A good number of items in the game, the bottled energy, energy bar, and adrenaline, all boost stamina but see no use for their intended purpose. Sure, the energy drink and energy bar get used for food and water, but the adrenaline isn’t really used for anything other than poisoning people.
I think the core issue here lands in how it is just far easier to level up related skills, even if it raises stamina to 100 it’s still not particularly useful.
My Suggestion
Rather than having those items directly raise stamina to 100, make them max out stamina and for a temporary period make it not be consumed, effectively giving the player infinite stamina for a limited time, varying depending on item. This would make them actually useful and not be unrealistic or out of place. Maybe to show when the players stamina is infinite during that period make the bar be a brighter glowy color and change the text to rather than a percent?
I should also mention this would not only enhance the vanilla game but also open up a lot of possibilities for mapmakers - by nerfing or disabling cardio it would be possible to reduce stamina regen and make stamina boosters of various types a crucial gameplay mechanic and making them a necessity for escaping zombies or hostile players.
All this is cool, of course, but adrenaline increases stamina to 100, it not only poisons, logically one could add temporary effects that are acceptable, let’s say a completely well-fed character will receive a regeneration effect for 1 minute, etc. But all this requires testing, I don’t think it will be planned in the near future. Since the game has a bunnyhop (jumping spam) and if you add such effects, it will no longer be fair… So I think all this requires tests and balance changes.
The poison effect should just be outright removed on that and the morphine IMO, and it wouldn’t be that hard to balance just change how long the infinite stamina period lasts - if it’s just a minute or two it won’t be overpowered
Medical injections and energy foods needs a buff rather than only increasing your stamina to 100% or increasing your health/food/water
I’ve managed to buff those ones on my servers since months ago, doing the next things:
Enery bar: increases your speed in 15% for 30s
Energy drink: increases your speed in 25% for 30s
Adrenaline: recover your stamina to 100% and also it makes it infinite for 1min
Morphine: increases your armor (resistence to damages) in 25% for 30s
Vaccine: recover your inmunity to 100%
I’m pretty sure with the vanilla buffs the cases you will use them for their purposes will be really minimal to never, but with some kind of buffs like these ones I added at least they can be even a game changer or you could say at least “hey, this is actually useful, I’m gonna loot them more often and stack them”
This all sounds cool, but I think that in the case of adrenaline, you need to make sure that the fatigue debuff occurs within 10 seconds after the 1-minute buff, since adrenaline is quite a powerful thing and affects a person’s heart.
You aren’t wrong but Unturned lets you drink glue with no downsides besides briefly hallucinating so I don’t think Nelson is THAT concerned with realism lol
rather than a percent?