Immune System

Hello Devs,

This is an idea related to illnesses - basically a stat / percentage (similar to fertility maybe?) that is called "immune system" or "immune system strength"  which basically alters the suspectibility to catch an illness randomly / from other pack members.  This would be a property, that can be passed down and combined through breeding.

A really wild idea would be to include the theory of major histone compability complex genes (MHC) (so uh, from real life Immunology / Biology), which are genes that have a HUGE variability of alleles. There are studies that have linked low MHC diversity to inbreeding in populations. I know inbreeding is seemingly becoming a controversial topic, and I dont directly want to discourage people from inbreeding their wolves, I just think this would be an interesting and realistic approach to balance out  the "advantages" of inbreeding (that it gives higher probability for the recessive secondary mutant alleles to match up to produce a mutant, for example) by having it affect the Immune System negatively to some degree.

Probably, giving the wolves actual hundreds of "alleles" in coding would be...complicated, so I propose that the higher the COI (Coefficient of Inbreeding) is, the approprietly bigger the "penalty" on the immune system is, but there should also be a random factor / roll involved in this, when passing the "immune system" stat / percentage. 

With or without the inbreeding "penalty" part, I think this would integrate illnesses more into the game play and maybe diversify possible breeding goals. Right now i feel like illnesses are just sort of "there" and you dont interact and think about them much when you currently dont have a sick wolf.

One could also later on consider special / rare items or high skill herbalist recipes that temporarily boost the immune system or a breeding item that give a higher chance for the puppies to have higher immune system stat...

Implementation by Devs :
As far as I can see, this would require:

1) changing coding in all processes where catching an illness is possible, to be modified by the property "immune system"
2) giving newly created wolves (born / in Explore) an Immune System Stat
3) incorporating this in the game code of breeding ( combination of inheriting this stat from parents + randomization aspect  )

I would be happy about further input and discussion about this idea, since I dont really understand Wolvden Economy that well yet...and therefore have a hard time assessing how this would affect it.

I love this idea, it would make diseases much more interesting to interact with! I think the penalty for inbreeding should not be too high as to not discourage it too much and only have a significant impact at very high COI, with the chance of the random factor making it more manageable.

Surviving through a disease could also give a wolf a temporary immune boost that would last x rollovers and reduce the chance of contracting other diseases. This could integrate or replace the current immunity period.

I would honestly Love this idea, so long as you aren't Extremely penalized for not heavily implementing it your breeding projects : )
It gives the illnesses a little more life to them. The pests and wounds aside ~ 

I love this! As the others have said, support if it's not too punishing!

This is an awesome idea and I would love to see it implemented! With illnesses in wolvden it seems like it makes total sense to have some sort of stat/gene type thing that interacts with the illness mechanic somehow.

I am also a big fan of the idea of inbreeding giving a penalty to this gene, but would certainly accept the addition of something like this without that sort of penalty as well.