Thread has become a bit of a bottleneck resource. It cannot be crafted - it must be found - and it is required for two tasks. One of those tasks is essentially a thread sink (keeping your gear in good condition is a constant concern) and the other is making rope, which although it can be avoided if desired, is still a necessary component in a number of construction tasks which, if you plan to perform once, probably means you plan to perform it many times over (the palisade wall).
Each 30ft rope segment costs a total of 9000 thread if no other bits of string or rope are found. This is a pretty huge number considering that a single palisade wall section requires 30ft of rope, and only covers one tile. String and thread are both used in a variety of crafting recipes, further putting a strain on thread/string supplies.
If it is presumed that you are going to build a palisade wall that is 20 sections arranged in a rectangle, this would be a whopping total of 180,000 thread.
This is… kind of unacceptable. That is such a huge amount of thread that it’s unthinkable. Yes, you will find bits of string and even 30ft segments of rope lying around, and chances are you will not actually ever need the exact amount of thread to build something for that reason. However, any task which must be repeated a number of times in order for performing the task to be useful, should not rely on items which can only be found, and rarely in significant quantity.
If it were possible to find huge amounts of rope in hardware stores (you should be able to) this would be less of an issue, but rope drops pretty rarely, and never in stacks that I have seen. Which is odd, because if I go to hardware store right now they will have huge spools of rope of all different types and thicknesses.
Anyway, my point is, we need ways to extract thread and string from our environment. I’ve got a few simple suggestions to follow:
TLD;
- When cutting up clothing or sheets into rags, we should also get a randomized amount of string and thread.
- Rags should be reducable to thread.
- When breaking a window, there should be a high chance that a length of string will drop along with a sheet, as curtains frequently include a long string used to draw them.
- A separate line of string/rope should be available for sinew. Right now you can use sinew as thread to refill sewing kits, but it can’t be used to craft string and rope. So either a separate ‘sinew string/rope’ could be available, or at least put an ‘OR N*sinew’ clause in the crafting recipe for string.
- Plant fibers should be able to be converted into string/rope somehow.
- Palisade walls should call for 26 Foot Rope, not 130 Foot Rope. 30 feet of rope to put up a pretty small section of palisade wall is pretty wasteful.
- There should be a way to reduce a 30 Foot Rope into 5*6 Foot Ropes. Maybe you can already do this with a knife, I haven’t tried.
