Deteriorating clothing- tailoring fix

Game Talk The Drawing Board
21

I really don’t know why tailoring needs to be harder to level up. Like someone mentioned earlier, the better clothes already require better materials than rags, which you already have to go out and find. And in no-cities mode, zombies are actually fairly rare - the better source of rags would be to roam until you find a group of dead scientists and a screwdriver, then disassemble beds in a lab. If this system is actually implemented, I’d like there to be some alternative to rags that could theoretically be made from scratch. Like maybe having fur pelts as a substitute for rags off the bat, or some sort of cotton plant that can be grown and spun into fabric.

It seems like a lot of people here seem to be too focused on city clearing as the only notable playstyle, and don’t take into consideration anything else.

22

We really need weaving and bolts of cloth…

And if we add fabric stores we need patterns, basically just tutorials on how to make that one sort of clothing.

23

Perhaps, apply a cap or a diminishing return on how much one could level up by simply mending clothes?

24

My basic idea was: keep the current system for making stuff out of rags, but replace the basic items (t-shirts, trenchcoats, backpacks) with “makeshift” versions not unlike what was done to the crowbar. This is only for clothing; survivor suits etc and fur clothing should stay the same. Marginally lower the quality of “makeshift” clothing, possibly with a new tag (leave storage/thickness as is)

Also, allow disassembly of non-makeshift clothing as long as you have a pair of scissors or a sewing kit (now craftable with bone needle+scissors. maybe also add a scissors recipe.) This gives you a.) thread and b.) lengths of cloth, cotton if the piece of clothing is cotton or wool if it’s wool (or other materials if we add them.) You still reinforce/repair cotton items with rags, but wool needs lengths of wool. Remove the ability to disassemble string into thread.

To craft clothing items out of lengths of cloth, you need a higher tailoring skill (in general) and a sewing machine (made of scrap metal, some misc parts, and a foot pedal, loads with thread at 1000 capacity.) So a makeshift t-shirt takes 1 tailoring and rags, a normal t-shirt takes lengths of cotton and 4 tailoring (or whatever.)

As for the main point of this thread, fabric in general is not rare enough in the real world for it to ever be plausible that someone would be unable to find it in large quantities in urban or suburban areas. I don’t see any way to enforce a scarcity without being really contrived.

25

Creating a series of separate new items would be a lot of work and a lot of clutter to add. New item tags might do it, and then you could set up for a skill-based quality system. [SHODDY], [ACCEPTABLE], [WELLMADE], etc.

26

+1

27

I disagree with the requirement for a sewing machine, but if one gets added then you could always have it speed up the process.
The tag system also sounds like a good idea, and probably could be used in all the crafting things. And constructions.

28

[quote=“One-Eyed Jack, post:24, topic:4118”]My basic idea was: keep the current system for making stuff out of rags, but replace the basic items (t-shirts, trenchcoats, backpacks) with “makeshift” versions not unlike what was done to the crowbar. This is only for clothing; survivor suits etc and fur clothing should stay the same. Marginally lower the quality of “makeshift” clothing, possibly with a new tag (leave storage/thickness as is)

Also, allow disassembly of non-makeshift clothing as long as you have a pair of scissors or a sewing kit (now craftable with bone needle+scissors. maybe also add a scissors recipe.) This gives you a.) thread and b.) lengths of cloth, cotton if the piece of clothing is cotton or wool if it’s wool (or other materials if we add them.) You still reinforce/repair cotton items with rags, but wool needs lengths of wool. Remove the ability to disassemble string into thread.

To craft clothing items out of lengths of cloth, you need a higher tailoring skill (in general) and a sewing machine (made of scrap metal, some misc parts, and a foot pedal, loads with thread at 1000 capacity.) So a makeshift t-shirt takes 1 tailoring and rags, a normal t-shirt takes lengths of cotton and 4 tailoring (or whatever.)

As for the main point of this thread, fabric in general is not rare enough in the real world for it to ever be plausible that someone would be unable to find it in large quantities in urban or suburban areas. I don’t see any way to enforce a scarcity without being really contrived.[/quote]

I like this idea to go with Vache’s tags.

29

IMO tailoring is at the same place as the rest of the skills, “you advance at an unrealistically accelerated pace”. As a crafting skill with abundant (hyperabundant even) raw materials, it’s probably worse than average since it’s extremely easy to grind up.

I’m thinking makeshift would bump up layering by a fraction of a layer (not sure how much exactly, something between .1 and .5).

