Should be able to use strong alcohols like vodka to disinfect

[Bio]

I think we should be able to use alcohol to increase recovery chance of infected wounds during the “needs to be disinfected” stage of wounds. Of course since its not actual medical alcohol it shouldn’t be guaranteed and only certain drinks would work. I think vodka should increase the chance of healing to 50% of survival and lower alcohols raising survival chances to %35 chance.

[TheMurderUnicorn]

I don’t really know booze very well, so my initial thought is whiskey, which, according to this bottle, is 90 proof. I’m inclined to agree with you.

The CDC actually recommends cleaning wounds with just soap and water, as alcohol can damage the cells that help close wounds. I would think this would reduce the player’s healing rate because of this. But, specifically for disinfectant, yeah, I feel alcohol should be viable.

Especially because we count hydrogen peroxide as disinfectant, when in reality, it’s pretty trash at disinfecting.

My guess would be that hard liquors spawn pretty much everywhere, so making alcohol a disinfectant would trivialize bite wounds (more than the availability of first aid kits/peroxide already have). That’s just my guess, though.

[kevin.granade]

Weaker alchohols (90 roof counts) aren’t strong enough to kill bacteria, strong alchohols are good antiseptics but damage tissue, and all of them have things you shouldn’t put in a wound like sugar that make the whole thing a rather pointless exercise.

If you want to sterilize tools, a strong alchohol is ok, but is not recommended for wound care, so the game will not be using it as such.

[Trigon]

You would need very strong alcohols to do what you describe, stronger than what would normally be acceptable for human consumption. Vodka could be used if you boiled off some of the water, which I’ve certainly done before, but there’s already distillation recipes in the game for such things.

Using whiskey and such is problematic due to the additives as Kevin pointed out, though these can also be removed with distillation once again.

If you need a low level disinfectant I would recommend Cattail jelly. It’s trivially easy to craft and auto learned by investing just a single point in survival at character generation.

[StyxTwig]

This is a cool idea, very resourceful. : )

[OneStar]

Just to make things a bit easier to understand proof is the alcohol percentage x2 so 100 proof = 50% alcohol alcohol disinfects/cleaners are commonly sold as 70% isoproply alcohol which is much more toxic than ethanol which is what we drink.

[TheMurderUnicorn]

I did not know what alcohol content was ideal. I also did not even consider the sugar and other gunk that would be in drinks. I think, you know, you see action heroes dump liquor in their wounds and move on with their day.

=(

Action movies lied to me.