I suppose interesting blob discussion belongs elsewhere anyway heh. My mistake for any assumptions I made regarding discussions on the subject.
I still stand by my previous views regarding cautery. Creating a layer of dead/burnt flesh is great because it plugs bleeding. Cautery is great for bleeding. Problem is that same plug is dead tissue, prone to decay via bacteria which may then directly access to your blood via the original injury you were staunching. It’s like you’re making a scab on the spot, but it may not be a sanitary piece of scab.
If cautery is your method of removing an already-infected bite wound, you are really just using it to make-dead a portion of your flesh that’s larger than the bite. If you don’t then remove that part, you’re kind of just back where you started for infection potential. Might be a means of slowing the infection temporarily, might damage a larger area and allow it to spread faster through damaged tissue. Remember, dead tissue has no immune response, and does not act as a good barrier between healthy interior tissue and disease.
Another thought of mine is a misunderstanding of heat for santizing: Heat doesn’t insta-kill all infections. Look up the boiling temperature and time required to destroy botulism for food-canning purposes (It is an interesting thing to know about. I prefer pickling for this same reason). Getting a knife to stay hot enough, apply it evenly to the whole infected area, and apply it long enough for the heat to kill, is something I consider too hard to do under duress of inflicting pain upon oneself.
However, applying heat to the blade as a means of sanitizing the blade might be very easy by comparison.
Here’s a proposal: Keep the apply-knife function. Keep it requiring a heat source. Change the text and some of the behaviour thus:
You heat your [blade item] to sterilize it.
Give the blade the [Hot] tag, and make the Clean Wound function of (a)pplying a blade dependent on it possessing this tag. (Hot) tag would wear off same as it does for food.
You cut the infection out before it gets worse.
It hurts like hell!
You don't think you got it all.
If cutting the infection out takes time, the blade might need re-heating again.
You cut the infection out before it gets worse.
It hurts like hell!
The remaining wound looks healthier.
Successive attempts to remove infected portions of a wound could deal (potentially) increasing damage to the body part in question. (Chance of damage affected by medical skill? Either way the pain amount would have to be re-balanced to account for the damage.) You could, theoretically, render a bitten limb unuseable through repeated attempts to clean it. This threat is a better cap than any “two tries and you’re out” method imo.
The resulting cleaned wound could still have a chance of re-infection. Alternatively, a harsher solution might only set it back to the very first stage of infection. Bandages could potentially be re-worked as an item that lowers the chance of reinfection, or gives a bonus to recovering from them naturally.
Please chew the hell out of this approach, feedback is very interesting and my history lecture is about to start. It’s three hours long. We can ignore the bandage idea and focus on just how last-ditch wound cleaning should work first, if that simplifies things.