Sorry lads, but I did a fair amount of tinkering around with syndromes when they came out, so unless Toady has made some significant changes to how contaminants work lately then I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you.
Items dropped into a pool of poisonous sludge (or poisonous sludge dropped onto a pile of items) will have absolutely no effect. The items will remain completely separate from the contaminant.
However, if someone/something is holding the item or wearing the item while crawling around in a puddle of muck, it'll stick. I can't quite recall if this only applies to armor or if it affects weapons too, it's a long time since I did all this.
Another thing that can be done is to get a creature doused in something (I.E., they crawled through it. Dumping/throwing a contaminant at someone will do nothing except bruise them a bit, they need to walk or crawl on a tile with a pool large enough to track onto them), kill them, and then wield the corpse as a poisoned weapon (I was poisoning wolves with a cougar corpse when I found this out). But getting it onto an actual weapon is a really tricky affair, that I never quite managed to work out. You could of course mod in a creature with poisonous blood, stab them a few times, and then go off and attack other people (be careful of getting sprayed though). That'd work, but only until the next rain or dip in the pool.
I'm certain there's a way of doing it, but I've yet to work out a truly elegant solution. And my modding and tweaking skills are seriously rusty these days.
EDIT: Haven't tried testing Loud Whisper's example yet though, and I do know that venomous bites have been tweaked in the later releases.
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Topic: Hypothetical weapon poisoning process (Read 3914 times)