Something almost exactly like this already exists in the More Survival Tools mod. There are a few other things that fill that niche for fabrication and survival in there, too.
It wouldn’t just be new low level first aid, but a complete top-down redo. The idea would be that you’d have different quality materials that you’d combine to make into supplies, used by different qualities of healing tool. Bandages → first aid kit with first aid supplies → a doctor’s bag with doctor’s supplies, and a parallel wilderness kit. First aid kit would be about 20% less effective than the current one (with the supplies making it a bit easier to craft) and doctor’s kits would be 20% more effective than current first aid kits (with a bit more than double the materials cost).
I thought the crappy 1 volume, 10 minute craft bandage type item healing 1-2 hp wasn’t a big deal since it’s so damn obnoxious to use (at first aid 2 you’re looking at dozens of volume to get two pips of health)…but after playing with it, the scaling makes that a horrific idea. It looks like skill scaling with healing is just a linear +3/+2/+.8 per first aid to torso/limb/head, so at high first aid everything healed for either 0 or silly amounts. A +% modifier might be better, say +20% healing per skill level? Would make high skill/high quality healing really seem like something substantial when used and would stop the simpler supplies from power creeping.
The rest were just just off the top of my head ideas for the flavor. The idea would be more avenues for players to explore, with more cross-skill dependencies. I really think electronics is ripe for a bunch of neat-but-not-must-have gadgets like the firestarter, and a nice way to add character to them would be letting you make Mediocre Item and later upgrade it to Good Item and possibly even Better Item with enough skill.
But I’ll stop the derail now and restart it in the lab once I have some json uploaded.
That’d be golden. Right now I can get a doctor’s bag type thing to hold charges, but when I use it, it throws an error and doesn’t eat a charge (still works though!).
I actually wrote code for variable scaling, just forgot to actually read it from the json and add an example for it.
It sounds like you want to make it a reloadable tool, which would require manual reloading. If so, it would be a good idea to rethink it not to require those extra keypresses, unless there is something that can’t be done without that, such as variable costs for different actions (100 supplies to disinfect a wound, 30 to heal hp, 20 to cure bite wound etc.).
Firestarter already exists, it’s just that it is as useless as it sounds, so no one uses it.
And bad->good->great copies of the same item is not a good idea, it would only result in extra clutter in crafting menu.
Yup, thus: “I’d also like to see medical kits made into a tool and medical supplies an ‘ammo’”. I’ll save the rest of the response till the json is up since it’ll address most of it.