Your "health" is your organ integrity, not your calories/thirst/exhaustion stats. You don't die when you reach 0 calories or 0 hydration, you die when you reach organ failure state a lot later (several sols) due to not having kept up the other vitals for a prolonged time.

The lower those vitals get, the more rapidly organ integrity will degrade (health is lost) over time. If you restore the vitals, organ integrity starts to improve over time. Eating/drinking/resting immediately retores the stat that represents the level of that specific need, not your health itself, and that restored stat will impact how organ integrity will change over time from then on. That's why they get (correctly) restored instantly when eating/drinking. You could argue that digesting food to get the nutrients into the blood stream does take time, but that stat simply tracks your calories intake, not how much of that has been processed by your metabolism so far. And as a matter of fact, metabolism is kind of simulated/represented too. The top tier stat in each 3 vitals changes instantly upon replenishing the stat itself, but the 3 lines below them will only gradually return to green one after another, and those represent how much leftover impact letting that stat go down still has on your health, or if you want, how much of your recent intake has been processed so far.

Radioactive exposure, however, works differently. It's accumulated over time (at least the kind of exposure you suffer in the game), and it should be removed over time too instead of being instant, because it's a metabolic process unlike downing a bottle of water or eating something, which happens "instantly" and adds the consumed amount to the intake tracker.

I have never, literally never, ever, in my 130+ hours of play time lost a single hab system component due to degradation, and I wasn't even repairing everything to 100% all the time, just a few repairs per sol on the lowest condition slots per system before heading out to a 2-3 sols long exploration trip. Degradation rate is fine, too low, even. At its current rate its nowhere near enough to cause any need for crafting replacements, ever.

50% over 3 sols is nothing. You are not supposed to be able to explore the whole map in one go without even so much as just thinking about having to maintain the habitat at some point, and with the current degradation rate and the recent in game time / real time ratio change, you can cover a huge area even just in one sol, let alone 3. I'm inclined to say I could explore at least third of the map in 3 sols with a bit of preparation (unless a dust / radiaton storm comes up) on foot, and the remaining two thirds in another 3 once I found the PRT, whereas it used to take 15-20 sols at least with the old balance.

One thing that I never explicitly mentioned is that all this is happening without having a pickaxe equipped, or even being in the inventory or anywhere else (as I haven't found one yet). It just started to appear on its own all of a sudden.

In case it's save dependand, you can use this save to try to reproduce the pickaxe issue too, I've noticed it first when I continued the game from this save.

I just encountered this issue too, also after I saved in Hab Beta for the first time. After I reloaded the save, the pickaxe started to appear under certain conditions:

1. After game load it's not visible.
2. Opening the datapad with any other hotkey than "E" then closing it with the same hotkey causes the pickaxe to appear.
3. Hitting any datapad hotkey (when the datapad is down and the pickaxe is up) causes the pickaxe to go away, but the datapad not coming up. In this state LMB is ineffective, nothing can be interacted with.
4. Hitting any datapad hotkey (other than "E", which breaks the cycle) when the pickaxe is not visible makes the datapad come up. Putting the datapad away with the same hotkey again causes the pickaxe to reappear.

Basically, this is what happens: datapad down -> hit hotkey -> datapad up -> hit hotkey -> datapad down, pickaxe up -> hit hotkey -> pickaxe down -> hit hotkey -> datapad up -> and so on.

Hitting Esc when the pickaxe is up, or using the "E" key to bring up or close the datapad breaks this cycle and from then ot the pickaxe will never appear again.

On a related note: I don't think I've seen a specific key or other control for taking out / putting away the pickaxe, so how is it supposed to work to begin with? I've also not seen any indication or access method of the sample holder slots on the character nor anywhere in the hab interiors.

Maybe the word "emergency" could be left out of this, since Outposts also have pop tents, but they are not necessarily deployed due to an emergency. Since the player craftable item is, I think, called "Emergency Pop Tent", this might give the impression that you can eat only in that, if the hint is taken too literally.

Maybe this would be better as "Use the PRT to transport..." as there's only one in the game.

While this was likely in the previous version, in 0.64 I've salvaged 4-5 items in a row and so far did not experience this. May have gotten fixed or there was some other factor involved.

This issue is, umm, partially fixed? :)

The datapad does switch to the inventory screen now, but then still closes itself, plus now a number of other things are broken with the datapad:

• Once the datapad closed in the above situation, LMB will be ineffective until the datapad is reopened with any hotkey then closed properly.
• When switching from one datapad screen to any other via it's hotkey (or even switching away from the hab status or crafting/salvaging terminal screens via a datapad screen hotkey), the datapad again gets closed and LMB gets locked the same way.
• When using the default RMB to close the datapad from any screen (including hab / sytem terminals, etc), LMB gets locked the same way.
• Once the datapad is lowered and LMB is locked due to the aboce issues, the control scheme also appears to get stuck in datapad mode instead of switching back to character mode.

Based on some limited test opportunity I had so far (with slots starting with broken components), this issue appears to have been fixed.