It seems to have changed since I last played, and I’m not entirely sure as to how it works.
If the body part name in the sidebar is red, you’re bleeding and need to bandage to stop the bleeding. If you’ve stopped the bleeding, the name will turn white again.
If the body part is shown in blue, you’ve got a deep bite which could get infected and you need to disinfect it. If you’ve successfully disinfected it, the body part name will turn white.
Beyond those two situations, wounds will heal without bandages or disinfecting at a rate based on your traits (fast healing, slow healing, etc.), but it can take a while, especially if you or a slow/imperceptible healer. But bandaging will make them heal quicker, with various qualities of bandaging effecting how much faster they heal. Also, disinfecting will make them heal faster, also dependent on the quality of the disinfecting.
Bandaging quality depends on the bandage used and on first aid skill. Real bandages (like from first aid kits) are better than bleached/boiled makeshift bandages, which are better than plain makeshift bandages, as you might expect (not sure if bleached or boiled is better, or if there is a difference). Disinfecting depends on first aid skill. It might also depend on what you disinfect with, but I always use the stuff in the first aid kits. Cattail jelly can also be used, but I’m not sure how it compares.
That’s all I have to say about that.
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Thanks! But you forgot to mention how an infected body part will turn green and if a body part is both bleeding and has a deep bite it’ll be purple. Not sure about infected + bleeding though.
I much appreciate all the info but I will say that the first part of what you said I already know, it’s after that that I was wondering about.
If you deal with it when it’s blue, you don’t have to worry about it turning green. 
I also didn’t mention what happens if you don’t deal with it when it’s red. You might consider that even more important.
A single antibionic has never failed me so far in getting rid of a deep bite so far. I don’t remember the exact side effects but making sure to avoid getting a full infection is always a good idea as it’s nice to be able to eat and not vomit everything up.
Antibiotics have nothing to do with Deep Bites (blue limb color) since they are specifically for curing infections (green limb color).
Bites (blue color) require antiseptic (95% chance to cure, used to be called disinfectant) or cauterization (50/50 chance, failure accelerates the conversion to an infection).
Both conditions might cure on their own via your immune system fighting them off but that’s low % and unreliable.
Well it must be a pretty crazy coincidence that I haven’t had an infection after a deep bite over a dozen times in a row and it just so happen that the blue indicator went away soon after taking an antibionic.
I don’t have any sort of boost to my immune system either.
I have plenty of antibiotics so I’ll take some as I have just in case.
Yup, something is broken in the bite/infection mechanics again.
I just created a brand new default test character, got him bitten on 3 limbs then made a save point. I then let 8 hours pass without taking any antibiotics with the result of 1 limb curing while the other 2 got infected. I repeated this many times and on average about 80-90% of all the limbs turned infected within 6-8 hours. These are about the normal results for untreated bites.
I then ran the same test multiple times but this time took antibiotics before passing time. 100% bite cure rate…with some limbs staying bitten for more than 20 hours before finally curing.
Definitely broken again. I will post the test info on Reddit and mention it in the CDDA Discord.
So, technically I was correct, but only due to a bug. Given that, I shall call this one a draw
Is it a bug that antibiotics fight infections? I thought that was kinda what they do. They just fight it from the inside, while antiseptic fights it from the outside.
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It’s possible, but if so i missed a pretty big memo/PR change at some point and i can’t find any reference to it. Seems weird to have a pill completely replace cleaning and sterilizing a deep bite wound (essentially making antiseptic and/or cauterization totally irrelevant once acquired). The wiki (yeah yeah, i know) mentions nothing about it either and it’s a pretty important game-play element to not have documented somewhere.
There’s a type of antibiotics now (Atreyupan) that is specifically for taking before the Infected status sets in, with a note that it won’t work after a wound becomes officially infected.
It’s better to just use some cattail jelly on the wound, but if for some reason you can’t you should absolutely take some antibiotics as a preventative.
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Last time I code dived, Atreyupan worked against infections, but just weakly.