Scavland Healing Guide: Campfires, Sleep, Medicine, and New Blueprints

How does healing work?

Health is one of the four survival bars you watch on every run — health, radiation, hunger, and thirst. The Day One Patch added a way to restore it that costs no medical supplies: lit campfires now heal you, complete with particles, sound, and a healing indicator while you recover, on one condition the notes state explicitly — it works if you have good Energy and Hydration. Update 0.7.0 (September 16) then doubled how much a lit campfire heals, making the free route genuinely worth detouring for.

Update 0.6.0 and its hotfix added a second free route: sleep. You can now sleep in beds to skip time — the world keeps running, the interface previews your stat changes, and damage, Hunger, or Thirst wakes you with a notification explaining why — and Hotfix 0.6.2 tuned it into a healer: sleeping restores 5 health per in-game hour.

The conditions are the interesting part. Campfire healing and sleep healing are not buttons you press; they are rewards for keeping the rest of your survival management in order. Let hunger and thirst slide, and the free routes close, pushing you back toward bandages and stimulants from your bag.

What status effects can your character suffer?

Four survival bars plus two injury layers. The bars are official — health, radiation, hunger, and thirst sit side by side in the official screenshots — and the patches have been quietly rebalancing them since launch. The injury layers split by source:

The community run-kit that covers all of the above fits one line: one stack each of bandages, medkits, antirad pills, water, and canned food on every outing (English early-game guide, September 10 — community-tested). What no official source documents yet: how fast each bar drains, what a fracture does to movement, and how radiation damage scales — those stay unlabeled rather than invented.

Which medical items are confirmed?

The same patch that lit the campfires also gave the medical crafting tree its first officially named items. Four blueprints were added in patch 0.5.169, all of them sold by the trader Alexei, and each is confirmed by the patch notes themselves:

Beyond the new four, the patches took a broad pass over the whole medical shelf: several medicines now carry reduced Hunger and Thirst penalties (medicine that costs you hydration is a meaner trade in a survival game than it sounds), Stimpacks got cheaper, and food values were rebalanced across the board. Update 0.6.0 also gave the Regular Bandage its first published number — its bleed reduction rose from 13 to 15 — and restated that IFAKs stack up to 3.

Where do campfires fit into a run?

The Day One Patch did not just flip on healing — it added and improved campfires throughout the world, and made rain less frequent as part of the same world pass. Update 0.7.0 then doubled the healing rate. Strategically, a campfire is now the cheapest full-stop on a route: sit at one with good Energy and Hydration and heal for free instead of burning through IFAKs you could sell.

That reframes the map a little. Camps like the ones in the official screenshots — tent, supplies, a fire burning — become rest points to plan a route around rather than scenery. The Zalesye world map guide covers how routes and revealed roads shape a run; the same thinking now applies to where you sleep off a bad fight.

What changed for medicine across the patches?

Collected in one place, the launch-week medical changes touch every layer of survival recovery — new craftable items, two new free healing sources, gentler penalties, and lighter bleeding pressure. Each entry below is a dated fact from the official notes:

• Four new medical blueprints — Advanced Bandage, Army AI-2, IFAK, Stimpack — craftable via recipes bought from Alexei (crafting itself is covered in crafting and repair)
• Campfire healing with the Energy and Hydration condition (0.5.169)
• Sleeping — beds skip time, the world runs on, and since Hotfix 0.6.2 it restores 5 health per in-game hour (0.6.0 + 0.6.2)
• Bleeding sources tuned down — Suckers no longer cause Bleeding, Small Rats cause less (creatures guide tracks the rest of that balance pass)
• Cheaper Stimpacks, more IFAKs in stock, IFAKs stacking to 3
• Regular Bandage bleed reduction raised from 13 to 15 (0.6.0)
• Reduced Hunger and Thirst penalties on several medicines, plus a broad food rebalance (0.5.169)

The full patch summaries and future changes are indexed in the update tracker. For what to do before you ever need to heal — keeping runs short, watching durability, avoiding the Mist — the beginner guide is the starting point.