Vampire

A helpful introductory pamphlet to the nightlife of Hell.

So you're thinking about joining the undead

Vampires in HellMOO are quite unlike the creatures in other sources of fiction.

• You can still get sick.
• You still age.
• You still need to breathe. (i.e. you can still drown)
• You spontaneously combust in the sun -- no skin-sparkling for you.

What does this mean? It means you want to think very carefully before becoming a vampire, and definitely probably should not take vampirism as a first mutation.

Basics

So you're a vampire, or considering becoming one. Perhaps you got bitten by some jerk in the orphanage, perhaps one of your corporation comrades bit you in order to feed, or perhaps you chose to permanently mutate (see Mutations) into a creature of the night. Let's summarize the basic effects of vampirism:

• Players with the vampirism disease get bonuses ranging from +0.5 to +2 in Brawn, Cool, Endurance and Senses and a corresponding -0.5 - -2 penalty to Brains. The further the vampirism disease has progressed, the greater the bonuses and penalties. The disease can progress either from successive infections (i.e. multiple vampire bites) or from growing naturally on its own. Diseased vampires also take twice as much sun damage than mutant vampires.

• You will be able to infect others with vampirism via feeding.

• If you are a permanent vampire (you got the mutation) the bonuses and the penalty will always be +/-4. Note that your raw stats are not affected, even if you have the mutation, only your full stats are and therefore contributes to the buff cap on those stats.

• You are able to heal by feeding (sucking blood) from people or monsters. This caps out at +5 HP per heartbeat.

• Normal food will not provide sustenance, only taking blood from others will. You do, however, still need to deal with thirst as you normally would, but drinking blood does cure some thirst.

• The sun will hurt you, and set you on fire. This is the most significant and obvious penalty. The sun can deal out big damage, and if you are set on fire (which is likely), you will continue to take damage until the fire goes out.

• You will suffer a weakness to wooden stakes and harpoon rifles and pistols. Their damage is simply multiplied against you, and is especially nasty on chest shots, which are a guaranteed crit. However, stab armour is very effective at mitigating this, which is why you don't see many wooden stakes in PvP.

• Vampire hunters will attack you on sight. Be very careful, vampire hunter are now quite strong! All of them are confined to the greater Freedom City area, except for Tyrone Belmont, who only rarely goes beyond Crater Rim.

Getting and losing vampirism

Acquiring vampirism is as simple as asking a vampire you know to bite you, or asking in tradenet or chatnet. Few people will turn down a free lunch. Failing that, Boozer under the Crack House's porch (in Gangland, not to be confused with the Crack Mansion) will be more than happy to bite you if you attack him, as will the vampire bats deep in the underground mine.

However you go about it, make sure to check that you've actually been infected, and optionally stick around for multiple bites to speed the process up. If you have the medic skill, you can diagnose yourself to ensure that you have the disease (biting does not guarantee infection). You can also check @buffs, where you will find vampirism's buffs listed if the disease has progressed enough to at least give you +/- 1.

However, sometimes you just don't feel that fangs are right for you. That's okay, weaklings have rights too, provided they don't interfere with their bloodsucking, albino overlords. If your vampirism is in disease form, it can be cured with a black hypo by a competent medic. Neither are uncommon, so just ask on tradenet. If you're a mutant vampire, however, your vampirism is as permanent as any other mutation, and you'll have to take a costly trip to Stormfront Island to rid yourself of it.

Choosing the Vamp Life

Acquiring permanent vampirism in its full mutation form is slightly more involved. First, you must have the full progression of the disease before you can mutate to vampire. The easiest way to know if you have the full progression is to just check your @buffs for those +/-2 brain status effects. The infection itself is otherwise acquired normally; find a friendly vampire, visit Boozer, or take a trip to the underground mine. If you're mutating earlier in the game and don't have access to a friendly vamp (it's not a terribly popular mutation), the vampire bats in the mine are often the safest bet assuming you can handle the mobs there safely; you won't have to worry about stepping out of the crack house and instantly getting blasted by Tyrone or something.

