The big problem with adding something like this is… the amount of work it would take to do, simply because you need to be able to consider every single possible combination, even those that are added in but could be added through the JSON system. Consider just a simple case of acid. What happens if the player dips something that isn’t acid resistant at all into acid? Is the weapon destroyed? What if it’s only partially resistant? What if I try to dip a liquid into a liquid? If I dip a grenade into poison, will the shrapnel have a poison effect? What if I dip something into acid and then immediately shoot it? Does the acid effect still work, or is the ammo instantly destroyed before I can shoot it? What if I dip something that’s on fire into water? What if I dip it into gasoline? Similarly if I dip food into ketchup how much is consumed? What if I dip it into acid, is the same amount consumed?
It’s a lot of coding, and it works in things like Nethack because they started to handle things like that long ago, and because their item lists are a little more fixed, so they can work on coding for individual items. Our item list, by contrast, is much more fluid, and moddability by the common person has always been one of our goals. This greatly expands the amount of work adding something like this would need to do.
That said it is possible to add more recipes and frameworks to simulate this (eating food + condiments simultaneously, crafting new “poison” arrows, etc.). And is something that we are looking into doing eventually.
