Health, Injuries & First Aid

Getting hurt in the city leaves real, trackable wounds — here's how to read them and patch yourself up.

Take a beating in The Estate and it isn’t just a health bar ticking down — you pick up an actual injury on a specific part of your body, and it stays there until someone treats it. Getting shot, cut, hit by a car, burned, dropped from height, caught in a blast, drowned, or electrocuted all leave their own kind of damage, and knowing what you can fix yourself versus what needs a hospital is the difference between walking it off and bleeding out in an alley.

How You Get Hurt

Every injury lands on a body zone — head, torso, left or right arm, left or right leg — and carries a severity rating that climbs the more that zone gets hit. Take two bullets to the same arm and the second one stacks on top of the first rather than starting fresh.

Many injury types come with a bleed, light or heavy, that drains your health every second until it’s stopped. A bad enough hit to your head or a leg can drop you straight into the DOWNED state even if your overall health hasn’t run out yet — so a single well-placed shot can be worse than a longer scrap that never targets one spot.

Two injury types don’t fully resolve out in the field, no matter what you use on them:

Gunshot wounds always lodge in the zone they hit. Bandages and kits will slow the bleed and dull the damage, but the wound itself needs proper medical resolution.
Severe burns behave the same way — smaller burns can be treated on the street, but a serious one needs a hospital to fully clear.

When you’re carrying a wound like this, you’ll get a nudge telling you to get to a hospital, along with a temporary route on your map — see The Hospital Walk-In below, or the fuller emergency medical picture if a medic’s on duty.

Reading Your Injuries

Your injuries and their body-zone diagram live in the Health tab of your inventory, alongside your usual gear. It shows you which zones are hurt, how severe each one is, and whether it’s actively bleeding — the information you need before deciding what to reach for.

If you take repeated hits to the same limb, treat it as a priority — stacked severity in one zone is what tips you into the DOWNED state early.

Treating Yourself and Others

Pharmacy-shelf items handle the bulk of day-to-day first aid: bandages, tourniquets, pain relief, antiseptic, a sling, a cold pack. Beyond that sit field-medical kits — AFAK and IFAK, plus a further “advanced” tier gated behind a Vitality ability — which do more per use. All of it is sold through general shops and services, so it’s worth keeping a few bandages and a kit in your bag before you go anywhere risky.

There are two ways to use them:

Use the item directly and it automatically targets your worst current injury.
Drag the item onto a specific zone in the Health tab if you want to treat something more precisely — handy if you’re carrying more than one wound and want to save your better kit for the worse one.

Most items stop bleeding and knock down severity together; a few are HP-pool consumables that wear down across several uses rather than being single-use. Using a medical item when you’re not actually wounded still works — it just tops up your health like a plain heal.

You can use any of this on someone else too — patch up a mate who’s caught a stray bullet or come off a bike badly, provided you’re close enough and they’ll hold still for it.

When Field Treatment Isn’t Enough

Gunshots and severe burns are the two wounds field kit can’t finish off. If you’re carrying one, your options are:

Find an on-duty TEMS medic, who can properly resolve the wound in the field or at the hospital depending on severity — see Rescue & Trauma Care for what that looks like from the patient’s side.
Use the hospital walk-in fallback below if no medic is available.

The Hospital Walk-In

If nobody’s working TEMS when you need help, the hospital keeps a reception medic on hand as a paid fallback. Walk up while conscious and hurt, and cash up front buys you a patch-up — the price scales with how badly you’re hurt. If you’re downed, a separate hold-key prompt (rather than the usual walk-up interaction, since you can’t stand to trigger it) buys a revive instead.

This heal is a pure convenience — it doesn’t resolve wounds the way a real medic does, and it earns no Vitality experience. Think of it as the “never truly stuck” safety net rather than proper treatment, and it’s always worth checking whether a medic is on shift first.

Letting Nature Take Its Course

Left alone, minor injuries recover naturally over time without any treatment at all — training your Vitality skills speeds this up, reduces how much severity you take from hits in the first place, and eases the aim/movement penalties an injury imposes while it’s active. Taking hits, treating wounds, and recovering from a bad episode all feed XP into that same skill line, so first aid isn’t purely defensive — it’s also how you toughen up over time.

Being hurt also has a knock-on effect on your other meters: expect faster hunger and thirst drain and slower recovery while you’re carrying anything serious, so it pays to eat, drink, and get patched up rather than grinding through injured.

If things get bad enough that you go down entirely, that’s its own set of rules — covered in full in Going Down, Dying & Respawning.