Once you've got the infection and have either bided your time until it reaches maximum progression (watch out for the sun!) or been bitten over and over until you're capped out, it's time to take a visit to Adamant Canyon. You'll want about 17 climb to make it down to the mutation safely, plus some cold weather gear in the winter months. Watch out for the apparitions and rock leeches on the way if you're a lower-level player. The mutation spot is located in the depths of the canyon, on the island at east side of the river, not to be confused with the Lithodermis spot which is on the west side. You'll know you're in the right spot when you spot a ghost called Mother Dao. She's not aggressive like Clairvoyance's Zhobelia, or even notable in any way at all, so just ignore her and mutate.

You may be misled into thinking that because the Canyon is pitch-black at night, it's a safe spot to be a vampire outside. Sadly, this is not the case, so make sure you skedaddle promptly after testing out your super cool new feed on one of the rock leeches on the way out!

Once you're a fully mutated vampire, you can naturally pass on the vampirism disease to other prospective vampires. Getting the full progression alone is a pain in the butt by comparison, so be a cool guy and help out anyone who asks for the succ on tradenet.

Feeding

Not only is feeding by sucking blood from living creatures the only way that vampires can eat (so to speak), it also lets them heal faster. It's also a fairly complex mechanic by HellMOO standards, so buckle up.

How to feed

Feeding works a lot like sex in that you will have to hold an unwilling target, while friends or gullible fools can permit you to feed freely by using allow suck from <x>. Once you are either holding or have received permission from a target, you use feed from <x>. It is helpful to create an alias for this command, such as feed <x> or similar, to reduce how much you have to type whenever you feed. You'll be doing it a lot.

Feeding problems

Whenever you feed on someone you will have an automatic chance of infecting them with vampirism, whether you are a permanent (mutant) vampire or got your fangs through disease. When you feed on someone, you also have an automatic chance of being infected with whatever diseases they had, or being affected by whatever drugs were in their bloodstream. Incidentally, most mobs are not immune to vampirism unless they have an in-built resistance to it. This means you can create vampiric dinosaurs and other scary shit if you really want to. Come sunrise, they'll die in the sun like any vampire would.

Feeding can be stopped by Superclot, but has an RNG chance to succeed and ignore superclot. The chance is in superclot's favour. If superclot succeeds in blocking the feed, that feed will grant no heal, stress heal or fullness to the biter; otherwise the feed will work as normal. The same blocking will occur if you try to feed from any vampire, so be mindful of chain-feeding on a mob that's vulnerable to infection; you'll just end up stressing yourself out with grabs. Some players and mobs also just don't have blood, which will result in you not being able to feed at all. Examples of this include zombies and shoggoths, along with a great deal of other things. Some mobs also just can't be grabbed (such as treemen), so you're locked out of feeding on them. However, you can feed from mobs that have a blood-like substance, which is why vampires can live off of giant ant hemolymph and sewer beetle ichor. You can also feed from freaks, but if you can't work out why that's a bad idea, perhaps Vampire is not the mutation for you.

On top of all that, do note that feeding from a player or mob will damage them and probably give them a bleeding status effect of varying strength. It won't kill anyone outright unless they're at really low health, but it is annoying.

Feeding and fullness

Feeding will fill you up, reducing hunger and possibly giving you fullness debuffs depending on how full you are. Finally, feeds will heal you every heartbeat, to a maximum of +5 per heartbeat for the blood and an extra +1 for being full. Being full and being healed by a past feed are not the same thing, which means that you can vomit to a level where you aren't getting debuffed by fullness but still retain your big +5 heals. It's possible to be very hungry and still be getting max heals from blood.

The amount that a given feed heals you and fills you up scales with a few things, including how much health the mob has, what percentage of the mob's health is remaining, and what XP value the mob or player has (and maybe some other stuff). This is why feeding from a sewer beetle barely gives you anything, while feeding from a large dinosaur or nullianac can fill you up so much that you instantly spew vomit all over yourself.

Every successful feed you enact will also reduce your thirst by a small amount and heal 75 stress.