Right, so now you dissasemble something that would yield 10 rags, after the change it would disasemble into 1 bolt of cloth and 2 rags or something. The main problem I see with this is curtains and other very large cloths, or do only clothes dissasemble into bolts of cloth? That might make sense. Another tweak is that damaged clothing might not disassemble into bolts at all, it’s ripped, so you can’t get a whole bolt of cloth out of it.

I could see hardcoding this into the crafting code instead of duplicating recipes, if the item has the appropriate flag, it requires either bolts of cloth or a number of rags, if you use the rags it gets the makeshift flag. Might also require a certain skill level to make it not makeshift.
I could certainly see adding a foot-treadle sewing machine, but it’s not technically necessary for anything, it just makes things faster.

Yea this is what I was getting at, but instead we’re attacking the supply of “quality” cloth, which is more reasonable.

I think introducing bolts of cloth that are a bit harder to get, and making clothes assembled from rags “makeshift” is a fairly straightforward way to deepen clothing construction a bit by adding an upper tier of clothes that it’s a bit harder to make.

30

Hrm, I like the bolt of cloth idea. But what effect does it have on reinforcing zed clothes for unlimited experience? It also doesn’t fix the hyperabundancy- if we’re still getting the equivalent amount of mats from zombie clothes, introducing another item is just adding another step.

Instead of swimming in rags & craftables, we’ll be swimming in rags, craftables, & bolts.

31

I’ve been thinking we need some thresholds for some skill practicing in general, e.g. tailoring not advancing past 2-3 or so when just doing reinforcing, electronics dissasembly, etc.

We already have it in some special cases, like hitting walls not advancing melee past 1, or bb guns not practicing firearms or rifles past 1, we can either manually cap the worst offenders, or try and come up with a generic system for capping skill practice based on the difficulty of the task.

32

Mmm, well that’s one of them. But here’s what I don’t want to see as a fix for abundant materials:
a. Upping the grind factor. Instead of reinforcing a score or two of clothing articles, we use the excessive mats to make excessive articles- 30 socks, 20 blazers, 5 dozen trenchcoats & 10 survivor suits.

b. Upping the resource requirements. Making a tshirt require disassembling 5 tshirts would make me value those piles of clothes sitting out in the rain; but the point is I’d rather NOT.

I’d rather do fewer button presses- less gathering, less breaking down, less crafting.

I actually like reinforcement leveling up tailoring- it allows me to progress just by going through day-to-day activities. What I don’t like is being able to grind it up in one day without leaving the immediate area of my shelter.

Monologue fin.

33

Actually, what is the rationale behind bb guns and not rising your skill beyond 1?

Sure, they won’t teach you anything about recoil management, but learning to aim is way more important and i fail to see how a bb rifle wouldn’t teach you how to do that

34

I can’t speak for the original rationale, but here’s mine, and it would actually extend to lower accuracy “real” guns.

Your gun has a certain accuracy, typically expressed in MOA, or minute of arc/minute of angle, which means when fired, the avarage shot follows a path that number of minutes of angle wide, since it’s a radial measure, it’s a cone that extends out from the gun.
When firing the gun, you impose your own degree of inaccuracy based on departing from the “ideal” handling of the gun, we also express this in MOA.
If the inaccuracy from the gun is greater than (or actually similar in magnitude to) the inaccuracy YOU contribute, there’s no way to tell if a missed (or hit) shot is due to your actions or due to the gun, therefore there’s no feedback for you to use to correct your shots, you won’t be able to learn anything, except at a very low level, where sheer familiarity with the gun is a major source of improvement.

In real firearm practice, you fire many times, focusing on consistency, and analyse the group to see what you’re doing wrong, because the KIND of inaccuraccy a person intoroduces into the process is different from the kind if inaccuracy the gun produces. Then you can correct and practice doing it right, analyse your new grouping, and tackle the next problem. You can’t do this in the field, because you can’t analize the targets, generally they fall over when you shoot them.

BB guns are pretty ridiculously inaccurate compared to real guns, so they have a simple override that just says you can’t exceed lvl 1 in the relevant skills by practicing with them.

I’ve been considering having the gun firing code compare the gun/ammo/mods dispersion to the skill dispersion of the shooter, and using that to scale how much practice is happening, so more accurate guns give you better feedback and accelerate learning. At the same time, as I’ve outlined before, I’d add long-term practice actions you can perform to try and make the most of your resources to improve your skills, rather than just throwing yourself at the zombies over and over.

35

Well yeah that makes a good amount of sense and yes BB guns are terribly inaccurate, I was confused and thinking about the pellet air gun that I had during my childhood and was accurate for let say at least 30m (I even had a telescopic sight for it!) and that I used to shoot at the telephone cables and street signals and ummm the occasional bird and squirrel.

But back to the point that explanation makes perfect sense