YordaEatsMelon

Some Interesting opportunities?.... nutritional deficiencies (scurvy, rickets), infections (malaria, unclean wounds, influenza), temporal diseases (if you get over a certain level of damage from a monster, esp. like the ones found deep down, there's a % chance you can develop a condition that's similar to rot or rust. This could be temporary, or it could be permanent but reversible.) Their implementation would have to be limited, otherwise players would have a lot to keep up with on top of getting food, avoiding wild animal attacks, making shelter, mining, mitigating spoilage, etc., especially for players who love more extreme climates. It could be fun if the devs thought, "So, I see some of you players want to live in a tropical climate where food has long growing seasons. Here, now there's risk of malaria to contend with." How to implement something like malaria though? I don't know

Not sure how this might fit into things, but it would be interesting if they had started out with a more medicinal role (like a plague doctor, sortof), but as the mire and sludge kept increasing, those they could tend to decreased. i.e. They helped hunters and malefactors as a crucial "supportive" role and otherwise would also tend to rot survivors?, but this eventually changed and degraded into only working among themselves + some malefactors and hybridizing their roles as the need for survivor assistance is near gone and the need for scavenging increased among the increasing difficulty of entire kingdoms living underground. Though it seems they eventually even departed from that role and just went into scavenging. Just some ideas