Animal bites can give you tetanus and infections

[NetSysFire]

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

No, realism. Here is a quick real life story. I volunteer in an animal shelter to play and cuddle with the cats (you know, shelters are chronically understaffed and volunteers to give the cats some extra attention are always needed) and yesterday I got a love bite by one which was just a little bit too hard, resulting in the shelter staff sending me to the ER, juuust in case.

Luckily I got my tetanus booster just a week ago but cat bites are nasty. The shape of their fang means bites are especially deep and the wound will be closed right up, making it even more dangerous and it could even cause sepsis. Do not worry about me, I am fine. I got some prime cattail jellyantiseptic ointment and antibiotics from the hospital. Yes, of course I thought of CDDA in the ER to improve its realism with my recent experience.

Solution you would like.

Animal bites in general are absolutely nasty. I did some digging in the monster definitions and saw #54587, adding tetanus to zombie attacks. It seems instant though, which is not really my intention for this but I will do some more digging. Mouths of animals (including humans) are full of bacteria. Human bites are exceptionally dangerous. You could hold an open wound into the sewer to simulate the effects of a human bite. I would want scratches to have a low chance for causing a potential tetanus infections and bites being more dangerous.

I also went through the list of wildlife to see if there is anything also eligible for spreading tetanus or even an infection. Dogs, of course, come to mind. Apparently many victims of a bear attack also get an infection.

Tetanus are soil-borne bacteria, basically naturally occuring in any wild animals. This is also the reason why being injured by rusty metal is so dangerous. Fun fact: Toxins produced by the tetanus bacteria has a medium lethal dose of 2 ng/kg, being insanely dangerous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose#Examples

Describe alternatives you have considered.

I am carefully considering the changes because I do not want to make cats the new meese. Cat bites are actually more dangerous than dog bites but cats tend to just avoid potential problems instead of attacking.

Game balance is definitely considered. In real life there are also tetanus shots which give you a high chance of not getting sick and also anti-toxins. Many hospitals and basically any doctors offices stock at least the vaccine, hospitals commonly have those anti-toxins. In my case I got treatment 1½-2 hours after the bite (the wound itself hurt a bit, a slight burning sensation, so that would be a good signal to tell the player to care for that wound), so you should still have some time before it would get swollen and infected. I think it would get swollen after say 4-6 hours.

Additional context

Bonus cat picture, this one is called Tigger and he is an incredibly sweet cat. He got adopted very recently and is not the one who gave me that lovebite.

I will also most definitely tweak the attacks and also stats of cats and kittens since I do have cat experience and know what they are capable of. I already added leaping attacks (so they can cross one tile when attacking) to cats locally.

[Ilysen]

I believe animal bites do already cause deep wounds. I know I've gotten them from wasps, at least, which have a bite attack.

[Maleclypse]

Rats currently have a disease effect that they can pass on to the PC in game so this wouldn't be out of line.