Status effects

Your lifebar is one bar, and everything that is wrong with you shares it. Health fills it from the left; afflictions eat it from the right, each in its own color; and whatever is left in the middle is your stamina. That is why being cold makes you worse at sprinting, and why an accumulation of small problems is a large one.

Fill the bar completely and you pass out -- which lands as a lethal blow, the same as any other.

The afflictions

Some fade on their own once you have been out of whatever caused them for long enough. Some are taken off by an action. Some are set fresh every tick from a condition and only leave when the condition does.

Weighed down

Not really an affliction so much as an accounting: what you are carrying, re-measured every tick. Put the anvil down and it goes away by itself. Nothing cures it, because there is nothing to cure.

Hungry

Creeps up over a run. Eat something -- a mushroom out of a mitten is the usual answer -- and it comes off. A cure takes it off too.

Injured

This one is your health. It is not a second copy of it: the injury on the bar is exactly the health you are missing, so healing yourself and clearing the injury are the same act. That is why a badly hurt character has almost no stamina left to run away with.

Poisoned

From a ray of sickness, a spider, or the wrong mushroom. Fades slowly, and only after a long stretch with nothing new poisoning you -- the slowest recovery of any affliction. A cure clears it.

Cold

Comes off frost. It fades on its own, but it fades much faster next to other wizards: every teammate standing close by adds to the rate. Huddling for warmth is a real mechanic, not a joke. A cure clears it.

Hot

Comes off fire -- a fire arrow, burning hands, a fireball, or a lit bat's touch. Heat and cold cancel: taking one takes the other off first. A cure clears it.

Stuck with thorns

Picked up in the wood. It does not fade; F pulls them out. No cure touches it, because the answer is your own hand.

Drowsy

From the sleep spell. It cuts your walk to a fraction of normal -- the one affliction that slows you without rooting you -- and it fades after a spell with nothing making you sleepier. A cure clears it.

Cursed

Does not decay at all. Nothing wears it off with time; a cure is the only way out.

Spored

Fungal, slow, and stubborn -- the longest wait before it starts to fade of anything that fades at all. A cure clears it.

Webbed

A root. A grounded wizard standing on a web patch is stuck where they are and cannot jump, whatever they wish. Pressing jump tears at it instead: each press takes a little off and the last one frees you. No cure -- you get out by struggling.

Petrified

Nothing cures it and nothing wears it off. While it is on you it also caps the bonus reserve, so you cannot eat your way back to a full bar.

Snared

The flytrap's grip: a root like the web, torn off with jump presses.

Stuck with an arrow

An arrow that hit you and stayed there. F pulls it out, and that hurts -- taking it out costs you health. It does not fade and no cure touches it, so the choice is a small deliberate wound now or a permanent bite out of the bar.

Fatigued

What a revive leaves behind. Being picked up off the floor gives you your health back and takes half the bar as fatigue, which wears off on its own over time -- or is lifted early by a heal, a potion, or the cleric's circle. A revive is not a heal; this is the difference.

Two rules worth knowing

The spawn shield turns almost everything. For a few seconds after you spawn, an affliction cannot be put on you at all -- except the weight, which is just what you are carrying, and the curse.

Heat and cold cancel. Taking heat removes cold first, and vice versa. Standing in the campfire is a legitimate answer to a ray of frost.