The agriculture/herbalism additions are going swimmingly - you can now plant all the gatherable plants (wild herbs, wild veggies, mushrooms, buckwheat, rhubarb) as well as beans. I also added some medicinal or otherwise useful plants that seem likely to naturally find in New England: dogsbane can be harvested for small amounts of plant fiber, canola’s seeds can be pressed into cooking oil, bee balm can be made into a tea and drank as a cough suppressant, mugwort can be made into an oil and used as an antiparasitic, and thyme can be made into thyme oil as a topical disinfectant. A mortar & pestle was added to facilitate some of this. It was kind of a pain to research these as according to most herbalism sites everything cures everything, but these seemed the most plausible. The herbs have a long rot time (240), and the seeds do not. The bee balm tea has the same 240 rot time, and the oils have a really long shelf life (672). I’m pretty sure rot doesn’t actually do anything to the efficacy of medicine, but at least it’ll disappear eventually.
Atlatls are done, using the firearm framework. They’re balanced to be somewhat stronger than crossbows, at the expense of the much larger ammo weight/volume and need for fletching/arrowheads. To facilitate hauling ammo around, I also added a way to bundle up darts using a rope, which takes up less space and can be slung over the shoulder (but not used as a quiver). The way I have it set up makes me think they’ll be very useful for hunting and not very useful at all for clearing out zombies.
On the tools front, I removed the swage & die requirement from making a proper metal hammer, as it was in chicken/egg territory (need hammer 3 to make swage & die). I added a stone mattock as an ‘advanced’ tool goal - it’s basically a stone axe, adze, and shovel in one slightly larger item. It’s also a decent melee weapon, but no specials to balance its raw damage. I may have to make a metal one as well, depending on how useful it is. Withered plants can now be made into short or long rope. Electric firestarter is in - no skill to make, minimal ingredients, eats 5 batteries per fire started. I also added in a recipe to make a sled (with an optional large waterskin). It’s made through the crafting menu like a foldable bicycle, except you can’t fold it back up again. I haven’t yet played with the changes to wooden vehicle crafting, so I’ll have to see if the sled is worth keeping, but we’ll see.
Most of my time was taken up pulling out changes and dumping it into a separate mod folder. The only real code changes demanded by what’s put in so far is a weaker effect on the herbal medicine. There’s also been a lot of boring computer janitoring like getting the clay/brick recipes to use the clay kiln and adding a fuel burn, and more to come like adding a bunch of food recipes, tweaking the forage item tables, adding the withered plant rope into recipes, and looking at the colors used on the various herbs/seeds, etc., but the final stretch is in sight. Should be testing time by the end of the weekend.
