Honey has been used for wound treatment for thousands of years, appearing in many of the oldest known medical texts around the world.

But don't take just my word for it, here's an excerpt from a research report published by the US National Institute of Health & National Center for Biotechnology Information ( Link to research paper here from the NIH website )

The healing property of honey is due to the fact that it offers antibacterial activity, maintains a moist wound condition, and its high viscosity helps to provide a protective barrier to prevent infection. Its immunomodulatory property is relevant to wound repair too. The antimicrobial activity in most honeys is due to the enzymatic production of hydrogen peroxide...

Now with the fancy science part out of the way, let's discuss how it could work in DayZ in a balanced and practical way.

I want to start by stating that given the small size of the honey packet/container and likely having a lower overall 'strength' compared to disinfectant spray and alcohol tincture, they should have some limitations. My goal here is to both add a bit of realism/authenticity and add a little something to the gameplay that slightly broadens their options with the infected wound mechanics without going to far with it.

I can think of two limitations that would be relatively easy (in DayZ terms) to implement, that would not require making any complicated changes to the existing infection agent/player resistance system.

• Only 'pristine' bandages or rags could be disinfected with honey. This could be explained by stating that dirty/worn/damaged rags either don't properly cover the wound enough to create a consistent barrier between the wound and the outside world, or they are simply too dirty for the honey to be effective.

• A single honey packet would only be able to 'disinfect' two rags at most. As I understand it, the crafting code should be able to handle this easily. Regardless of how many rags are combined with the honey, a maximum of 2 'disinfected' rags would appear on the ground.

Bandages would be slightly trickier, perhaps. I see two possible options.

• One, using honey on a roll of bandages creates a disinfected roll with only two uses remaining (or one if only one use is left), regardless of how many uses the bandages had before crafting/disinfecting. Not ideal, perhaps, but the trade-off would act as a balance mechanic, and simpler to implement.

• Two, the crafting process removes two uses from the existing unclean bandage and creates a new disinfected bandage item with two uses. This seems overly complicated and has an increased potential for bugs/exploits/duplications, but I at least wanted to put the idea out there.

Finally, it would make sense that a bandage/rag would do a reasonably good job of treating an infected wound that is still in stage 1. Given the above limitations, I don't think it would be necessary to make it any less effective than treating a wound with disinfectant spray or alcohol tincture.

Thoughts?