Feeding mechanics

The process of actually using feed has a few peculiarities. Firstly, you cannot feed on an unconscious target (unlike the fuck verb, for instance). This is very annoying if you're feeding from a mob and they pass out halfway through the feed, because your feed will be cancelled, so watch out for that. Secondly, feed takes quite a long time to perform, meaning that it can be interrupted if you're not careful. Thirdly, cancelling feed is subject to some very strange behaviour. If you have grabbed a mob in order to feed from it and then decide that you want to stop feeding halfway through, you will need to input stop twice. The first stop will cancel the grab, and then the second will cancel the feed. This means that if you grab someone and start feeding from them, you can't stop the feed and go back into a regular grab without letting go and grabbing again, so pick your moment carefully!

As well as this, if either you cancel the grab but not the feed or the mob breaks out of your grab before you're finished feeding, they will be able to attack/do regular actions as normal, but your feed will not be cancelled. This means that you can complete the feed without actually having them in your grip, which can be a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, if you're locked up in a feed and forget to cancel it yourself when the mob breaks out, you might end up dead by their attacks. On the other hand, if you're feeding from a mob that hasn't aggro'd you and they break out of your grip, you can wait out the rest of the feed in relative safety and still get a free heal. Combined with musk, this is a great way to feed from basilisks and the like on the go without having to worry about how brawny they are.

Dealing with the weaknesses

Vampire bestows great benefits, but you will gain proportionally significant weaknesses, which need to be dealt with intelligently.

Loss of Brains

Most (but not all!) vampires are not brains-focused builds, so not being able to craft mediguns as a vampire generally isn't such a big deal. However, this will sting your utility skills a bit: -2 to pilot and -4 to medic are very significant debuffs. The good news is that vampires have their own built-in sustain package with feed. While +5 hp per heartbeat isn't quite as good as a trauma kit from a good medic, it's not miles off the pace. Also note that as a vampire, you cannot take hyperimmune and therefore stand to gain a lot more by using nanite healers.

Low brains can also be problematic in combat, where you may end up getting hit by a feint for an obnoxiously long time. This can be countered through frenzying, which increases resistance to feints, and the Hooligan mutation, which gives a 35% stun resistance that will reduce the length of feints.

Hunger and stress

Because grab causes significant stress and is a requirement for feeding on most mobs, stress is often a problem for the vampire in the field. Feeding helps to offset this, and other ways around it include wearing bling to buff your cool and using scrimshaws to destress. Having a buddy to feed from is also helpful, since you don't have to stress yourself by grabbing them.

Hunger can be a huge problem for vampires if it gets out of hand. Starting at 50 hunger, vampires have increasing chances of gaining a mental, which can be dangerous and difficult to cure. This is why it's so important that vampires stay well fed. If you do end up with a mental, a strong medic can cure most of them (the sooner after you get them, the better). In theory, Empaths can also cure all mentals (and are your only option if you have Enigma), but Empath is a terrible mutation in practise and you'll find few or no Empath players in-game.

Deathgear and diseases

Vampires cannot take Hyperimmune, which means that using the deathsuit and deathshead requires a lot more care to watch your buffs and make sure you don't kill yourself with ATP. High endurance helps with this. Don't fall for the myth that vampires are locked out of using deathgear, however; it's perfectly viable to use in short, measured bursts as long as you're not lazy or careless.

As a vampire, you're also vulnerable to any other disease that you might come across, again subject to your endurance. Since your medic skill is also debuffed by your brains penalty, it's wise to be cautious and bring preventative gear where you're worried about infection, like taking a towel to a zombie fight.

Vampire hunters

They mostly hunt in Gangland, FC, and Slagtown. Tyrone Belmont hunts all through Corpclave, as well, and can wander as he pleases, occasionally ending up as far as Lurleen. All vampire hunters will attack you on sight, and none of them respect musk. Most of them are very dodgy, and all of them have high damage potential, wielding stakes and other hard-hitting weapons. Aside from a single kill journal for killing any hunter, there is little reward to killing any of them, although some of them do drop trophies.

