Sanity check of requirements to make Antiseptic soaked rags and antiseptic soaked cotton balls

[Proxiehunter]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Requiring First Aid 1 in order to put antiseptic onto rags or cotton balls to apply it without wasting antiseptic by dumping it all over the place seems excessive. Maybe I'm considering this more common knowledge than it really is because I was raised by a professional nurse but is this really something that requires training, even as low as skill level 1, or is this actually something any idiot should know how to do?

Maybe there's a strong gameplay argument that the player should spend a point during character gen to get First Aid 2 or read the manual that comes with every First Aid kit until they hit First Aid 1 in order to gain the skill required to conserve limited supplies of antiseptic but I'm not convinced just letting people put antiseptic on rags or cotton balls at First Aid 0 would be game breaking.

To be fair I wouldn't call requiring First Aid 1 to make these items gamebreaking either, which is why I'm filing this as a feature request not a bug, but it is a bit immersion breaking to think something so simple and obvious to me requires training a skill and dropping the requirement to First Aid 0 saves the player either a point during character creation or the time (and if you can't find a First Aid kit or other low level First Aid book resources) required to train First Aid to 1.

Describe the solution you'd like

Antiseptic soaked rags and cottonballs require First Aid skill 0.

Additional context

No response

[RoyalFox2140]

I don't know what Viss was doing last time he touched this stuff, but these specific items keeps becoming a repeat issue.

[ZChris13]

There's a reason the first aid kit comes with a book and you basically always have at least one in the starting shelter. And no, you should never underestimate the depths of human stupidity.

[Zireael07]

You'd be surprised how easy it is to waste antiseptic/hydrogen peroxide in such a way. FAid 1 seems an okay requirement for 'you need a bit of training to know how not to pour stuff all over yourself/random stuff'

[Proxiehunter]

You'd be surprised how easy it is to waste antiseptic/hydrogen peroxide in such a way. FAid 1 seems an okay requirement for 'you need a bit of training to know how not to pour stuff all over yourself/random stuff'

I think everyone has just dumped rubbing alcohol or peroxide over a cut because they were in a hurry or lazy or didn't have a cotton ball handy and didn't want to grab some toilet paper to put it on. Has anyone done so because they didn't know how to put it on a cotton ball or because they didn't know that was possible to do?

As I said my main problem here is that I find it immersion breaking that the character doesn't know how to put antiseptic on cotton balls without training in how to do so.

[RoyalFox2140]

I really have no opinion on this because I use stuff like medigel from 2200 and even beforehand antispetic was never rare enough for the recipe to matter in general, but I really wish we'd stop changing how antiseptic works every couple of months. Last I recall it would give dirty items that were useless until it was changed to our current system.

I furthermore don't see a reason to use soaked rags and cotton balls on an injury at all, given it should be inferior disinfecting quality but a way to make your resource go farther. It would save resources since you're using less but I see no reason why using less would mean more quality and higher bite curing chance. I'm tempted to delete these recipes until someone decides to make antiseptic rare enough to make use of them.

[Proxiehunter]

I furthermore don't see a reason to use soaked rags and cotton balls on an injury at all, given it should be inferior disinfecting quality but a way to make your resource go farther. It would save resources since you're using less but I see no reason why using less would mean more quality and higher bite curing chance.

Last I was aware they were coded to have a lower chance not a higher one, although from a realism standpoint I'm not sure that's actually how it should work.

In real life when you dump from the bottle over a cut I'm like 90% sure you're not disinfecting it more you're just wasting peroxide or rubbing alcohol as it spills all over parts of your body that aren't open wounds and runs off into the tub or sink. Putting a small amount on a cotton ball or q-tip or a bit of toilet paper to apply to the cut lets you use a more correct amount applied directly to the wound being treated and provides the same (not better and not worse) disinfecting quality as just dumping the bottle.

It might be different if you're actually trying to remove physical debris, which in real life would be better done with running water but water safe to do that with is hard to come by in the cataclysm, but most use cases are simply making sure bacteria in a relatively clean cut or scrape are killed.

As for the rags and cotton balls not being dirty after I think that's still a bug not the recipe working as intended. I'm just glad it's not using up extra rags and cotton balls anymore.

[RoyalFox2140]

In real life when you dump from the bottle over a cut I'm like 90% sure you're not disinfecting it more you're just wasting peroxide or rubbing alcohol as it spills all over parts of your body that aren't open wounds and runs off into the tub or sink. Putting a small amount on a cotton ball or q-tip or a bit of toilet paper to apply to the cut lets you use a more correct amount applied directly to the wound being treated and provides the same (not better and not worse) disinfecting quality as just dumping the bottle.

That is what the medical skill is for. Proper application of any amount of medical supplies. You wouldn't only dump it on your cut, unless of course we simulate that at medical 0, in which case that applies to both.