The hardest part about Pathologic 2 game is surviving. Your health states are constantly dropping unless you take care of yourself, much like in real life. Though when you're so busy with quests and mysteries it gets too hard to focus on your own body. This part of the game is so taxing for players that the developers had to implement a way to make sustaining yourself easier, if the player wants, with the discretion that the easy way is not the way that the game should be played.
If you're able to make your way through this trouble and see the beauty the game has to offer, you'll want to keep a list of all your options when it comes to maintaining your precious life. Each tick on the clock means hunger, infection, and thirst.
Use Safe Houses
As soon as you find yourself welcomed (somewhat) to the village where you were once raised, you may be prompted to say hello to any old friends who may offer you a bed and some bread. You may want to do this with haste. By pinpointing where you can sleep, eat, and save before any trouble starts brewing, you'll be saving yourself less problems for the next day. Otherwise, you may find yourself in panicking situations like starving on the streets at night with nowhere to go.
- Bad Grief
- Lara Ravel
- Big Vlad
- Abandoned Factory
These are the safe houses you can find for yourself early on in the 12 day cycle. Lara and Bad Grief will be marked on the map upon arrival. The factory house will become available on Day 2 when the game starts to pick up speed. Here you can start crafting and storing goods as well as sleep and save. Most sleeping areas are couches if they are not owned by you. Lara can offer you sleep as early as Day 1 and gives you food when you first see her and agree to stay with her. Every day you can loot her cupboards for any water or bottles.
Bad Grief has no place to sleep but he is where you can find your first save stall. In his little empty shack neighborhood, there is a food store nearby. In this area, you can both save and stock up on food, all of which are available Day 1. Big Vlad is the next top safe house to remember. He is the leader of this little town, who you'll be prompted to meet following your father's death and the angry mobs. Inside his den is a safe stall and a couch to crash on.
Be Likeable
If people don't like you, you're dead meat. People won't give you crucial tips or trade with you if they don't trust you. If you're absolutely disagreeable, groups of men will even hunt you down and beat you up in a back alleyway. Getting knocked out cold hinders your health and story progress and just isn't fun.
- Trade
- No murder
- Chat with people
To make sure each district likes you, or the important ones anyhow, you'll have to agree to the people's terms and flow the way they flow. Trading with people is essential as it shows you're a part of their society and contributing. A lady may come forward and tell you you're doing well, but that you must trade with all genders and ages for people to believe you mean well. Things like these improve public perception. Of course, murdering people in cold blood also affects this. Even if you do it behind a bush or in an abandoned house, people will know. Everyone will know. If you simply must kill, it has to be a low body count or else people will try to put justice into their own hands with you.
Talking with people will also warm them up to you. But only if you don't flat out disagree and start fights, that is. Be relatively neutral or agreeable in conversation and people will start to like you. Being liked means the town will gift you valuable information about your quests or give you crucial items.
Loot And Buy
Stocking up on your goods is important. Since your health states will always be declining unless you maintain and take care of them, every day you'll need to secure food and water. Apart from food, knowing where to find items that create ease in your investigations is also important.
- Meat
- Water bottles
- Fingernails
You could always steal things for immediate results, but everything has its consequences. Whether someone is physically there or not, they will know you stole and it will lower public perception of you. People won't like you this way. Everyday loot will reset inside of garbage bins and the like. You can mostly find water bottles this way, where you can fill them up using the town's water pumps that are scattered around. Doing this early on, you'll never run out of water.
Meat is expensive but the best tummy-filler. People will be trading and selling other food items, though, and anything you can get your hands on is worth it. Save your money and purchase food when needed! Fingernails themselves are hard to come by, but are a lifesaver when time is of the essence. The best way to get them early on is to trade them off of children. Children like little nuts and sharp objects. Those useless small edibles that markets sell are good for trading with kids.
Craft The Cure (SPOILERS)
Last but not least, the cure. Food and sleep are well and good but won't do much against a deadly virus that's taking out half of the town. Being the son of the town's late healer, saving everyone is up to you. You must help the town against the plague that's been brewing in the darkness.
- Any tincture
- Living Blood
There are two ways to cure the plague. By using Panacea or Shmowder. Shmowder almost kills you during the intake process, whereas Panacea is harmless and the most effective. The only issue is that Panacea is scarce and the ingredients are hard to come by.
By Act 3-4 you will be able to craft and trade some cures for the townsfolk. You will only be able to craft seven cures in total during your 12 days. To craft them, you need tinctures and living blood. Living blood can only be acquired during the later days of Day 6 when you drain some from a new village, Shekhen, and loot some in a new building, the Abattoir. Once you acquire the vials from those places, you must combine it with herb and water tinctures using the alembic in the abandoned factory you inherited.