How does one get these?
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Sinews: big mammals (bears, deers, wolves, cougars…). The higher your survival skill the higher the chance of you getting sinews
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Plant fibers: triffids (the plant like creatures, usually around woods). Any kind, but especially vinebeasts.
ok, keno told you were they are, but you _get these items with pits, 2 or three next to each other, that you dig spaced randomly between the shelter and the nearest house. anything that wants to eat you, you lure into those pits. this is where you will find free food everytime you wake up from sleeping in the shelter (make a bed there with the stuff you get from smashing up a window and smashing up or deconstructing the benches and counters in that place)
you get the shovel by luck if you spy the proper store nearby, and you need to be too lucky to raid there without enough guile, so don’t count on that right away; so you get the shovel by breaking into nearby houses from the back, cleaning the window and scouting the house for thread, sewing kits or the bit of rope that you need to construct a stone shovel.
once you have a shovel, you win. big pits to kill stuff with and butcher little things with your pocket or steak or butcher knife every morning until your skill delivers meat most of the time. only then should you take apart the real sinew packages, err bears. with modest skill a bear can get you 8 bits of sinew, so don’t squander them.
so, its a bit of a chicken and egg thing with the wilderness survival cause you still want the houses to get the string to get the sinew etc. but fortunately you can find that by sprinting through the first houses you find (leave some windows open so you can run through those in order to shake anything that might want to eat you as you go)
also beware triffids. if you see them at the start, say goodbye to your shelter, don’t think twice, just leave until you’re 20 or so mins away. find a new home there, then go back and marvel while you snag some tasty veggie meat.
your best weapon at the start are humble rock shovel dug pits outside windows. at the rear for meat, at the front for zombie delivered goodies. later on, sneak into town during a storm at night to dig more of those, then just wave your arms around come morning so the Zs come to deliver. but that’s a different story. what you have here _should just help you actually get the sinew. which is cool. with plenty of running away you can have your first portable shelter up in a few days.
please ignore this if you can already go up against a bear 
Note that zombies also count as big animals, and if you have an urban character, are a cheap way to raise your survival skill.
Although I will admit that it’s a little disturbing to use zombie sinew as my main source of sewing thread.
Actually, zombies no longer drop sinews and bones because of mumblemumblegoo
We should probably talk about that. I think it certainly makes sense to have it /reduced/ for regular zombies, or even eliminated entirely for some zombies like skeletons (or enhanced - do hulks still drop tons of leather and sinew? Because I always liked that)
Or is there a mechanical reason you think zombies shouldn’t drop them at all?
It was mainly because with bones being dropped by zombies, you could use them as a food source. And sinew production is tied to bones in the code.
It would be nice if they just dropped tainted bones too, heh.
Hmm, you’re right. On the topic of sinew in the git version: it looks like sinew drops were reduced by a factor of 10. Is that intentional? e.g., before I’d get a couple drops of sinew*10 off a corpse, whereas now, I’ve gotten drops of 2 and 3 sinew off of cougars. And just to be absolutely clear, that’s single sinews, not stacks of 10.
I agree that reducing the sinew drop rate makes sense (even if reducing the drops was a side effect of another change), because it was honestly a little ridiculous in 0.3, after a while. But I suspect you didn’t intend to reduce it QUITE that much?
EDIT: Found the commit in question, looks like it was indeed a refactoring error. The version tag is a little odd, though - the commit tagged as 0.3 includes a lot of stuff that doesn’t seem to be in the 0.3 release (I’ve scrolled back to at least commit 2df32242…, and that’s one that’s not in the source download labeled as 0.3 on the website). I’ll say more about that in the tech forum in the morning, as well as submitting a patch when I’ve had time to figure out how things are supposed to work (rather than, y’know, a random sinew*10 term).
butchering enough sinew from an npc killed animal at the start of the game? priceless! ty.
[quote=“Soron, post:9, topic:596”]Hmm, you’re right. On the topic of sinew in the git version: it looks like sinew drops were reduced by a factor of 10. Is that intentional? e.g., before I’d get a couple drops of sinew*10 off a corpse, whereas now, I’ve gotten drops of 2 and 3 sinew off of cougars. And just to be absolutely clear, that’s single sinews, not stacks of 10.
I agree that reducing the sinew drop rate makes sense (even if reducing the drops was a side effect of another change), because it was honestly a little ridiculous in 0.3, after a while. But I suspect you didn’t intend to reduce it QUITE that much?
EDIT: Found the commit in question, looks like it was indeed a refactoring error. The version tag is a little odd, though - the commit tagged as 0.3 includes a lot of stuff that doesn’t seem to be in the 0.3 release (I’ve scrolled back to at least commit 2df32242…, and that’s one that’s not in the source download labeled as 0.3 on the website). I’ll say more about that in the tech forum in the morning, as well as submitting a patch when I’ve had time to figure out how things are supposed to work (rather than, y’know, a random sinew*10 term).[/quote]
Kevin’s working on fixing it. Right now it’s generating a single sinew with x charges rather than x sinews with default (i.e, 10) charges.
Or go the easy way out and just make a crafting interaction that uses tainted meat for sinew.