Cleanliness as an Item Quality

Okay, I know this is a pretty-far fetched idea that I’m sure a lot of people are going to disagree with, but what about adding a cleanliness quality to all items? It would add realism and a new aspect of the game to worry about for later-game players. Obviously if you’re hot out of the shelter with zombies on your heels, you don’t care about whether your socks are dirty or not, but what about the character a year into the game, just rocking it as king of the wasteland? Dirty socks would lower morale, and a dirty scarf might even get you sick. A dirty firearm would misfire and be harder to reload. A dirty melee weapon could be more slippery. Just like all items can take damage based on a five or six point scale, they should be able to be clean or dirty on a similar scale. Slightly dirty clothes wouldn’t bother the character, but after a year of wearing the same socks without taking them off, they’ve got to be disgusting, which would cause morale loss. The lowest cleanliness rating for clothing could make the player lose morale like being out in the rain, and could be detrimental to the health of the player. Lowest cleanliness rating guns would have crap accuracy and misfire constantly. Clothes could be cleaned with a water and a washboard or soap and water. All regular items could be cleaned with soap and water. Projectile weapons would have to be cleaned with specialty items designed to clean them, like metal tubes wrapped in rags or something. Melee weapons could be cleaned with rags. You could craft soap out of sinew or ant eggs. The clothes could be modified by the stylish trait, where dirty clothes inflicted harsher penalties. All items would have to be maintained over time based on their use, and items would start out with a rating based on their location (very dirty in caves/streets/sewers, dusty in mansions/houses/public works, and clean in military bases/bunkers/labs).
I understand that it would be difficult to implement and that some people would be annoyed by it, but I think it would be a worthwhile addition to the game, and add some realism to a new front.

Cleaning firearms occasionally? Yes.

Cleaning other things? Possible, but slim

Cleaning clothes? Probably not. The reward for adding it in is probably not worth the amount of hassle it would cause in-game.

The whole idea of dirt is nice, but now because of you I think about IVAN’s “dip” feature and DF’s earlier versions where you had lots of dwarves covered in crust of blood, vomit and dirt(shake but do not stir)

When we’ll be able to cover our weapons in slime mutagen and then throw it at NPC to see how he turns into a vomiting slimey macabre of human and then rob its disgustingl dirty corpse?

It would make sense, though. They could make it so that the penalties from dirty clothes were low enough to ignore if you didn’t care about it, and high enough that your late-game survivor would take notice of. I don’t understand how it would be such a big hassle. It doesn’t seem like all that complicated of a feature to add in, and it’s as reasonable an item quality as damaged. I mean, if pieces of metal and random items can get damaged, why can’t they get dirty? To me it seems to be on the same level, really. Obviously damaged clothing is going to make a far greater difference than dirty clothing, but realistically, both would factor into the overall use of the clothing item about equally, given that the cleanliness of the item would decrease whether you were in combat or not. And cleaning them really wouldn’t be that big of a hassle as far as gameplay. You could have it as an option by item, just like repairing clothing items is an option. You need leather/plastic/rags and sewing materials to repair clothes, so why not soap to clean them, working in the same way? And you’d find soap in the world, too, in bathrooms and whatnot.

This seems like a tedious mechanic designed solely as a time/material sink that only applies to a very small audience. If a similar mechanic like this is really going to be implemented, I imagine it’d be over general item quality/maintenance, as has been suggested multiple times, over cleanliness. I have my own issues with a mechanic like that but at the very least it provides a stronger justification for such repetitive actions over cleanliness.

Pretty much. Not to say that we might not include a morale bonus for washing your clothes, but I don’t really see us adding in a morale penalty for not doing so.

I see where you are coming from. Still, it could function as the flip side for the Stylish trait, like you need clean clothes to get the morale bonus for it.

well this would definitely add a use for storage containers such as cabinets and lockers; items you leave lying around in the floor of your base would get dirty over time, but if you put it in a locker, cabinet, etc. it’ll stay clean longer.

There was in fact an improvement coded a while ago that made cabinets and lockers more useful by speeding up crafting times using objects within them, simulating the ease of accessing properly sorted objects. However, the actual merging of it was delayed for completely inexplicable reasons.

If you actually followed the github discussion, the reason was clear. Not everyone agreed with that, but for the most part it has been decided.

^^oof, that there was a burn.

But seriously OP, how about some cleanliness as a literary tool; you’d need a friggin meat cleaver to cut through that block of text!

http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Paragraph

Also, I really don’t think this addition would bring any more fun to the game, just another tedious process. Repairing your clothes/armor is enough on its own.

Would it really have improved the situation if I had stated ‘the reason it wasn’t merged was because someone was being an obstreperous ass’? Probably not, and it wouldn’t help if I named names either. I was trying to keep things implied but if you really want everything aired out in public, suit yourself.

If you’re going to criticise my decisions, at least get your facts straight. The feature was that you could use items from further away when crafting if they were in containers. If it had been crafting speed, I would have merged it, because that would have made sense. Instead, we simply enlarged the distance in all situations.

I’m, “noisy and difficult to control.”? o_0
I don’t think I’m particularly noisy, and of course I’m difficult to control, I’m in charge.

