Attempt to grab an item from damaging field may cause you grab another thing

[3721assistant]

say, if you want to grab something from fire/acid tile,if the item is destroyed before you take it, you will grab another thing instead. While fighting with bare hands, trying to grab something from acid pool may cause you wield an acid zombie corpse instead, and this is very annoying.

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[Snaaty]

Yeah, can confirm that bug.

[kevingranade]

This might also trigger a crash in some situations, bleh.

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

Recently from the forums: http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=8361.msg191202#msg191202

@Coolthulhu:

This is a relatively old bug that sometimes works a bit alarming. I never had it cause a crash, though.

When you attempt to pick up items from a tile affected by an item damaging field (or any other effect that can remove items), the item indices can change, causing the pickup function to grab unintended items or even items that don't exist.

For example, attempting to "save" an item from a freshly dead spitter corpse pile will often pick up the corpse itself. Sometimes instead of just picking up the corpse, it will spawn another one, this time with a name. So far I've seen 2 names: spitter zombie corpse "of INCONSPICUOUS" and "of null".

I managed to replicate item duping by dropping 1 brandy, 1 gasoline and 1 non-flammable item (power armor) on one tile, lighting it up with a bionic (takes no time), then trying to pick up both the liquids. Instead of picking a liquid, I picked up a copy of the power armor.

[Leland]

Super old bug (that was considered old in 2014, phew) – can anyone confirm this is still around?

[Coolthulhu]

It is.
The items are still addressed by their position in item vector.
There is no way to fix it without either being able to confirm that the item is the one we want, or tracking all instances of "wanted" items.