Getting skewers ist super easy .
I just cut up a stack of wood next to the place where i cook. ~hundreds of skewers fast an safe xD
Thatās a good reason for dropping them as a component and making them a tool instead.
If making something is āfreeā, then it should be automatic. Only making the first skewer has a requirement (you need a cutting tool and some wood), after that their cost is incredibly low - negligible even.
Honey doesnāt spoil in part because of its high acidity and in part because itās hygroscopic - itās a pretty profoundly uninviting environment. So the only real thing you need to do to maintain honey for a long time is keep it dry. Tea is only really sanitized by merit of having been made with boiling water, so itās just as resistant to spoil as any other food cooked with boiling water. Itās kind of like how sugar doesnāt go bad in your pantry but simple syrup needs to be refrigerated despite being nothing but sugar and boiling water. Iād only really feel comfortable making it rot immune in a sealed jar recipe (and requiring a vacuum sealer etc). Plus Iām only really talking rot on new medicinal teas, since the existing teas also show up in sealed plastic bottles and having them not rot is a way to avoid the issue of sealed vs unsealed plastic bottles.
You can already dehydrate dandelions (cooked dandelion greens to dehydrated vegetables). The medicinal herbs I want to keep limited to prevent stockpiling - the medicine is going to be ubiquitous and relatively easy to make, so just a lower effectivity isnāt enough to really balance them against proper medicine. That said, the intent was to have a long rot timer on them (not like raw meat, more like eggs or longer) so you will be able to maintain some medicine and get more when necessary while still coveting any proper meds you come across.
Eh, like I said, though - you wouldnāt actually need them at all to smoke the food since the only way you can do it is through tools that are already specifically designed to facilitate smoking. If you could smoke meat over a regular fire then it might make a bit of sense to need something to drape the meat over, but thatās what the smokerās already for.
Iām about leaves, not liquids. Liquids should probably go stale - itās completely unappetizing to drink tea after itās been out for a few days.
And syrup needs to be refrigerated because sugar has very high threshold before the solution becomes unhospitable.
If these medicinal teas are much more effective than current āherbal teaā, which Iād rather keep because I drink mint-based teas with no regard to medical effects, then do feel free to balance their effect with spoiling.
You could sit a few months by the river, like I did with canvas sacks and ability to put things in containers manually, and get the updated object-recipe system which would allow you to do āskewers only with fireā without duplicate recipes.
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, canolaās 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). Iām pretty sure rot doesnāt actually do anything to the efficacy of medicine, but at least itāll disappear eventually.
Atlatls are done, using the firearm framework. Theyāre 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 theyāll 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 āadvancedā tool goal - itās basically a stone axe, adze, and shovel in one slightly larger item. Itās 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). Itās made through the crafting menu like a foldable bicycle, except you canāt fold it back up again. I havenāt yet played with the changes to wooden vehicle crafting, so Iāll have to see if the sled is worth keeping, but weāll 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 whatās put in so far is a weaker effect on the herbal medicine. Thereās 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.
MormonPartyboat: I was actually looking at adding some crops, but sounds like youāve beat me to the punch. Do you intend for this to be a mod or something you intend to submit for merging into the mainline game? Iād prefer not to step on your toes in the latter case, so Iāll avoid trying to add anything like beans (I appreciate that, by the by; it wouldāve required some futzing around with existing food recipes and possibly the existing beans).
Anything else you plan to add for crops? I wonāt be adding gatherable plants, beans, or the medical plants you mentioned. I may, however, add things like oats, rice, maybe soy (the issue with soy is that itās so bloody versatile), broccoli, zucchini, and such. Mind if I take those, or do you have them covered?
Also, mind if I add a clay oil lamp? I noticed in the OP that you seem to be interested in playing with clay, so I donāt want to step on your toes there, either.
I was hoping for it to be main line eventually (itāll need to be for the code changes to add the natural medicines), but Iām going to hopefully post it in the mod forum once I have something to post later this week. I had a list of things that had to change in the code, but keep happily discovering that things have been pushed to json since I last poked around.
