Physiology system

Physiology is the skill for observing health, administering prepared interventions, and improving wound recovery. It produces a fallible differential of possible diseases, but never reveals the authoritative disease identity or recommends a treatment. Preparation crafting and chemistry remain deliberately out of scope for issues #214 and #215.

Private authority

The authoritative strategic simulation derives ten bounded functional-loss meters:

• oxygenation
• perfusion
• hydration
• temperature
• inflammation
• coagulation
• nutrition
• neurologic function
• renal clearance
• tissue integrity

Disease curves are deterministic and piecewise linear. A versioned, server secret keyed phenotype changes the relative involvement of meters for each episode while keeping the population mean neutral. Baselines, phenotype values, raw meters, infection identifiers, and disease identity stay in private SpacetimeDB state.

Interventions use generic, versioned profiles with meter deltas over time. Administration records the patient, concrete preparation and profile version, route, amount, optional body region, start and stop minutes, and private sensitivity/adverse variation. No effect lookup accepts a disease key.

All authoritative personal-time paths evaluate disease and intervention effects together. The earliest integer-minute terminal crossing wins, with a stable meter-order tie-break, so splitting an interval into smaller calls cannot change the result.

The authoritative database initializes private key material from runtime randomness and persists one private key for the lifetime of the database. Changing its version requires recreating the disposable pre-launch database; older causal rows fail closed instead of being re-derived with new material. Infection and administration causal rows pin the ruleset and key versions used to interpret them. No secret is compiled into the module, placed in an environment-backed WASM constant, or exposed through a public view.

Observer notebooks

Physiology exposes four period-facing Humours: Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Choleric, and Melancholic. Each is a documented weighted sum of several private meters. The map is intentionally many-to-one, so a humour reading cannot reconstruct a private meter or disease identity.

Notebook authorization is based on persisted pair-presence spans. Joining or rejoining a party opens a fresh span at the lesser of the two personal clocks; departure and death close it by the same rule. Each direction stores the observer's Physiology capability band at that boundary, preventing later training from sharpening historical observations. Every notebook records at most one examination per day. Higher bands produce more finely quantized readings and a better-calibrated differential, but do not add examinations.

The trusted strategic gateway derives a bounded, pre-quantized chart on demand from causal infection, administration, presence, capability, ruleset, and key boundaries. Periodic meter or Humour snapshots are never persisted. A chart contains:

• timestamped, signed humour deviations for each body region
• a fallible differential of possible diseases
• interventions the observer could know about
• explicit gaps for absence

Externally visible findings are never listed directly. Coughing, fever, rash, and every other finding are forced through the deliberately unhelpful Humour lens and contribute to the relevant regions. Healthy is the zero baseline; both positive and negative deviations are shown, and the absolute deviation contributes to the Humour-colored impairment in the corresponding regional health bar.

The physician notebook presents seven tall graphs side by side, one for each body region. Time runs vertically. Hovering, focusing, or selecting an observation opens its quantized snapshot. Medication starts and stops are horizontal event markers, while party absence is drawn as a hatched interval that also breaks the Humour lines. Stable keyed observer noise varies the readings from day to day without changing the authoritative body state, making early treatment response deliberately ambiguous.

Possible diseases are ordered and colored from red through yellow to green. Physiology skill and time spent observing make those colors better calibrated. The differential also compares the expected action of known treatment with the patient's subsequent regional burden, so improvement or deterioration can strengthen or weaken a candidate without exposing private disease identity.

It contains no authoritative diagnosis, recommendation, infection row, phenotype, or raw private meter. Browser subscriptions never include the private tables.

Presentation contract

This document and the Health wiki page are the canonical explanation of meters, Humour weights, chart limitations, and intervention scope. The game does not expose a standalone authoritative reference page: players currently encounter the system through the physician notebook. Future NPC dialogue should keep period claims separate from authoritative explanations so presentation does not blur in-world belief with system truth. Humour information remains textual as well as colored, keyboard focusable, and available through pinned mouse/touch tooltips.