Improvements For Clothing Repairs

[Pharose]

I really enjoy the clothing and upkeep aspect of this game but there are some things about it that bother me.

When designing these systems you should always consider what a perfectionist would do and in this current build of the game a perfectionist would conserve their cloth and use it as efficiently as possible. This means that they would only repair their clothing when its condition has dropped low enough that the maximum repair percentage can be used. For example, if one piece of cloth can provide 40% durability to a shirt then it is not efficient to repair it until its condition has dropped below 60%. This is problematic because this is unrealistic, counter-intuitive and it encourages “masochistic” gameplay.

In real life clothing will decay at a exponential rate with use because fabric with holes and tears will disintegrate more quickly. The most efficient way to preserve clothing is to repair it as soon as you see any sign of damage (the reason you don't see this more often is because damaged clothing is more fashionable than “repaired” clothing and patches are more obvious than tears). If you repair your clothing like this then you would probably never need any cloth at all, just a small amount of thread will suffice for most fixes.

However in this game there is no option for minor repairs and the most efficient method is to let your clothing get really torn up before making any repairs, which punishes the player by making them freeze their butt off. This is really punishing for items like scarves where the repair percentage is really high so I let my scarf fall far below 50% durability before fixing it. This problem is slightly less relevant now that cloth is more abundant than before but it still remains an issue for players who want to survive for 100+ days or players with OCD.

The first thing that should be done to address this issue is to modify items that require two pieces of cloth to repair so that they only require one piece of cloth but can be repaired half as much and in half the time. The next thing that can be done is to half the unit size of a piece of cloth and make it so that these units are twice as abundant but half as useful. You would also want to tweak the longevity of sewing kits as well. Perhaps the best fix for this problem would be to convert cloth from whole units to decimal units, like water. This means that I would be able to perform minor repairs with a small quantity of cloth without waste.

I have not yet achieved a high level of mending skill but one thing I think would be cool would be to add a “reinforcing” perk at high skill levels so that you can repair your clothing above 100%. For example you could repair a toque to 120% durability so that it provides an extra 20% insulation but with slightly increased weight. The article name could then go from “new” to “reinforced” or “padded”.

[SteveP]

There's always the possibility of frost-bite for fingers, toes and ears. It could impair walking, handling items or hearing. I like your ideas!

Shivering could be a thing and that could be really annoying so the player is much more motivated to stop and make fire, perhaps long before the ability to make a fire is impaired.

That could make Interloper even harder; almost like Death Wish or Suicide mode. It should be really punishing, in a sadistic sort of way!

[Dirmagnos]

I have this issue with clothing, pisses me off greatly. Surviving is supposed to be about being inventive, but for some reason, i have to wait till my scarf or hat drops of really low durability be4 i can repair it or i will be wasting cloth. And additional problem with such approach, is that lower durability items are also easier to be destroyed as player is forced to wait till it drops sufficiently and just one encounter with wolf can be enough to trash those couple dozen durability points and lose item altogether.

At some point if proposed ability to cut cloth(or just reduce cloth value and make it more abundant to compensate for it) and hides into smaller patches. It could take some time and require sewing kit(but not reduce it durability). As result player would be able to perform smaller fixes every now and then(and it would be far more realistic), instead of going with full hide when he needs to fix something.

Alternatively player could spend only portion of cloth/hide when repairing(as much as he needs to fully repair item), allowing leftovers to be used for future repairs.

Alternatively, items could go over 100% durability(but items can only be repaired when they are below 90%) so that material would not go to waste. But no additional (warmth)bonuses are provided for 100+% durability.