Vampire oddities

[Tiber]

Thanks to other forum-goers recommendations, I decided to try out vampires. While they're different, I've noticed some issues:

1) If you're drinking blood and a rat so much as enters your field of vision, you automatically stop drinking blood, and the corpse goes to waste. No prompt at all.

2) Contaminated corpses give less nutrition, but corpses can easily be made into potions of blood, which don't have this problem. While the lower nutrition part seems thematic, it makes little sense, especially because it means that a rat is actually more nutritious than a human if you don't bottle it.

3) The alive state is kind of annoying, since you can't eat while alive and it comes with fast metabolism (further increased while regenerating) it's impossible to stay in this state for any length of time. And if you drink from a corpse instead of a bottle, you only seem to fill up just enough to get you to the alive state. If you drink from a bottle, you can stay at this level at most around 200 turns w/o sustenance. With a corpse, around 50. It's just a hassle to try and aim for maintaining the alive state, even if you have an abundance of blood.

4) Drinking a corpse doesn't seem to produce hides; only bottling does. This isn't really explained anywhere, and what's worse is that, since you can't bottle poisonous corpses, it seems to be impossible to make swamp dragon armor (I tried many, many times in wiz mode and got nothing).

5) According to documentation, you get rotting resistance at thirsty or less. Yet, % says I have it all the time.

I guess what I'm getting at is I don't quite get the design inconsistency of drinking directly from the corpse vs. bottling blood. If bottling is superior in almost every way, why even have the former?

[defen]

4 - nothing stops you from chopping the corpses.

[Tiber]

4 - nothing stops you from chopping the corpses.

I should amend that. You can get the hide by animating the skeleton, or by butchering if you have spells that require chunks. If you don't have any such spells though, you get the message, "There isn't anything suitable to butcher here." The game figures you have no reason to butcher anything, therefore you can't.

[Kate]

4 should be fixed - looks like the prompt for butchering a corpse as a Vampire was assuming you could bottle any corpse with blood, instead of just clean/contaminated corpses (and I assume you were using confirm_butcher = never, which skips the prompt).

[JeffQyzt]

For that matter, it's kind of illogical that draining all the blood out of corpse from two little holes should mean that there's no way to skin it for its hide...though I suppose I wouldn't want to code an exception case "skin drained corpse" just for vampires.

[Tiber]

For that matter, it's kind of illogical that draining all the blood out of corpse from two little holes should mean that there's no way to skin it for its hide...though I suppose I wouldn't want to code an exception case "skin drained corpse" just for vampires.

That's my bigger issue with 4. And if bottling blood can produce hides, why can't drinking blood? I've also noticed that it seems to produce fewer skeletons. If anything, I'd say the problem is that drinking corpses should be less of an exception case, not more.

[greepish]

Well, going into the logic of fantasy can get pretty futile. E.g., you should really make about 50 potions of blood per corpse.