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Food, Health & Death

Food

How food quality, health decay and yearly death probability work in Dynasty, and why mortality rises sharply with age.

Food effects apply after the annual stat decay, so a good diet can offset part or all of the yearly Health/Happiness loss.

Everyone eats from the same backpack, in a fixed order: you first, then each minor child, then the family dog if you have one. Keep enough food for all of them before the year changes.

Lifestyle

Lifestyle is a stat from 0 to 100 that measures how well your character lives. It is where the stars on goods finally matter to a consumer: stars never change what an item does, but they decide how much it lifts your Lifestyle. Everyone started at 20 the day it arrived, and so does every new character.

Everything you own and consume pulls the bar toward its own value, by a small share of the distance. Something below your level pulls you down, something above it lifts you up — so the bar settles where you actually live.

It moves slowly on purpose: within one game year the bar can never move more than 10 points away from where the year started, up or down. Going up and back down again does not use up that allowance. Even with a villa and five-star everything, reaching 80 takes about a week of real time.

An heir starts halfway between 20 and their parent's Lifestyle: a parent at 80 leaves an heir at 50.

At 80 the doors of 🎩 The Elite Club open. A low Lifestyle makes you ill; a high one lets you join the most exclusive circle in the world ($2,000 a year, you stay while your Lifestyle is at least 70).

Illness

Illness is what a low Lifestyle costs you. Once a year, if you are not already ill, the game rolls your chance of falling ill:

Each illness follows one of three paths, picked at random, and gets worse every 2 years it is left untreated:

• The damage starts at the year change after you fall ill, so there is always time to react. The year before it worsens, your yearly report warns you.
• Stage 3 never gets worse — but it never heals either, and 20 Health a year on top of the normal decay is fatal within a few years.
• A stronger voucher also cures a milder stage. Cure from the 🩺 Cure button next to your Health (on a phone, tap your Health at the top): the game uses the cheapest voucher in your backpack that works. It also gives its normal Health bonus, and it works even at full Health. Using a strong enough voucher straight from your backpack cures you too, with that exact voucher; a weaker one only gives its Health.
• One illness at a time. It is not contagious and it is not inherited.

Death at zero health

Health reaching 0 is death, with no probability involved. It is checked once a year, at the year change, on the health you finish the year with — not on any value it passed through on the way.

The order the annual tick applies is fixed, and it is what makes that distinction real: first every penalty (the age decay, LQ food or starving, worn equipment), then the value is clamped to the 0–100 range, then every bonus you have (the Vitalia passport's +5 Health/yr, a Fur Coat's +5 Health/yr). A character who goes below zero on the decay and is pulled back above it by those bonuses survives the year. Protections you paid for are applied last, deliberately.

Above zero, the death check below still decides whether you die, on the health you started the year with.

What cannot bring you to zero: actions that cost health refuse to run if they would take you there. An Energy Drink that would kill you stays in your backpack, and the nightclub turns you away. What can: the annual decay, starving, an untreated illness, pollution from nearby public works, the Discipline dogma, and battle — a war victory costs 5 health, a defeat 15.

Death probability

Once a year, a death check runs using your Health at the start of that year:

baseRisk = 0.05 × e^(age × 0.055)
healthMultiplier = 1 + ((100 − health)/20)²
deathChance = min(100, baseRisk × healthMultiplier + (max(0, 50−health)/50)² × 50) × 0.5

In plain terms: mortality rises exponentially with age, and gets sharply worse once Health drops below 50, with an additional penalty the closer Health is to 0. Keeping Health high is the most effective way to extend your character's life at any age — and below 31 it also decides what your heir inherits, see below.

On death, any Life Insurance is settled, your spouse is freed to remarry, all contacts are wiped, and any political or sport-federation positions are vacated before inheritance is processed.

Intensive care

Dying in poor health charges the estate $20,000 for the final hospital stay. There are two bands:

The band is stricter for the young on purpose: past 70 the decay is 25 a year and falling under 50 is close to unavoidable, while reaching 30 at 30 years old takes years of neglect.

This is the only charge in the game that can leave an heir starting in debt. It never applies to murder victims, and never to anyone who paid the rest home fee — see The Third Age. Without an heir it is not charged at all: there is nobody to bill.

One more consequence of dying at zero: life insurance pays nothing, whatever the policy's health requirement — see Life Insurance.

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