In one of the recent experimental builds, I’ve been able to use my towel as an improvised weapon against the undead by picking it up and throwing it at the enemy until it dies. I can manage 5-10 damage per throw against a zombie dog with kevlar harness.
I propose that there should be a flag for some items that mark it as a less-than-ideal projectile, by either dividing the thrown damage by a large number, or having a large chance to for it to “bounce harmlessly off” of the target.
Alternatively, leave it as is, because using random silly items to fight back fierce enemies like in the Dead Rising series is still quite fun.
I now want a soft, fluffy pillow to whack zombies with, along with a special recipe to treat a pillow with zombie pheromones. If a zombie sees such a pillow on the ground, they automatically walk over, pick it up, and from then on will ONLY try to attack you by hitting you with the pillow, which does no damage. If you thereafter hit them with a pillow of your own, you get a morale boost. There is a small chance that on a successful hit, the pillow will burst into a cloud of feathers, which will temporarily obstruct vision like a smoke grenade, in addition to destroying the pillow.
Does this really need a special flag? Just special-case items with 0 base damage to always do 0 damage. Make the threshold higher for throwing, if it’s important that you can gently slap a zombie with a pillow for pathetic damage but can’t deal any damage by throwing the pillow.
Gold bars are excellent throwing weapons, while you cant throw them far, they often insat-kill dogs. Plus the mental image of your character throwing a goldbar to the zombies head is hilarious.