Heart Failure (Cardiac Arrest)

Heart Failure (Cardiac Arrest): The game calls this cardiac arrest, not heart failure; only epinephrine and defibrillators restart the heart.

Use, trade-offs and mechanics

The condition players call heart failure here is cardiac arrest. In the community Heart reference, it begins when fibrillation reaches one hundred or heart rate would fall below twenty beats per minute. The heart then stops pumping; an ECG rhythm problem and a stopped heart are related stages, not identical labels.

Without an auto-pump, blood pressure collapses and consciousness falls rapidly. The auto-pump changes the circulation support available during this state; it does not mean that the heart has restarted. Brain damage and the eventual dying state make delay consequential. A returned pulse also does not erase brain damage that has already happened.

Epinephrine is one documented restart option. Injected volume produces a timed sequence of five-percent restart attempts. A successful attempt sets the heart rate to two hundred and leaves fibrillation at fifty, so the rhythm problem can still require attention afterward. Excessive effect duration can itself force fibrillation.

The other option is a manual or automatic defibrillator. Each arrest shock has an eighty-percent failure chance in the reference; a successful one resets fibrillation completely. The manual tool does not need an exact shock strength for that arrest check, but battery and time remain limited. A Coil is not an equivalent restart tool despite its electrical effect. Check the heart, blood pressure, oxygen and consciousness together when interpreting the outcome, and keep the distinction between preventing fibrillation and recovering from an already stopped heart visible.

Documented properties