Drink, Smoke & Addiction

A pint, a smoke, a vape — all fine in moderation, but lean on any of them too hard and your body starts keeping score.

Drinking and smoking are woven into everyday life in the city — a bar crawl, a cheeky vape between jobs, a joint to take the edge off. None of it is off-limits. But every one of these habits is tracked by your body the same way hunger, thirst and stress are, and lean on them too often and you’ll start paying for it in ways that outlast the buzz.

Getting Drunk

Any alcoholic drink raises your blood alcohol level the moment you drink it. As it climbs you move through three rough stages:

Tipsy — a light camera shake, nothing that stops you doing anything.
Drunk — a heavier shake and a proper stumbling walk animation kick in.
Hammered — the worst of it: heavy shake, the drunk walk, and your character loses the ability to sprint or jump until it eases off.

There’s no way to rush it — alcohol burns off passively on its own, and a session that starts from fully hammered takes roughly twenty minutes to clear. It’s also purely a live-session effect: nothing about your drunkenness is saved, so logging out and back in (or a server restart) leaves you stone-cold sober regardless of how many rounds you’d had.

Getting visibly drunk isn’t a mechanical crime by itself — it’s a roleplay flag, not something that trips an alert. Just remember stumbling around in front of the wrong people rarely ends well in-character.

Smoking & Vaping

Cigarettes and vapes both deliver a nicotine dose and a bit of stress relief when you use them — handy if your stress bar’s been climbing, but every dose also nudges your nicotine dependency up.

Vape devices in particular have their own little assembly loop through your inventory:

Fit a pod or tank part onto a bare vape device to build it into a finished, working kit — once assembled, that morph is permanent.
Slot in a battery to give it a full charge.
Refill it from an e-liquid bottle, which locks in that bottle’s flavour and strength until the tank runs dry.
Puffing it drains battery, liquid and puffs together, so a device eventually needs a fresh charge or refill to keep working.

Full assembled kits and a range of e-liquid flavours and strengths — including custom blends — are sold through shops and services; see Inventory & Storage for how the combine/assembly mechanic works more generally.

Rolled cannabis products (joints, blunts, spliffs and backwoods) sit in their own loop covered in full over in Drugs & the Black Market — worth knowing here is that a spliff carries a small nicotine dose alongside its cannabis effect, since it’s cut with tobacco, so it feeds both dependency tracks at once.

How Addiction Builds

Every alcoholic drink, cigarette/vape puff, and dose of cannabis feeds a separate dependency track for that category. Using something doesn’t just raise your dependency number — it also resets an internal “clock” for that category, which temporarily holds off any withdrawal symptoms. That’s the trap: topping up feels like it fixes the problem, but it’s quietly raising the baseline you’re now dependent on.

Below a certain dependency level, none of this matters — casual, occasional use carries no penalty at all and just fades away naturally if you stop. It’s only once dependency has crossed that threshold that the clock starts to bite.

Chasing that reset feeling is exactly how dependency creeps up on people — every “one more” that silences withdrawal also raises the bar for next time.

Withdrawal: Running Dry

Once you’re dependent and you let the clock run out without another dose, you escalate through three stages: Craving, Withdrawal, and Severe. Each stage:

Adds ongoing stress and makes your stress harder to shake off naturally.
For most categories, cuts your maximum carry weight and locks the bottom rows of your inventory grid — see Inventory & Storage for how the grid itself works. Cannabis dependency never locks your rows, and nicotine withdrawal is milder than alcohol or harder substances.
Hitting Severe for the first time in a session triggers a rough one-off physical moment — shaking, retching, the lot — so you’ll know when you’ve properly crossed the line.

Running multiple categories dry at once stacks all of it together — the stress, the weight loss, the locked bags — so a rough week where you’ve skipped drinks, smokes and everything else at the same time hits a lot harder than any one on its own.

Coming Back Down

There’s no shortcut and no quick fix — dependency itself decays slowly on its own the longer you go without feeding it, provided you can ride out the withdrawal stage rather than reaching straight for another dose. Time, patience, and managing your stress elsewhere (proper meals, training at the gym, a good night’s sleep) is what actually gets you clean.

Because withdrawal both adds stress and slows its recovery, breaking a habit is genuinely easier when your stress is already under control from other angles — which is exactly why the two systems are linked. Investing in the Mental Resilience side of your skills softens stress gain and speeds up recovery generally, which indirectly makes riding out withdrawal far more bearable.

Staying Ahead of It

A few habits keep this from ever becoming a real problem:

Treat any of these as an occasional pick-me-up, not a default fix for stress — a proper meal or a breather does the same job with none of the long-term cost.
If you know you’re relying on something heavily, watch for the early Craving stage and choose to ride it out rather than reset the clock again — it only gets more expensive the longer you stack resets.
Don’t let more than one category run dry at the same time before a job that needs your full carry weight and a clear head — check your dependency state before you commit to something important.

None of this is punishing if you’re paying attention. It only becomes a real drag when a habit’s been ignored for days at a time — the fix is always the same: stop, and give it time.