For all these reasons, the best strategy for vampire hunters is often to simply avoid them. Don't linger around the greater Freedom City area and you won't run into them too much. Bear in mind that Tyrone will sometimes go out of his way to deliberately track you down to a point.

Here's a full list of the hunters:

• Buffy uses a stake, is very dodgy and has okay to-hit. One of the weaker hunters; a gun or a solid headbutt will take her out very quickly.
• Blade is somewhat soaky and has a fair amount of health, comparable to a bootlegger. He also uses a harpoon pistol, which halves your dodge.
• Callahan has a ton of health and heaps of focus, and will often open with a carrie and feint. The carrie has a good chance of hitting you for the maximum debuff, so watch out for the damage ticks and to-hit reductions.
• Neville is probably bugged. He's supposed to be accompanied by Samantha, making a scary combination duo. However, lately the two seem to get split up a lot. Neville uses a harpoon rifle, which halves your dodge, while Samantha is a gulfbitch that screeches a lot, as well as being quite soaky.
• Abe, the president, can feint, and hits very hard with his own special commemorative railway fire axe. Similar to a very buffed-up fireman.
• Tyrone Belmont is the tracker, and the face of the hunters. Wanders around wherever he pleases. Uses a 'Vampire Killer' whip as his weapon instead of a stake, which is lightning fast and does a lot of damage. Unlike the other hunters the police won't attack him should he try to kill a vampire in the city. In addition he seems to have a vamp-tracking ability the other hunters lack.

Weakness to the sun

The sun is your biggest enemy in game. Its active hours vary depending on the time of year. You can find a listing of the vampire-friendly times for each month here: pastebin.com/y2NxSS9q. To check whether the sun is gonna bake yo' ass before going outside, use the time command and check what it says. Vampires are only safe from dusk until dawn, so if it says morning or evening, keep your shit indoors. The sun's damage is hugely variable, and can hit anywhere from the low 20s in damage to no damage at all. It tends to hit hardest towards noon, or when it's not cloudy outside. Sun damage does often set you on fire, but it does not inflict burn damage, instead inflicting its own unsoakable damage type that can't be resisted. Being in the sun will also debuff your stats quite heavily.

Sun damage can hit you in two ways. First, you will always take a hit from it upon first entering the sun unless you are already under the influence of the sun debuff when you step outside. Second, every heartbeat that you are still in the sun will result in you taking another hit from the sun. This means that if you're unfortunate enough to step outside shortly before a heartbeat, you'll get double-tapped by sun damage, so try to keep an eye on heartbeats before you step outside.

It is still quite possible to move about FC and go to your favorite hunting grounds during the day, however. Some strategies for doing this include:

• Trauma kits heal using the same timer that sun damage uses (heartbeats), thus negating some of the damage. By keeping trauma kits you can strategically avoid the sunlight and even never take damage while out in the day if you move quickly and find cover from place to place. The same logic applies to healing from feeding or Iron Liver.

• The sewers offer easy cover from the sun while in FC and give you access to the areas around it by finding the manholes which lead to them. You can get to slagtown, gangland, and the crater rim just from the sewers, and a manhole is accessible in Corpclave that allows one way travel to the FC sewers.

• The best counterplay to the sun (aside from just not standing in it!) is having lots of health. Fibrocartilage is great for this, as is using lots of endocrine modules to cap out your HP at 60.

• Firewalker is a very strong mutation that will block most of the fire damage from the sun setting you on fire. It is also the only way to soak damage from being on fire in general, which is great for ants, PvP, Callahan-dodging, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

• The Phaser and Blink mutations are a good choice for Vampires who want to travel during the day. Simply set your memorized 'phase' location to the spot you wish to travel to during the day (for example, outside your apartment) and step in as soon as you've phased. This does require a bit of focus, and is mutually exclusive with Clairvoyance and Leapfrog. Blink allows you to travel vast distances very quickly without memorizing, but is a lot less precise than Phaser.

In practice, the sun damage is rarely instantly lethal to a fully healed vampire, even in the middle of the afternoon, and it is often possible to make quick outside runs without taking damage at all. Good luck finding sunscreen though!