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[Ampersand]

The details I haven't quite decided on yet, but if the hospital room type is being implemented, I thought it might be reasonable to provide incentive to keep the injured away from potential sources of infection. Since wound infection and sepsis is delayed for the next version, maybe miasma exposure would just make healing take longer, or cause necrosis if exposure is too long. Or something. Discuss.

[Warlord255]

Sounds like a good idea, plus it makes miasma a threat. I'm all for it.

That, and it gives us a controlled method to produce infections.

[Capntastic]

I'd like to see how diseases and infections are handled in the next version, before I'm sure how I feel about this idea.

[Ampersand]

I think it's important to note that it would only be a threat to the injured, not to just the healthy, working dwarves. They'd need to be the ones cleaning up, after all. I'm just thinking that there should be incentive of some kind to keep your injured and wounded away from rotting meat, and perhaps eventually, flies and other vermin somehow.

[Pilsu]

Flies generating miasma will probably be changed

I don't really see dwarves being exposed to miasma that much really. Sure, why not but seems rather frivolous

[Jakkarra]

i wouldent say it was frivolous, but id suggest having miasma exist for longer, and have  larger range, that should make this work a little better.

still brilliant idea.

love, jakkarra

[Aspgren]

i wouldent say it was frivolous, but id suggest having miasma exist for longer, and have  larger range, that should make this work a little better.

still brilliant idea.

love, jakkarra

Miasma is disgusting and only ONE stupid baby can fill a 10x10 room with miasma sometimes. Hell ordinary lizards can easily fill a 6x6 room.

[Volfram]

I like it!

One thing I've always tried to figure out was a way to weaponize miasma.  If it causes risk of infection in open wounds, then there you go: flood your battlefield with miasma, turn your crossbowmen loose, and suddenly in addition to the bizzarre lethality of piercing weapons, any invaders which survive risk being infected and dying a slow, horrible death even if they escape the battlefield.

[Heron TSG]

ooh! use a majillion weak weapon traps and send in a rotting cricket!

[sweitx]

Technically, miasma is just a bad smell.
It was believe for a while that miasma (aka bad smell) causes disease, before they discover that diseases are actually caused by air-borne pathogen...

But this is dwarf fortress, we can have mythical diseases being carried on miasma that sicken dwarf it touches...

Hm... the fog of death.

[Ampersand]

Well, it's not that it's the Miasma causing it per se. Think back to when rotting cattle were weaponized in castle sieges as a method of spreading disease. It's not a matter of keeping bad smells out, it's a matter of keeping sources of infection away, and it just so happens that Miasma is generated by a common source of infection, decaying biological matter.

[Aquillion]

One dead roach on the other side of the room should not cause an injured dwarf to get gangrene.

[Bricks]

I think we should all reflect on the knowledge gained from the dark ages:

Widespread disease is caused by tainted food/water sources (biological warfare would make for horrifying sieges, enjoy tearing up most of your beds simply to boil the water from that once-clean brook), vermin (rats spreading the plague), and lack of hygiene (oh god, the dwarves are screwed).  OK, I don't have any official knowledge on this.  I should have read Guns, Germs and Steel.  But the vermin thing is real, fo sho, lack of hygiene is undeniable, and we all want to throw rotted cow carcasses over castle walls.

That said...  Miasma should be a symptom of tainted food/water, not the actual cause of disease.  Not that the dwarves wouldn't confuse the two, as other medieval folk would.  In fact, particularly festering wounds could CAUSE miasma.  Also, please please please have lepers forced to live outside the city gates, subsisting on the pity of locals.

Further, airborne pathogens seem totally fine, but should be spread immediately between dwarves, or on items both dwarves touch ('flu covering' on a coin, yikes).  Not only do thing like that fail to linger (although who is to say in a damp, uncirculated cave), but the notion of simulating any sort of disease "fluid" seems totally processor frivolous.

Though a magical creeping fog of death sounds great.

[Volfram]

wouldn't(theoretically) add much to the game.  Miasma is already simulated, and dwarves already check when they walk through it.  Adding an extra step which sees if the dwarf has any currently open wounds would be fairly minor.

If we wanted to get complex, then wound severity would be a base infection rate, probably something from 1-50%(50% being "my torso is open and I can rifle through my guts on the table in front of me," but at that point you have more pressing matters than a disease, anyway).  Every turn the dwarf is in a miasma-occupied square, he has that chance to get sick.  If he's sick, then we don't worry about it.

[Aquillion]

wouldn't(theoretically) add much to the game.  Miasma is already simulated, and dwarves already check when they walk through it.  Adding an extra step which sees if the dwarf has any currently open wounds would be fairly minor.

But the objection is that it's wrong.  Clouds of stench and miasma do not actually spread infection in the real world.  Dwarf Fortress has 14th century technology, yes, but the world is generated and run on realistic principals; and some stinky rotten milk on the other side of a hallway will not actually infect your wounds in reality, no matter how annoying it is.