Iāve been doing it a pretty hilarious way - for the new items, I add a newitem, a seed_newitem, and a recipe to cut up one āunitā (based on charges) of newitem to make two seeds. For beans I just futzed it by taking some beans and adding water to make some sprouted beans which are seed_beans in the code. The way the code seems to work is that it needs seed_ at the front since it identifies what item the seed is for by string manipulation (so the mushroom stems are seed_mushroom). Just for giggles I made a seed_hammer (without editing the hammer at all) and sure enough the bush sprouted hammers.
[quote=āAllisonW, post:26, topic:8768ā]Anything else you plan to add for crops? I wonāt be adding gatherable plants, beans, or the medical plants you mentioned. I may, however, add things like oats, rice, maybe soy (the issue with soy is that itās so bloody versatile), broccoli, zucchini, and such. Mind if I take those, or do you have them covered?
Also, mind if I add a clay oil lamp? I noticed in the OP that you seem to be interested in playing with clay, so I donāt want to step on your toes there, either.[/quote]
Go for it, and feel free to take beans! Theyāre out of place with what Iām doing anyway. All I did with clay is change each of the recipes from using the charcoal kiln to a (new) clay kiln and make them use fuel. I have no problem tweaking things later if what Iām doing gets merged to mainline. Iām also not planning on adding anything else on the crops side, except maybe the transplanting of trees and the potting of flowers.
Uh, no, you can have the beans, honest
Assuming youāre done with beans, anyway. Thereād be no particular point in me retreading ground youāve already covered, so I wonāt do beans unless you havenāt actually done them yet.
Occamās Razor: why create a new item when you can rename an existing one - brick kiln?
Because making gargantuan clay pots out of a small, portable kiln isnāt a thing. No clay item in game is small enough to put into a portable one, and itās more work to try to jury rig a solution than to just nix the brick kiln entirely and depreciate any existing ones.
~double post~
Iāve been working around code limitations re: planting trees, as it doesnāt seem to allow a way to spawn items via the construction menu other than despawning and harvesting. My first swing at getting cuttings from trees and replanting them ran into all kinds of issues when dealing with out-of-season young trees (construction to turn t_apple_tree to t_apple_tree_cut, which can be harvested for cuttings that are planted as t_apple_tree_young with a harvested flag that harvests for null and turns into t_apple_tree_harvested). It seems like the way the harvested flag works, it auto-converts the terrain as if it had been harvested when you load the map out of the growing season, so if you plant a young apple tree in summer, quit and reload, the tree turns into an adult apple tree. So thereās no way I can see of having a young tree terrain tile mature into an older tree without code monkeying, at least through manipulating terrain through the construction menu.
However, I think I found a workaround - using the code that lets yeast flasks mature. You take a cutting from a ripe tree, plant it in a pot, and itāll take two weeks to grow. Once thatās done, you can take the young tree out and plant it as a harvested tree. While that means you only have to wait a year to have a producing tree (best case), itās the best I can do unless Iām missing something. I donāt think itās a huge balance issue, though, as tree yields are pretty miniscule (an apple tree produces less annually than a single moose kill).
I may be able to start a thread on the mod subforum tonight, but Iāve also gotta make sure it plays nice with the latest experimental as Iām a decent bit behind by now. Weāll see.
okay!
Canister, bowl, jugā¦
ā¦increasing the volume and weight of brick kiln along with the renameā¦
Also, thereās no āgargantuan clay potsā. Yet.
