Personally I have ok RNG and not getting hit/getting armor asap as been way more useful. Mid to late game, I stock up on all curatives and usually never need to worry.
I find in the early game, getting hit too much is likely (with little to no armor) to get you infected.....and you havent had time/invested in getting said anti infection items.
In ALPHA 20 Alone RNG wise I have had several characters I played that got infected early, out of 8 game startups (multiplayer included) that got infected early 2 on multiplayer where either we group searched or someone had a curative, 6 were single player, 4 of those 6 just died either from Issue the disease gave, or trying to go out of my way to get infect cured but other injuries stacked up and I died from that.....not the disease itself.
1 of those 6, I got to 40% and just killed myself
however the last one was interesting, I got infected like first 3 minutes playing the game....thought should i just die? then was like, no, no, I got this went around but made 100% sure to destory all stumps i happen to see/look for a curative.
Boy was that game interesting, it was a brawler, machine gun, shotgun, club build for a farmer build testing in alpha 20 here. Feral sense on at night, cause of reasons too long to explain. I had 7-9% infection each time I seem to get one honey, oh did i mention that zombies that hit can increase the infection % it seems, or the rate at which it goes up at least, cause i have had infections before and this game felt different, but then again brawling didnt help a little, it was the damn animals that kept infecting me in that build. Still the story goes that I had that infection even for the first horde night, it was at 2% that night, Made a easy to do quick melee one, with a toilet pistol and pipe rifle. (pipe shotgun sucks too bad even tho i was going to use shotguns)
I kept finding honey from stumps at the right times to keep it down, I actually used the club more often, and did have a perk in brawler should of used that more to prevent infection ability in hind sight. I think the highest i got was 18% on infection Heck i even found 2 honey in a POI loot grab at one point but laughed as i had just hit 11% at the time.
it wasnt til day 9-10 when i check the merchant they had a antibiotic, only 2 of them but i got both. interesting game.
Still have the save, and I dont think I have died once on that one. Heavy Iron armor was a priority in that one, didnt get the steel schematic til like day 43? even with 200% exp on, loot was at 100% and in the winter biome is where i finally found it.....after i had two tier 6 pieces of steel on.......I grinded two merchant who where not too far from each other til both had offered tier 5 POI quests then i just did those as much as possible, boy did i level up fast, that crackabook headquarters is really good for exp when your sent there 3 times in a row XD in two days and cleared it out before doing the mission for the double up effect.
Still infection/ disease in the game is not very......interactive or an issue overall. its annoying yes, if you cant cure it more so, which encourages cheese deaths. But overall its not very.....threating. Should it be, no, could it be more intuitive? I could think of several ways it could.
Moral of the story, the dam animals are more likely to infect you cause zeds are a bit easier to dodge.......dam birds.
my last play. 