Huh. Kinda interesting that stat's dont affect how long you can stay in a drowning state when they affect so much in the game. I wonder if swimming underwater for any decent amount of time will be added at any point. And the amount of time you have under water could be determined by i dunno...Endurance perhaps? Underwater combat sounds interesting.
Anyways thanks for the feedback/info. I didn't know that Tropical zones did that. Kind of thought that it was a general sort of freeze. I should probably read the more world generation'y parts of the wiki again.
I'm not saying stats
didn't affect drowning, I'm just saying I've never read anything saying it did/might, while I had recalled reading somewhere about the "ten ticks 'til death". With five soul stats unimplemented in adventure mode, who knows what future releases will bring, and nobody truly knows what goes on inside the present code. It's all being discovered using in-game testing.
So, though I'm not sure whether it was swimming speed or the swimming skill it's self (or possibly stats), Lida (master swimmer) did manage to traverse flooded sewers by swimming from floor grate to floor grate while Adventurers with lower swim skill sadly drowned. It appeared that, while she was still drowning, she wasn't losing movement ticks while underwater in between air pockets.
Presently, I'm fortressing the snot out of a world so I can pull Lida out of retirement and gain her some decent equipment and provide some extended sites to clean up, otherwise I'd play her a bit to count drowning ticks just to verify/confirm things.