Sponge being non-craftable is intended?

I really enjoy playing with low item spawn rates worlds where you have to rely on crafting heavily.
However, ever since you need a sponge to wash most items, crafting metagame became really weird.

Am I missing some way of obtaining a sponge or something? That is, other than just finding one randomly. Because a sponge (of all things) not being craftable and being essentially a bottleneck feels really bizarre.

How do you make sponges in the real world? I know they used to be dead sea sponges, but I don’t even know what modern synthetic sponges are made from or how.

If you see here you’ll find that making sponges is quite an involved process:

If it were up to me I’d make it so that you can find sponges underwater as a band-aid solution, but if a crafting recipe had to be made according to the page provided it’d probably involve:

  1. Chemistry set
  2. Vacuum sealer
  3. Cutting tool
  4. Cotton or hemp(weed)
  5. Lye
  6. Water
  7. Charcoal
  8. Sulfur
  9. Bleach

And would take several hours.

Depends of the type of a sponge, I guess, but if you can make piece of plastic into a bottle with nothing but a fire and a universal mold, surely you can turn another piece of plastic or fabric into something approximating a sponge.

An any rate, if we want it to be more realistic, we can make washing board without a proper sponge consume rags as makeshift one-time sponges.

P. S. The main problem is not the sponge per se, it’s the fact that under current implementation you can’t, for example, clean a piece of tinted glass with just some detergent, water and a piece of cloth.

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As far as I know, there is no reason that there is not a makeshift alternative to the sponge other than the fact that nobody has made one yet. Why don’t you?

It doesn’t even have to be a sponge specifically y’all never used a ‘washcloth’? its in the name :stuck_out_tongue:

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There are also Loofahs, but I don’t think they would grow well in New England. Plus growing a plant just to have a sponge seems really involved and entirely not worth the effort.

I did a quick search, there are many alternatives to sponges. Of particular note is the Tawashi from the edo period, which appears to be a lot of leather? strips tied together in a bundle.


The one I refer too is pictured on this page, near the bottom

Take your pick, mix up a believable recipe and submit it to Github. If it’s not too ridiculous, it’ll make it in.

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hog-mane brush should suffice

It just occurred to me that there are no paper towels in the game. Those are the ‘duct tape’ of cleaning products. They could also function like a disposable mop item as well as a sponge. If not paper towels, perhaps the uses of paper material could be expanded?