Currently, clothing & rags are everywhere. It’s downright easy to train up tailoring, & clothing stores have questionable use after you’ve fought your way into the city to loot them.
Proposal:
Attach a ‘deteriorating’ tag to clothing articles worn by zombies.
Said tag would:
Make the clothing article easier to damage
Make the clothing article extremely difficult or impossible to mend
Make the clothing article grant very few rags- 1 or two at most
This can be explained as
a result of the space-goo. The zombies are a bit slimy, and the goop is rather inhospitable to the clothing.
Additional item:
Detergent. Combine it with water & you can clean off clothes, removing the deteriorating tag. This is so that, if you’re attached to that trenchcoat or backpack you peeled off a shambler, you can keep & reinforce it.
The detergent would be uncommon, and the water requirement would keep survivors from cleaning every scrap of clothing they come across, (unless they’re well-established enough to do so).
These changes would make clothing stores & clean clothes more valuable, & would make tailoring more difficult to train up.
-Additional idea: boomer bile applies the deteriorating tag again, as do goo pits & whatnot.
perhaps have it dependent on what you do with it? Keeping it damp, having slime all over you, fires and such lowering the quality, whereas keeping it dry and locked up somewhere would keep it in good condition.
You know things like clothes are a such an ubiquitous item in real life and most pieces of clothing are the same thing with slight coluor/pattern changes that it really makes no sense for them to be a strange resource to get in game. And it really makes no sense for clothes to not get better once you have parched the holes in them with pieces of cloth.
Plus rags can already be found by the thousands by smashing windows for the curtains.
But they are a resource- tailoring is a skill. And right now just clearing the street in front of a safehouse leaves you with enough cloth to become a grandmaster tailor.
So, smash the windows. At least you won’t watch it dissolve in acid rain if you have to collect it.
-speaking of which, curtains resulting in 20-rag sheets is kinda op, but it isn’t quite as silly as the mountain of damaged, (but viable), clothing that just lies around.
I wish you could do something with sweaters and other woolen items…
And I don’t understand why you wouldn’t be able to fix things. having clothing wear out from wear sounds at least sane, and having it rendered useless thanks to damp or slime or something just sounds good.
And heck, perhaps we will be able to wash our clothing and our avatars someday and get happy from it.
the number of rags you get from an item is tied to your tailoring skill and maxes out at the item’s volume. Probably needs some work
As far as Sweaters and Blazers (as well as a few other clothing things) someone really should go in and set their material type to something usable, I’m not sure what they’re set to now, but they apparently don’t count as cloth, plastic, scrap, kevlar, leather, chittian, or fur.
(I was gonna post this as its own thread but this seems better)
I’m curious as to the long-term plans regarding tailoring and clothing, especially with non-cotton fabrics. How about deconstructing blazers into lengths of wool? Sewing machines for crafting? Shearing sheep? Yarn? Looms? Knitting? It would be cool to make your own suit, but that’s not realistically possible using cut-up curtains and a bone needle.
I also really like the Stylish trait, but I feel like there’s a dearth of items that actually work with it, and most of them aren’t that useful (I understand looking good is more important than surviving, but the trait costs 2 points). I wish there were more clothing in general; there’s been a lot of expansion in armor and such, but we still have like 3 different kinds of pants (where are my cords? dress pants? raw denim?)
I also have some specific ideas for “fancy” clothing (waistcoats, chesterfields, three-piece suits, tweed jackets, brogues, kevlar-lined business suits, oxford button-downs, neckties, etc); I’m working on the jsons but I figured it might be a good idea to see how people feel about this stuff in general
…Well I was gonna poke about vehicles next, but expanding the clothing system will require less mucking about in non-JSON files (but not none) …seems like a better middle step, I’ll look into it next week after I close up the foodstuffs expansion… …assuming they don’t hang me for my grammar and spelling errors first. XD
Soooo, about cutting down on the amount of free tailoring mats you get?
