Rope and string conversion

Gatleos · 2013-09-04T06:26:17.000Z

I’ve been bothered by this for a while: is there any reason that ropes and string have to be measured in lengths of 6" 3’ 6’ and 30’? It seems extremely clumsy, and creates a bunch of unnecessary crafting and disassembly recipes for switching between the two sizes for each.

It looks to me like it’s some old legacy code that Whales never got around to changing. It would be much simpler to make it work like thread and sinew/fiber. Any objections to changing it?

KA101 · 2013-09-04T06:37:17.000Z

I know that Ropes are used in construction and rappelling, and the Strings in a few crafting recipes. String could probably be generalized but Rope seems better to leave in specified lengths–that way people don’t fret about needing X amount of Rope charges to change Z-levels.

(Or maybe that’d be a good time to implement it.)

Gatleos · 2013-09-04T07:45:57.000Z

Well, is the rope reusable? I really can’t see any functional change this would make other than simplifying the depiction of rope and string in the game. You can already freely transfer between the types with crafting, having rope and string stack with “charges” like thread wouldn’t be much different.

kevin.granade · 2013-09-04T14:38:42.000Z

What’s your actual proposal here, make one “unit” of rope be 6", and allow it to auto-stack?

With thread, the typical use is to use tiny pieces of it for things (sewing), so it’s not that big a deal having 10 6" pieces vs 1 60" piece. it’s really an afterthought that allows it to be made into string and string into rope.

With rope, the typical use is to use the whole rope to do something, so the distinction between 10 3’ ropes and 1 30’ rope is HUGE, and that’s reflected by the fact that they’re distinct items. On the other hand, with work you can splice rope, hence the recipes. Actually splicing loses length, so the combining recipes should be lossy.

Gatleos · 2013-09-04T15:03:27.000Z

I considered that with rope, that recombining small sections of it didn’t really make sense. I was mainly proposing a change to how string works, but if rope is staying the way it is it wouldn’t make much sense to change string since they’re closely related crafting-wise.

I guess the actual problem is I had no idea originally that you could disassemble rope and string in the ) menu, which made the system seem a bit flawed. I’m not sure what to do about that, maybe make it more obvious somehow.