Hello!
This post was originally going to be about food being spoiled, but then I realized it could be used for something else as well.
Currently how quality on items work is like this: Weapons and attachments get damaged by using them. This affects damage or even if the attachment works.
Clothing gets damaged when you get hit while wearing clothing. This affects how much damage it absorbs.
Food doesn’t degrade in any way whatsoever, outside of easy mode (like anyone plays normal). Food spawns on a random quality dictated by a .dat file, this affects by how much the stats get refilled.
Currently, this system is what I would consider not survivalish, there is not much maintenance needed and you can just hoard food for however long you’d like, walk in the same clothes without them getting progressively torn apart and constantly proning and crouching with your weapon to offset your hitbox as much as possible.
So why not create more reasons why an item can degrade? May it be from just time or hiking from one place to another.
I also want to suggest a states system. Where you would have X amount of states. These states would have their own stats, model, name prefix (example: Fresh Bread > Bread > Stale Bread > Spoiled Bread) that would be triggered depending on the quality.
To be fair though, this game is becoming more of a PVPVE sandbox where combat is truly the most fun, so I have no idea how necessary this feature is due to the game being heavily PVP oriented, but I feel like there needs to be more maintance mechanics needed on items.