Since the Gear entry an item has been a few plain numbers: what it weighs, how hard it hits, what it does. Those numbers were fixed. A bat was a bat on the day you found it and the same bat a month later, an apple was fine one day and spoiled the next, with nothing in between, and a pistol was always empty. This week the numbers started moving.
Food goes off
Anything you can eat has a freshness bar, and the bar runs down. Fresh, then spoiling, then spoiled, then rotting, then rotten, which is just a lump of rotten food. Each stage warns you about the next as its bar gets low, so a sandwich in your pack is a small clock you can read at a glance. A can never goes off. Fruit keeps for a couple of weeks. A sandwich is gone in about a day. You can eat something spoiled: it feeds you half as much and costs you health for the privilege.
Food you find is not fresh either. Where you find it decides how far gone it is. A grocery that stocks it is the only place it’s like new. A home pantry is a gamble that’s always still edible. Off a body it’s often spoiled and sometimes worse. This replaced the old rule, which aged food by how long the world had been running, and made no sense: a tin in a shop should not go off because the city is a week old.
Weapons wear down
A weapon has a condition. Every swing and every shot takes a point off it, and at zero it breaks: a bat becomes fists, a gun stops firing. You can mend it, but only one way, by taking a spare of the same kind apart and putting what’s left of it into the one you’re holding, and the mend never adds up. Two half-worn crowbars make one good crowbar, not a new one, and a weapon you’ve patched is never quite what it was. The sheet shows you the bar, and a faint ghost of where the mend would take it, before you commit the spare.
Found weapons arrive worn, and where you find them decides how worn. Off a zombie, rough, almost never flawless. In an ordinary home, used. In the shop that sells that kind of thing, near new. So a bat from a sporting goods store is worth walking for and the same bat off a walker is a stopgap, and both of them tell you that on the bar before you pick them up.
Armor already soaked hits from a pool, but the pool refilled whenever you put the piece back on. From this week each piece keeps its own wear: every hit it soaks wears it. At zero it stops protecting and drops back into your pack, broken but mendable, the same way. Ordinary clothes still give their scrap of protection and never wear out, because a t-shirt is not equipment.
A gun keeps its load
Until now every gun you picked up was empty, and every gun you put down forgot what was in it. Now the rounds live in the gun. A pistol off a body has whatever its owner left in the magazine, which is usually nothing and sometimes a few. Swap it out and back and the rounds are still there. You can unload a gun into your pack when you’d rather carry the ammo than the weight. Most found guns are empty on purpose. Ammo stays the scarce thing.
Wear is either tension or upkeep, and the difference is how many taps it costs. If a survivor spends their evening mending crowbars and eating apples before they turn, I’ve built chores. If the bar on the bat is a thing you glance at before a fight and the sausage is a reason to eat now rather than later, I’ve built what I meant to. The numbers are set so a weapon lasts a good while and food lasts anywhere from a day to a couple of weeks, and the first thing play will tell me is how often people bother to mend anything.