[quote=āBarhandar, post:32, topic:8768ā]Canister, bowl, jugā¦
ā¦increasing the volume and weight of brick kiln along with the renameā¦[/quote]
Lets take a step back and look at a modern āportableā clay kiln, and for reference the ābrick kilnā item has a volume of 9 liters and a weight of 21 lbs. This one is one of the smaller kilns I could find that could probably fit the one liter clay jug within (though it would need to be pretty squat). The outer dimensions give it a volume of 137 liters (548 volume in-game), and it has a weight of 80 lbs, which is far from anything that Iād consider āportableā. And once you start going up to include other items, it just gets heavier and bigger. Modern electric ones that can contain the large clay pot would be in the realm of a thousand liters of volume (4000 volume in-game) and 400 lbs. On top of that, an equivalent charcoal fired kiln made out of metal rather than ceramics (the ābrick kilnā has a steel material) would be significantly larger and heavier, both for the charcoal holder (or stand) and for the much thicker metal needed to provide a consistent heat.
I COULD see an electric clay kiln being a vehicle component, but the ceramic insulation needed to not also set the vehicle on fire would put it outside the realm of survivors making the kiln itself. And Iād hardly consider that item to be āportableā or even usable without being rigged to run off vehicle power. I could also see a possible jewelry kiln to let people make their own jewelry or clay arrowheads or whatever (which would probably still need to be heavier than the brick kiln, but would still be something that could feasibly fit into a backpack).
As I said: itās more work to try to jury rig a solution than to just nix the brick kiln entirely and depreciate any existing ones. Hell, responding to this post took more work than what it took to implement the fix.
Now please do the same calculations for electric forge (which seems to work on resistant heating, not induction), which is perfectly portable and can be used for making really large things in the game.
Sometimes realism needs to take a step back and let the gameplay simplicity pass.
Setting aside your factual issues and condescension for now, why would you possibly think Iām obligated to fix everything if I decide to fix something?
Please be constructive if you are expecting a response - Iāve been putting in the effort to give you a thorough response, and I expect more than a flip retort in response.
Iām willing to make kilns/forges/etc require a fixed location if folks like.
I donāt think itās really needed for charcoal kilns or either forge - the existing kiln is far smaller and more annoying to use than the constructed one, and the vast majority of things made in forges can be made with small, portable ones since you only heat a part of the metal rather than needing to, say, stick a whole nodachi into a sealed container for hours. There is an argument that some of the bigger things (like a 55 gallon drum) wouldnāt really be craftable with a portable forge and would instead need a big one, but that sounds like a monstrous pain in the ass to sort through and figure out and wouldnāt really make a better game in the end to tier out a few niche items out like that.
Itās only really the proposed ceramic kiln where literally no clay item in the game could be made in one small enough to fit into a backpack that the reality bending becomes gratuitous. And since clay is more suited to the stationary, low-tech lifestyle, requiring clay crafting to be stationary dovetails nicely.
Welp, work has been thoroughly kicking my ass the last few weeks, but I finally have a solid weekend off.
I fired it up with the latest experimental build (2745) and fixed a few conflicts (firestarter changes are neat!), and removed a constructed sled as itās redundant now that wooden vehicle construction is in (whoo!).
I still have some work to do on it, but Iāll be putting it in The Lab shortly.
Erm. Wooden vehicle construction was around since 0.A experimentals, possibly earlier. The only thing that changed recently is wooden construction actually requiring hammer and nails, not the regular wrench + welder set due to incorrect condition.
While youāre near firestarters, why not add the regular steel/ferrocerium (very rare find in cabins and sporting goods shops (why does CDDA have no hunter/fisher/wilderness living shops?)) spark lighter that is an unbreakable fire drill (extended_firestarter - both require tinder, so itās abstracted, and ābetter fire drillā is lacking), and the gasoline match that is crafted using said ferrocerium lighter, some cotton balls, small plastic bottle, scrap metal (or a battery!) and a bit of copper wire and is a gasoline-fueled regular lighter that isnāt a freaking pain to use, unlike the current essentially-a-Zippo refillable lighter?
Thatās what I was talking about.
Neat stuff. Iāll have to think how to add it, using scrap metal + ferrocerium stick should be enough to make a simple firestarter that uses crafted tinder as ammo (whittled wood shavings, charcloth, etc). Iām not sure how the gasoline match would be any different (json wise) from the refillable lighter, though.