Though off-topic, to make ‘stylish’ more flexible you might want to develop a ‘style’ value- an integer instead of a flag. Woo everyone gets to know the dev’s fashion sense.
Just a thought, but shouldn’t the three-piece suit be made of … 5 pieces? (dress pants, dress shirt, necktie, waistcoat, jacket) All worn separately at the same time.
Sheets are in every house that has curtains. It just adds a layer of tedium that doesn’t solve the main issue (which is that tailoring trains too quickly).
And by the way, for the clothes that provide serious protection (e.g. leather, fur, kevlar, helmets), they all require much rarer mats.
With most developers I know in person, your maximal style values would be assigned to “jeans” and “meme-of-the-week tshirt”. I’m not sure how this happened, but for me it’d be your typical dress clothes, I’m not claiming any particular fashion sense, I just like dress pants/shirts.
Back on topic, I agree that destroying zombie clothes and the clothes you’re wearing isn’t going to help much, because the raw materials are so abundant it would just require you to patch and make new clothes all the time.
It seems to me the problem arises from using “rags” as the input to clothes creation, and there’s no penalty for doing so.
You CAN sew together a bunch of random chunks of cloth into say, a shirt, but it’s going to be too thick, heavy, probably very difficult to get it to fit properly, and it’s going to take a really long time to sew, since you have to stitch each little cloth together instead of just the straight seams of the clothes.
A more minor but related issue is being able to desconstruct string into quality thread, in reality it’d be very difficult to tailor with a bunch of short lengths of thread.
Finally, all cloth isn’t created equal, there’s a reason you don’t normally cut up sheets or curtains and make clothes out of them, they end up fitting poorly and being very uncomfortable. Also I’d guess they’d be more prone to wear.
How to handle this better without it becoming an overcomplicated mess, I’m not sure. Have to think about it more.
Well, do we want to stick to realism or game sense? Because realistically it’s easier to cobble together a survivor suit from a couple fitted pieces than it would be to stitch together a fitted tshirt from scraps.
Which would put character progression ackwards bass.
If we’re trying to make it keep game sense, that’s what my original proposal was aimed at.
-Making tailoring more difficult to level up.-
I contend making the materials more scarce would help a great deal- we’d actually have to hunt down dressers & clothing stores instead of just chopping up half the zombie droppings in front of our base to reinforce the other half.
Couple that with decreasing the number of rags/strings you get from disassembly, and tailoring isn’t the easiest skill to level up anymore.
However, this shouldn’t affect rarer mats quite as much- kevlar is hard to come by. Leather & plastic are still fairly common though. Fur would be unaffected, what with butchering.
I don’t know if I like having clothing stores/dressers be the only source of good clothing. I like playing with cities completely off once in a while, so I’d prefer if I still had some way to put a good suit together even in that scenario.
Attach the quality (patchwork) to clothing when it has been made from scratch or damaged beyond Ripped. Attach a small penalty to wearing more than two pieces of (patchwork) clothing (small hit to morale, and/or speed, and/or pain recovery… or something). So, it would be preferable to wear the Pants (fits) that you got at a clothing store to your homemade or zombie-salvaged Pants (fits) (patchwork). But you could still craft yourself a Pants +5 of Incalculable Jabberwock Annihilation (fits) (patchwork) out of a pile of rags and some animal sinews if your skill is high enough, so there’s plenty of room for progression.
@inad
In the no cities scenario, the deteriorating clothing would still drop one or two rags a piece. You’d also find the detergent item in non-city locations- mansions, public works, labs etc.
@foil
Mmm, but what does it do about the abundance of tailoring material? This isn’t so much about preventing the player from getting nice clothes as it is requiring us to put in a bit more effort to level it up.
Making nice clothes more valuable is a pleasant byproduct.
@101
Elaborate on Fabric stores & patterns?
Yes, the current system works. But it’s flawed. The equivalent would be if fabrication only required a hammer and looting a zombie yielded a stack of scrapmetal, some 2x4s & a couple rags.