Survival

Your skill in wilderness survival. This helps you butcher meat from a corpse and craft various basic survival items. Also used for skinning corpses to acquire pelts. For a more efficient butchering you'll need this skill at level 3, dexterity at 8 and strength at 4 or higher.

Apart from reading books on the subject, you can easily raise this skill by butchering corpses (including those of zombies), examining undergrowth, crafting stone hammers and, later, digging sticks and snare triggers.

• At level 3, it can detect if an food item is poisoned. "On closer inspection, this appears to be poisonous."
• At level 5, it can detect if food items contain hallucinogenics. "On closer inspection, this appears to be hallucinogenic."

Getting bionics from corpses

The survival skill also influences the chance of getting a bionic from a corpse that has a bionic inside of them (Shocker zombies are a prime example).

Several factors influence the chance of getting a working bionic, if the roll fails you get a Burnt out bionic.

This is how the process works:

• There is a variable called "skill_shift".
• First random float from 0.0 to survival skill level - 3 is added to skill_shift.
• Then random float from 0 to 0.25 * (DEX - 8) is added to skill_shift.
• Less than 4 STR gives penalty to skill_shift equal 0.25 * (5 * (4 - STR)).
• If you have inconsistent weapon, you also get penalty equal 0.2 per level of inconsistent.

If "skill_shift" is negative you get a nothing, otherwise there is a (skill_shift + 1) * 3 in 2 of getting a working bionic otherwise you get a Burnt out bionic.