Simply put, as of now most of those common household items are pretty much useless. In general, there is now use for them, with only a few notable expections: plastic bowls (but now other bowls, interestingly) can be used as containers and tin plates can be disassebmled for some tin. All the other cups and plates - no matter if made from glass, ceramic or metals - are completely without use, as is the butter knife. They don’t even hold up as a makeshift weapon!
What I propose is to make those items situational useful by adding a flag to them that gives a (small) moral bonus whenever you have them in your inventory/vicinity when you eat.
Reasons why I think this is a good suggestion:
Usefullness: It would add a use to those items without cluttering any menu.
Realism: Because even though survivors life in a zombie-infested hell hole, they’re not animals.
Not intrusive: As it would be completely optional, I don’t see this getting in the way of other features/design choices. If you don’t want to bother with those items, just ignore them and play the same game you do now.
While I think a moral bonus for having silverware could be interesting these items actually aren’t without use. Butter knives can be used for a number of crafting recipes that call for metal and glasses can be broken to get shards of glass that are, again, used for some crafting recipes.
This is a feature I am very much interested in implementing in the game myself.
In addition to the morale boost you just mentioned I think having appropriate cutlery in your inventory or near you when eating should also slightly increase the time it takes to eat a meal. The trait Rigid Table Manners should also give a hefty morale penalty for eating without cutlery.
Appropriate cutlery:
Spoons - increase morale and consumption time when eating soups.
Tablespoons - decrease coffee and tea preparation time.
Forks - increase morale and consumption time when eating solid food.
Steak knife - decrease meat preparation time and increase morale when eating meat.
I think you should leave knifes out of any cutlery since you can technically use any knife or cutting implement to eat your food. (might not be as easy too eat a teak with a sharp rock but a combat knife should be just ine)
May want to add bloodstains to equipment then. I don’t think it would be a good idea for a mostly normal human to eat food with a knife covered in zombie guts.
Yea thats a valid point. Main reason utensils exist is to prevent food contamination.
-Hands are utensils
-Food, flesh, liquids etc contaminate utensils, containers, tools used on them
-Items can be washed
-Items that touch dirty stuff get dirty
-Items that touch food are initially harmless but start spoiling
-Eating using utensils that got spoiled or from spoiled containers may cause disease as if the food was spoiled
A player can abstain from using utensils altogether but it’d require washing hands all the time as hands would get dirty not just from food, but from digging, butchering, frabricating, mechanic-ing etc. A fork would only need to be washed once every few days to keep it unspoiled, whereas hands every time you dirtied them in oil or dirt or zombie guts.
If youre plannnig to snack on the way you could prepare a clean container, like a paper wrapper, for food and it’d be safe to eat it even with dirty hands.
Basically, you’d get saddled with these realistic chores which if not done would give you food poisoning or parasites. Is it worth it though? I mean, its entirely possible to simulate hygiene and sanitation in CDDA to whatever fidelity is desired, but should it be done? Will it be fun?
My criteria for a thing that is worth adding, is that while it may be detrimental or risky if misused, it should also be beneficial once you invest enough effort into it. Can sanitation and hygiene and managing utensils provide player with any bonuses at the end game? I’m struggling to imagine how. Only way to achieve that would be to overhaul medicine, bionics, mutations etc to be affected by that as well, so that without building a sterile cleanroom you cant achieve late game breakthroughs. I doubt anyone would bother investing all that effort, overhauling half the game, just to make achieving whats already in the game a bit more complex.
The main problem is that it’s a chore that most players probably would find just adds to tedium. That’s been the reason for not adding things like personal hygiene and bodily waste disposal.