Suggestion group 2.5: (wound system)
Instead of having bites cause infection, track wounds inflicted.
All injuries will create a bodypart-specific wound of some kind, and every some many tics there is a chance of each susceptable wound becoming an infected version of itself, and infected wounds can increase in severity and cause systemic infections.
Zombie bites inflict wounds that are far more likely to become infected than other injuries, and have more serious reprecussions. (unless those other injuries are also special sources of infection. This introduces some new and interesting gameplay potential - certain critters could be relatively non-dangerous aside from their high chance of infection.)
Wounds heal over time. Using first aid/alcohol/bandages can change wounds to versions less likely to become infected, with proper clean/sterilize/bandage treatment reducing it to nothing.
Wounds can be relatively long-term, but healing should be accelerated compared to “realistic” durations*, simple cuts and bruises should recover within a day, and pretty much nothing should last more than a week or so.
Example:
Character cuts themselves climbing through a window. It starts as a “clean cut”, and if ignored progresses to a “dirty cut”, then possibly “infected” etc, but there’s only a chance, it’s also healing, and may well heal completely before becoming significant;y infected.
Character is bitten by a zombie. This starts out as a “zombie bite”**, and has a very high chance of proceeding to “infected zombie bite”, which has a moderate chance of causing “fever”, “severe fever” etc and is relatively slow to heal (2 days or so).
Character crawls back and forth through a bunch of rubble, and then gets bitten, all within a couple minutes. The “scrapes” have a very low chance of infection, but if there are enough of them some have a good chance, but they’ll probably just heal anyway. The zombie bite proceeds as usual.
Medical treatment comes in four varieties, clean, sterilize, bandage, and antibiotics.
Cleaning is only needed for “dirty” wounds, which either comes from dirty sources (bites, rusty nails), or clean wounds you ignore too long (especially if you’re in a “dirty” location, like the sewers). Cleaning includes rinsing out the wound with water, or more extreme measures if the wound is seriously infected.
Sterilization makes a clean wound and makes it “sterile”, which will have 0% chance of infection (but can still transition to “dirty”)
Bandaging mostly keeps clean and sterile wounds from getting dirty, and might also reduce infection chance beyond that (antibiotic bandages?). “good” bandages (first aid, bandage item would be 100% effective, binding with regular rags might help somewhat)
Antibiotics reduce infection chance for all wounds, but probably never to 0.
Treatment either targets the “worst” wound, or lets you pick a wound, I’m leaning toward pick since it’s simply displaying a list.
First Aid does a full clean/sterilize/bandage sweep on the wound, and will take a while.
Alcohol “clean wound” provides cleaning + sterilization and adds pain.
Bandages provide, well, bandaging.
Antibiotics bump antibiotic level, which reduces infection chances, and decreases over time.
Probably many more items, superglue for sufficiently small cuts, stitches?
*With an option to make healing durations realistic for the truly hardcore. This also implies that the relative rate of healing should be realistic, with an explicit multiplier that we can mess with, at least as a defult.
** Probably needs a better name.