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.
May I ask what the cost reduction is, and if it is in the current build (0.4) or if it is in an upcoming build?
As per rope being separable, that is good, though it really only comes as useful (in this context) if the palisade uses smaller section of ropes.
Converting sinew into thread by running it into and out of a sewing kit is somewhat amusing and it does help, though you tend to find sinew in relatively small quantities, so in terms of satisfying the 9000 thread per section of palisade, you’d need to slaughter a huge number of animals.
My two main concerns are extracting thread from clothing/sheets, and reducing the amount of rope needed per section of wall. We are, after all, talking about three logs per section. Thirty feet of rope to tie together two logs is more than a little excessive. Two or three lengths of 6 foot rope would more than suffice.If that’s been addressed in an upcoming update, awesome.
They need 2 lengths of six foot rope now, and I added sinews and plant fibres to the recipes for string. I also made Domestic Windows drop a 3 foot length of string when broken. I’ll probably get around to your other suggestions soon.
great to hear about the string and palisade changes! i always thought that plant fibres, along with ripping them from the bodies of sentient plants, should be a harvestable with the survival skill - considering you can make a strong rope quickly with just grass…
… though i wouldn’t want to use it in the construction of a longbow.
I agree that string is a bottleneck for a lot of crafting recipies. So like in another game that I like (Wayward) there should be multiple sources of string/rope like materials. Some examples that they implemented were seaweed, treebark, spider silk (should be easy to get into cata), leaves of several types, plant roots, and tree vines. I am not sure how all these would factor into cata but I believe that they could all have a place, and maybe their uses could be different as well.
The spider silk thing…it gives me ideas. obviously it’s dangerous to harvest, but since these are mutated border collie+ sized spiders, would their silk be usable as a cloth?
If the sinew -> thread conversion method using the sewing kit is intentional, there should be a crafting recipe for it, to allow auto-crafting. It’s kind of painful to continuously unload/reload. That said, other sources of thread would also be nice; being able to harvest the spider webs lying around would be a good start.
When I was first looking for extra thread I actually assumed you could get it from webs, and went to cut some down. It didn’t work, and I tried looking it up to no avail.
Harvesting thread from webs is a great idea and I’m a little surprised it’s not in yet. It’d be a great reliable/semi-dangerous way to harvest large amounts of thread. After all, you can get enormous amounts of wax from bee zones, so why not thread from spider zones.