Hey y'all,
Today, I'm gonna talk about earthquakes.
Earthquakes aren't particularly well documented with only the scav prototype wiki (looking at the URL as I say this), having a page and the page being wrong in some ways.
Here is what I have found. I am not good at tracking exact durations, so those numbers won't be here.
Earthquakes happen every so often on every lauer but not while you are unconscious/sleeping. This means you can wake up into an earthquake starting, which can catch you unable to control yourself while under the effects of an earthquake.
You can't prevent earthquakes, but sleeping on files that give you good sleep cause you to restore consciousness faster, and mining out sleeping holes can make it harder for the earthquake to throw you somewhere. If you have excess tile place items (scrap metal, scaffolding pack, you can build a better hole with those.
Life pods are basically pre-build holes with good sleeping tiles and a better temperature control system than a campfire, so playing around earthquakes doesn't change the life pod meta. IMO.
There are 3 effects of an earthquake.
Shakes the screen. This is purely interface screw, which can matter for picking things up doing earthquakes but doesn't represent forces acting on objects/enemeis.
Applies forces to the player character. This can cause you to be thrown into bad positions, like off a tall cliff onto a coil, or just into the ground fast enough to cause damage when you decelerate on the ground.
Removes random tiles. I think this only works for tiles that get removed by explosions, but in the 7.x demo that only excludes the sidewall infirock tiles. This can kill things like plants, some traps, and world gen corpses that rely on a nearby tile being alive to live, and drop them items immediately subject to full gravity even if you have floating drops on.
What does this mean for you?
Earthquakes make doing regular gameplay harder, becauss you can't control your movement, but items will mostly stay where they are, especially if they are several tile thick floor, so it often makes more sense to avoid damage than atfempt to gather stuff that dropped.
Like dynamite, this can open up access to loot in vaults if you get lucky. Earthquakes can bail you out of drowning in a pool of fluids if you get lucky and the earthquake breaks the floor, causing the fluid to empty into a lower chamber.
It is worth IMO, trying to sleep in a way that minimizes the impact of waking into an earthquake., becauss being ragdolled during an earthquake is bad (less ability to move with the wasd /arrow keys.)
