Deaf

Deaf is a status effect which disables the player character's hearing, for example, smashing something won't say "From the (direction) you hear whump!" Deafness can be gained when a flashbang detonates in 8-square radius or nearer, or if any explosive goes off, or when a gun is fired, or sometimes when the character hears a noise with volume over or equal to 150. In both cases, the duration is based on distance to the source of sound and its volume. In the latter case, the duration cannot be longer than 40 turns, however it appears the duration can stack, deafening you for hours.

When deaf, you cannot talk to NPCs, and you risk strangers becoming hostile upon meeting.

Players can be in significant risk of long-lasting deafness if they are in a burning building, or any collapsing buildings, since the sounds of the collapsing can be really loud and stack. You could use ear plugs to avoid deafness, but do not forget to take them off when you do not need them anymore.

As explosives have gotten a big buff in 0.D (Danny) good hearing protection is advised. Loud blasts can damage your hearing for a very long time, almost feeling permanent.

If you are deaf, lockpicking a safe becomes impossible.

Items which provide ear protection

There are various items that provide ear protection, starting with the a simple pair of ear plugs, which simply make you deaf and stops further ear damage. Up to things like the shooter's earmuffs which don't make you fully deaf but just prevent loud noises from damaging your ears. You can recognize the items by looking at the DEAF and PARTIAL_DEAF tags on the item browser. Deaf just makes you unable to hear, and partial deaf prevents loud noises, as such the latter is better.

Deafness can also be prevented by the Enhanced Hearing bionic.

Hacking deafness

So you used a few mininukes and didn't know deafness was a thing and you should have used ear protection. And for some reason it feels like you are deaf for a long time now. How would you fix this? Well first, you probably are deaf for a long time if you played around with mininukes. Deafness from those bad boys can last up to 4 years of ingame time. Of course there is a way to fix this by cheating. Follow the following easy steps.

• First make sure you are not wearing hearing protection ingame. If you do, remove it save the game and quit.
• Locate your save directory (default is in the /save/ directory where you installed C:DDA)
• Locate the directory of the world you are playing in.
• Inside this directory there are a few files with random characters, find one that ends in .sav and open it in a text editor.
• Check if this is the character who is deaf by searching for the word 'deaf'. (If it doesn't have this, either your character isn't deaf, or you are playing multiple characters in this world, and you picked the wrong one. Open a different random string .sav file).
• If you found 'deaf', there should also be a duration in that same part of the text, after the duration is a number, this is the amount of ingame turns you are deaf.
• Reduce the deafness to a more manageable number (best practice is to set it to a number slightly higher than zero so the 'your deafness is now over' thing still gets processed, important if there ever is an event which triggers when your hearing returns).
• Save the file, and enjoy hearing again.