I’m unsure if this has been answered already. But regardless I have a few ideas.
I’m splitting this into 2 main categories, Zombies, and Spawns. I will be talking about my suggestions for how loot should be handled in 4.x and possible solutions to problems that the 3.x system has.
Spawns
This one should be quick, so we will do this one first.
3.x
In 3.x you find food on the floor, this is fine. There’s really not much of an issue here.
4.x
The only issue with the current system in 3.x is that when on the ground, nothing really happens to it (not sure if I got this wrong if I did sorry!). I think it would be interesting if the food was to degrade over time, and could also develop types of mold and other fungus related growth, it would also be interesting to see some food be able to decompose into materials that can be used in fertilizers.
It’s unlikely the last bit will happen, but still an interesting though.
Zombies
Let’s talk about loot with these creatures.
Realism Issue
When you kill Zombies in 3.x they drop a random item chosen from the spawn tables, based on percentages. This, of course, can mean a zombie that clearly doesn’t have a backpack on could drop one. The only way this can be circumvented in 3.x is to make an individual spawn table for every zombie and make a new type of zombie to use that spawn table.
In 3.x
When a zombie dies, it drops a random item from its item spawn table.
How it we might be able to fix this,
Make the loot system similar to Fallout games have some menu where you can look what you want or everything. However, it would show the items instead of just text. Though there are many other systems we could use, like an improved 3.x system, where if it chooses to drop a clothing item, it would drop the one that the zombie is wearing, if it’s wearing a hat you might even be able to pick it up form the corpse.
Anyways, that’s what I have to say! Please tell me what you think, and possibal ways to have an improved system for 4.x, I hope any of the things that I said wern’t incorrect or stupid, but if it is, woops.