I’ll personally let it slide because it’d be weird to moderate statements targeting me, but if you had called someone else an ass I’d be issuing a moderation warning. Keep your tone civil please. And no, it makes zero difference that you were calling someone a name without identifying them.

[quote=“Sirent Odour, post:11, topic:4869”]^^oof, that there was a burn.

But seriously OP, how about some cleanliness as a literary tool; you’d need a friggin meat cleaver to cut through that block of text!

http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Paragraph

Also, I really don’t think this addition would bring any more fun to the game, just another tedious process. Repairing your clothes/armor is enough on its own.[/quote]

:smiley:
But I agree with all the gun cleaning, might just be that I am a gun nut, and regularly maintain my guns, lol.

+1 for gun cleaning. I would add that dirty guns should not only misfire, but jam too. A jam in a combat could be fatal, because you have to clear the jammed case.
Of course different guns fare better or worse in dirty conditions, that should be included too. For instance the AK family of guns(Ak-47, Ak-74, Saiga) if famous for being very reliable.

I agree with icecoon id like to have to clean guns and maybe clothing. A thing to note is this could pave
the way for posion tipped arrows, darts, bullets.

We can dream…

Well, if you really wanted poison-tipped weapons they could be already implemented as a craftable item. Implementing an entire dirt and cleanliness system, then fleshing that out into a general liquid-dipping system just so you can get poisonous arrows seems like a rather roundabout way of doing things. Also, are you really so devoid of excitement that your fondest dream is to simulate menial tasks in your zombie game?

I don’t really think the task would be that menial. It would take probably less than ten seconds to clean your clothes, and you could find or craft soap easily. I mean, you instantly repair your clothes, craft items, butcher corpses, and sleeping for 9 hours in-game takes about a minute on a slow computer. Using the word “menial” to describe anything you do in Cata is pretty weak, because basically everything you do in-game is the result of choice by you, the player, and basically all of the “menial” aspects of the game are streamlined so that the player doesn’t have to deal with them, the character you’re playing as does. Cleaning clothes, items, and weapons and everything that came along with it would be streamlined just like all of the other “menial” tasks in the game, and it would add a level of realism and interest on par with damage to items. It’s not unreasonable. If a damaged shirt is problematic for the survivor then it just seems logical to me that a dirty shirt should be problematic as well.
Towards the endgame, what you’ll find is that your long-surviving player has stacks of clothing in perfectly good shape, and has no need to repair damaged ones if you are near your base, you can just ditch the clothes, backpack, or item and get a new one, or save it simply to scrap for whatever material it’s made out of. To distinguish between clean and dirty clothes, weapons, and items would make people less likely just to hoard a crapton of items and clothes and weapons, because you would take better care of the items that you were using and were important to you, and if it was just another item to stash in your base, you’d be less likely to take it because you’d have to go through the cleaning process to make it an item that you’d want to keep. Just like you wouldn’t pick up a shredded t-shirt in the world unless you needed it for some reason, you wouldn’t be as likely to pick up a dirty one. Items that aren’t damaged are more valuable than the same items that are damaged, and likewise, clean items would be more valuable than dirty ones, for the same reason.
Adding this quality would make it more rewarding to raid higher-level locations, because they would have cleaner items and you wouldn’t have to clean them.
I personally like raiding locations, and having a quality like this to items would make me consider more whether I wanted to take it or not, knowing I’d have to clean it once I got it back to my base, and would stop me from hoarding items.
Furthermore, it would make the items that are special or important to me more distinguishable because they’d be clean. Sometimes I’ll find myself in-game with a stacked armory full of weapons, sometimes with two or three of the same gun. If they could get dirty, then they’d be different from one another even if they were the same gun, and I could just swap a dirty gun out for a clean one of the same type instead of cleaning it. The player would be more attached to items that you’ve maintained over time, and less attached to new items that you find in the world.
Besides that, it just makes sense to me. Sometimes in-game, I’ll just stop and think, “Shit. I’ve been wearing this t-shirt for three months and I haven’t cleaned it at all,” yet, the shirt is just as good as one I shoved in a locker three months ago. That doesn’t add up for me, and it removes a level of realism from the game that I think would be interesting and just downright reasonable to have in the game.

The difference between cleaning clothes and repairing them is that on is something you have to do as a result of specific decisions/things that happen to your character, while the other is something you will always have to do. Repairing is something that’s only needed to be done after you’ve gotten into combat (and with better armors not even then). Cleaning is something that would basically amount down to “and then every other day I have to spend time doing this”; and that’s a bad thing (or at least something that could be automated).

If it was every other day, I would disagree with it, too. I’m not saying it should be a constant thing, I’m just saying that it should be a part of gameplay. I don’t think the devs would make it that often, if they did put it in, and I wouldn’t want it to be that often.
But I still feel like you should need to maintain your armor somehow, whether it’s a great crafted armor or a t-shirt. I don’t feel like it should just be sweeping that it’s in 100% good condition all the time as long as you’re not in combat, and having to clean it after a week or so in-game would do that.
In my mind, the penalties for having dirty clothes wouldn’t be so great that the player who wanted to ignore them, couldn’t. And besides that, it would reasonably go along with a point-cost trait that allowed the character to operate in dirty clothing as easily as clean clothing.
It just makes sense.