As tends to happen after a while, I find myself knee-deep in the bodies of the dead, corpses every which way. There’s always butchering and burning them, but that tends to become rather tedious after a while.
What if we could get the zombies and other critters to do that for us?
Here’s what I’m envisioning: a zombie or other critter is walking around doing its thing, and every so often it does a check of its surroundings for corpses, chunks of meat and tainted meat (for zombies, as animals seem to have some ability to detect bad food). When it spots a suitable object, the critter toddles along until it stands on or next to the tile with the target. The critter performs an action that degrades the target object by one level (perhaps with acid damage so that it gets the “partially eaten” modifier as is appropriate) and you get the message “The X tears a chunk out of the Y and eats it.” This repeats until the item is destroyed, at which point the critter does another check for food items and, if failing that, turns on you.
This does several interesting and useful things: it takes care of the glut of zombie corpses you’ll eventually wind up with after a while, adds some nice immersive behavior, and adds behavior that the player can exploit for their own survival (like killing one or two zombies and escaping while the others feast on the fallen, or carrying chunks of meat you can throw about as a decoy).
Is such a thing possible to impliment?
