Recipe for cured pelts in build ca. ~8500

Not sure if this should go in the garage or the drawing board, but I’m just curious as to the logic for why the Cured Pelt recipe now requires 50 units of pelt? I understand that since the butchery overhaul you don’t just get a pelt from a creature, but a certain number of “pelt units” corresponding presumably to some rough estimate of square footage. The problem is, VERY few animals actually give 50 units of pelt in one go. So what happens is you skin a wolf, and you get 17 units of Raw Pelt, but you can’t preserve it and it goes rotten because you don’t have enough for the recipe.

Yeah, I noticed it too. That is a weird and gamey restriction. IRL trappers can cure rabbit pelts without having to gather like twenty of them and stitch them together first. It feels a bit like “bring me twelve bear asses.”

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I noticed it too. It would be easy to change the recipe in json. How many units do you think it should require?

It should be one-for-one, if anything. Even a small scrap of pelt or hide can be cured. Might not make for much usable material, but it’s a better solution than the situation that’s currently happening. Another thing that would be cool would be to have a recipe for brain tanning. An old saw goes something along the lines of “God gave every creature just enough brains to tan its own hide”. Apocryphal at best, and probably not very true for the smaller critters (or the dumber ones), but it would be a nice touch.

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Yeah, to keep things simple, one-for-one makes the most sense, with an extremely high (perhaps 100%?) batch bonus up to a certain number of units representing several large hides. I’m not an expert but I can only assume the only real limit for how many hides you can cure at once is space to work and materials.

There is the issue with scaling, however. There are two types of this recipe:

10 cooker charge per 50 pelts
10 salt/saline solution OR 2 salt water per 50 pelts (faster)

I assume 1 cooker charge or 1 salt per 1 pelt wouldn’t be too bad, but changing it to 1 salt water per 1 pelt seems like a big nerf. One of the options I have considered is separating the salt water recipe and making it require 1 salt water per, for example, 25 pelts. This would still be a faster option and reflect curing a one, nice and big piece of pelt in one go, while the 1 to 1 recipes would reflect individually curing small scraps.

Sorry if I sound overly specific, but I want to be sure before I commit.

The problem with one-for-one is you can’t batch craft more than 20 at a time. This means you wind up with several different recipes for various sizes of critters.
It probably needs a different way to do it, like maybe a tanning rack.

Well, the second option is to keep the current ratio of 1 cooker charge/salt per 5 pelts. But honestly, the 20 batch limit is quite silly. Why can’t we make bigger batches?

The batch size limit helps prevent the player from carelessly crafting items that would take several days to complete.

Some of the problem is how crafting time scales with batch size. After performing a quick (not full) butchery of one goat, I had so many units of liver (36 or so, I think) that a full 20-unit batch took some 11 hours to complete, during which my character became quite hungry and thirsty. And I still had more to cook. This was one damned liver from one damned goat, mind you.

It’d be nice if an interrupted crafting session would yield partial results. If a single unit takes 30 minutes and each additional unit adds 5 minutes, then stopping after 40 minutes could yield 3 items (and consume the components for those three), even if you were trying to produce a batch of 10. Batches larger than 20 would be less problematic then, since you could stop to eat/drink/sleep or defend yourself and still not have completely wasted hours of your time. Want to craft 10 but only have time for 3? Just finish the rest later as a batch of 7, even if it takes the additional 25 minutes for the first item in the second batch.

That would never work for cooking. If I’m cooking 10 pieces of liver and one piece of liver takes 30 minutes to cook and each consecutive piece takes 5 more minutes to cook then that means it takes 1 hour and 15 minutes to cook the entire batch. Now if we break this up realistically that means a chunk of it is prep time and a chunk of it is cooking time. Which means we could for example say 30 minutes is prep time and then the other 45 minutes is the actual cooking time for the entire batch because it takes longer to cook a larger batch than it does single batch you can’t just stop 45 minutes in and say oh it’s done because 30 minutes was taken to prep it and 15 minutes was taken to cook it so all can pieces still require 30 more minutes of cooking because it’s still undercooked. The same goes for a lot of batch created items some of the time is taking to prepare the item for assembly or crafting some of that time is taken for actual crafting you can’t just stop in the middle of it and say you finished a couple. The whole concept is based around organizing your effort and two steps and coming at it with a lean manufacturing attitude

Correct, we run into the issue of the fact that batch bonus is supposed to represent economy of bulk. It takes, hypothetically, 15 minutes to cook a steak. It still takes 15 minutes to cook five steaks if you have enough room, but this doesn’t mean you’re going to get three cooked steaks if you’re interrupted 5 minutes in. The batch bonus is just to represent you can do these sorts of thing more efficiently if you do a lot at a time, but it still takes an additional amount of prep time for more material.

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How does curing and tanning function in the reality bubble, when the process should take a rather long time to do either irl?