Doloc Town Radiation Sickness: Damage, Causes and Cure

What it actually costs you

The damage is stated in the game's own time units: 8 HP per time unit, for 4 time units. That works out to about 16 seconds of real time and roughly 32 HP total. On its own that is survivable at almost any point in the game. The danger is that it ticks while you are still fighting, so it converts a manageable exchange into a fight you are losing on a timer.

There is a visible particle effect while the status is active, so you always know it has been applied — you do not need to read the status bar to notice.

Two causes, one answer

The first cause is the Radiation Chameleon Bug. It charges up and then leaps at you, and its physical hit applies the status if you are not radiation immune. The bug spawns at random spawn points in the Wild Lowlands and in the sewers of the Old City Ruins.

The second cause has nothing to do with combat: parts of the Old City Ruins are an irradiated environment, and standing in them applies the status by itself. This is what turns radiation from an enemy mechanic into a zone requirement.

Radiation immunity — from an equipment skill or a buff — does both jobs at once. It clears the status if you already have it and prevents it being applied again. There is no separate cure item documented on either wiki; immunity is the mechanic.

A disagreement between the two wikis

The Chinese wiki describes the Radiation Chameleon Bug as neutral: it only attacks after you have damaged it. The English wiki lists its behaviour as hostile, and gives its health as 150.

We are recording that rather than picking a side. Both pages were edited within the last two weeks, and neither states a version number for the behaviour, so the difference could be a genuine change between builds, a difference in how the two wikis classify the charge-and-leap pattern, or a plain error on one side. In practice, treat it as hostile and keep your distance — the cost of being wrong in that direction is nothing.

The English wiki also carries three archive entries unlocked at 1, 20 and 40 kills, describing radiation vesicles in the creature's gel layer. Those are flavour rather than mechanics, but they confirm the creature is a repeatable farm target rather than a one-off encounter.

Getting to the ruins in the first place

The Old City Ruins are split into a long list of zones: the garrison camp, city outskirts, wild lowlands, central park, power station, residential district, elevated road, industrial district, commercial district, sewers and the dead signal zone. Four bus stops serve them — Old City Garrison, Old City Residential, Old City Commercial and Old City Idle Zone.

The bus network has thirteen stops in total. Each trip costs one Ticket, or 30 G paid on the spot. Tickets themselves cost 25 G to buy, so the station charges a 5 G premium for paying without one. If you are going to be shuttling in and out of the ruins repeatedly while farming chameleon bugs, buying tickets in bulk is a small but genuine saving.

At-a-glance comparison