Enter Vacantide

Current game help

Sanity guide

Sanity measures your mental resilience in the Vacantide. Hope shields it from harm, your level helps you resist frightening threats, and reaching zero Sanity is fatal.

Frightening threats

  • Frightening creatures and dangerous places can trigger a Resolve check. At encounter entry, the highest-level frightening creature sets the threat.
  • Some monster attacks trigger another check. If an attack has several fear effects, only its strongest one is checked.
  • A failed check can cause mental damage, terror, or retreat. For mental damage, Hope absorbs it first and any remainder reduces Sanity.

Resolve

  • Resolve = your level + your current Sanity. Losing Sanity lowers your Resolve.
  • Subtract the threat's level from your Resolve, add defensive bonuses, and subtract offensive bonuses. Roll at or below that number to succeed.
  • Checks use a d100 roll: a natural 1 always succeeds and a natural 100 always fails.
  • Resolve cannot be trained directly. Train Sanity and Hope, recover Sanity, and gain levels. train resolve shows help without spending points.

Hope

  • Hope is a mental buffer: it protects Sanity in the same way Toughness protects Health.
  • Characters begin with 1 Hope. Reaching zero Hope is survivable, but later mental damage can reach Sanity.
  • Hope recovers by 1 after each completed 10 real-world minutes, online or offline, up to your maximum.
  • Time spent at maximum Hope is not banked toward a later recovery.

Terror and retreat

  • Terror prevents attacking and escaping for one of your combat turns, or five seconds outside combat. You can still speak, inspect things, and use healing items.
  • Retreat tries the way you entered first, then another usable exit. Locked or undiscovered passages do not provide an escape.
  • If you cannot escape, you freeze in terror. Your encounter continues until you actually move out.
  • Repeated exposure adds no separate penalty. Losing Sanity makes later checks harder because it lowers Resolve.

Death by fright

  • If your current Sanity reaches zero after Hope is exhausted, you die regardless of what caused the loss.
  • The normal death, item-loss, and respawn rules apply.
  • Use score to check your current Hope, Sanity, and Resolve.

Recovery

  • Sleep restores one Sanity per completed hour, up to your maximum, while you remain asleep in an eligible location.
  • Sleep does not directly restore Hope, though time asleep counts toward Hope's normal passive recovery.
  • Health and Sanity do not recover passively while you are awake.
  • Gaining a level fully restores Health, Sanity, Hope, Toughness, and Stamina to their trained maxima.
  • Training a resource maximum also increases its current value by the purchased points, preserving existing damage. Successful training during combat uses your turn.
  • Level-up restoration and training increases work even while starving or dehydrated. Ongoing conditions continue afterward.
  • Watch your current Sanity as well as your Hope. A low Sanity reserve weakens your Resolve.