with it since it happened naturally every time you went on a longer exploration trip, but now it's so slow that you need to deliberately create an "unnatural" test case to make the stats drop to a noticeable level.

Hmm, maybe there was some unintended change regarding how the vitals display works now, but how it's supposed to work is exactly how you say it should, how it did, and how I tried to describe it above. It was one of the early design decisions about the whole health system, that instead of a simple number/or percentage saying "you are exactly at 49% health", it should be more of an organic, "moving average" kind of thing where satisfying the immediate needs, which happens instantly (you don't eat for the whole duration it takes for consumed food to pass through your digestive tract, you eat "now", and then it gets processed; the calories intake changes instantly to reflect the fact that you have eaten, not that it has already been processed in an instant and "healed" you, which it didn't), trickles down through a series of affected parameters over time to eventually impact your "health". Calories/water intake and exhaustion has four "tiers", you can only directly infulence the topmost one (I ate/drank/rested right now, the calories/water is in my system, and it'll have some impact on my health over time as it gets processed and the linked vitals below the topmost line stabilize), and the other three react at different speeds, getting better when you have satisfyed the need and worse when you didn't, the change trickling down from the top line to the ones that are below it, and eventually affecting organ integrity one way or the other.

At least that's how it should work, and consistently did work over the course of development up to this point. Maybe something got broken and everything changes together instantly even though it shouldn't. If that's the case, then it needs to be looked at and fixed.

Actually, one thing I can think of that there was a balance / fix pass on it, which caused the "trickle down" to happen a lot slower now than it used to. Now even if you let calories/hydration to reach 0 (which takes about a day for food, and somewhat less for water) but immediately eat/drink just as it did, you won't really see much change as too little time went by without the topmost tier being satisfied for the negative impact to get further down the line. It was one recurring criticism that not eating for a day or two shouldn't have a significant impact on your health (previously you died in about 3 sols if you have not eaten for that long, at which point all food related vitals have gotten red one after another, and if you did eat in the last moment, only the topmost one went back to green, the rest took a day or two to catch up one by one). I think now the trickle takes up to about 10 days to reach all the way down, becoming visible only after the topmost tier not having been satisfied for days. It may feel more "realistic" now, but from a gameplay perspecitve it all but killed the tenson resultng from a much faster, even if less "realistic" degradation of vitals when going without food, water or rest for a while.