BathTime

Time to take a bath

Adds a basic hygiene mechanic to the game.

Gettin' dirty

As you go about your daily business, you will accumulate stinkiness. After a while you'll start to smell bad. If you let things get too bad, you'll start to carry a visible miasma around with you, and flying insects will swarm in your presence. People won't want to hang with you, and animals will have an easier time picking up your trail.

To find out how you smell, use the 'Check your pits' button in the character menu.

Gettin' clean

To clean up, you're going to need to take a bath. Bathing is simple: find some water and stand in it. However, bathing outside is uncomfortable and incovenient. It'll take you a long time to get clean shivering in a lake. You'll find that bathing indoors is much more pleasurable! Taking a bath indoors will more than triple the rate at which you get clean.

If routing water indoors is beyond your primitive grasp, you have a couple of options available. The simplest solution is to keep a bucket or barrel filled with water in your house, which you can use to bathe with Sneak+RMB. This will slowly deplete the water, so you will need to refill your makeshift bath from time to time. If you tire of lugging water home from the nearest lake, you might find it easier to build a comfortable outhouse at the lake side. To check that your bathhouse is functioning correctly, open the character screen and check for the 'Taking a bath' status.

When you decide it's time to embrace true luxury, you can build a boiler to take heated baths. Bathing in a room containing a lit boiler full of hot water is the height of bliss. Time will fly by as you luxuriate, and you will find yourself getting clean twice as fast. Such a decadent bathing experience will soothe old wounds, restoring your health over time.

Gettin' dry

After taking a bath, you'll want to towel off so you're not soaking wet and freezing cold. Towels can be crafted from cloth or wool (from the Wool mod). Using a towel will completely dry you off, leaving you ready to face the world.

After using a towel, it will be wet through and you'll need to give it some time to dry before using it again. Careful you don't mix your wet towel in with a stack of dry towels, or they'll all get a bit damp.

Towels are also handy if you get caught in the rain, or fall into a lake! Be careful though: if you fall into water or take a bath while you're carrying your towels, they'll get soaked through.

Gettin' fresh

When you're ready to level up your bathing experience, you can stock your bathroom with soaps and perfumes. Soaps can be used while you are bathing, or with a bucket or barrel of water, to sud up and temporarily increase the effectiveness of bathing. Perfumes will instantly reduce how much you smell, and mask your scent from other humanoids or animals.

Note: soaps are currently supplied by the Soap and Lye or Boric Alchemy mods, and perfumes are supplied by the soap-treated poultices from the Soap and Lye mod. I cannot promise these mods will stay updated; as of June 14th 2026 Soap and Lye is outdated but mostly compatible, and Boric Alchemy is up-to-date. If you want soap or perfume compatibility in your favorite, thematically appropriate mod, ask the mod author to add the "soap" or "perfume" tags to their items as appropriate, or make your own JSON patch!

Current features

• Accumulate stinkiness over time, becoming visibly stinky eventually.
• Reduce stinkiness by bathing, either by standing in water or interacting with a water container using Sneak+RMB.
• Creatures will detect you from further away when you're stinky.
• Traders will react to your smell! If you're too stinky, they might even flee from you.
• Check your own hygiene levels with the "Check your pits" button in the character stats menu.
• Create towels from cloth to dry off after you're done relaxing in the tub. Be careful: towels in your inventory will get wet if you take a dip!
• Use soaps from Soaps and Lye or Boric Alchemy while bathing to sud up and increase how quickly you get clean in a bath.
• Use soap-treated poultices from Soaps and Lye to perfume yourself, reducing how stinky you are and hiding your smell from animals and traders for a few hours.
• Add soap and perfume compatibility to your mod by adding the "soap" or "perfume" tags to your items.

I found a bug, help!

Leave a comment here, or reach out to one of the authors via the Vintage Story discord. We cannot promise all issues will be fixed quickly, but we will make an effort.

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