suggestion Knitting skill and tools/materials

[stratvox]

Hey, I've got an idea. It seems odd to me that cloth from a pair of harvested jeans can be used to repair a woollen tuque. So, in the interest of adding more crafting/repair goodness, I'd like to suggest knitting as a skill, and some new materials for creating and repair of knitted and felted wool items.

Existing knitted items include wool tuque, long wool scarf, wool scarf, wool mittens, cowichan sweater, fisherman's sweater, thick and thin wool sweaters, and wool socks. 

Items made with wool felt include the mariner's jacket, the mackinaw jacket (holy mackinaw joe!), wool underwear, and the wool shirt.

I'm not quite sure how to handle the climbing socks... I'm thinking that maybe both yarn and felt required for repair, along with darning needle and sewing kit.

Yarn becomes an item that is both found and harvested. Ditto for wool felt.

Idea is you get one unit of wool from harvesting a wool tuque, wool scarf, wool mittens, and wool socks, and you get two from the long wool scarf, the wool sweaters, and say three from the cowichan and fisherman's sweaters.

Harvesting the wool shirt and wool underwear get you one unit of wool felt, and the mackinaw jacket and pea coat get you two.

New tools include darning kneedle (used for repairs) and knitting needles. They should degrade but very slowly (1% per use) and make them fairly rare, say at the level of whetstones. Darning needles should be more common than knitting needles (even though this is the opposite in the real world  ).

Found items include yarn ball (one unit of yarn) and yarn skein (five units: should be pretty rare).

Repairing: wool felt plus sewing kit is used to repair the relevant items (wool shirt, underwear, mackinaw and pea jackets). Yarn ball and skeins and darning needle are used to repair those relevant items (tuque, scarves, mittens, sweaters, and socks). Repairing wool felt items uses the mending skill. The new knitting skill is used to repair the knitted items. The climbing socks are a big deal... say you need darning needle, one unit of yarn and one felt to repair those. Big buff here... because of the ability to unpick screwed up knitting, failure doesn't cost you your yarn but does use up that 1% of the tool. When repairing climbing socks, should also use up the sewing kit, and repairing climbing socks requires yarn, felt, darning needle, and sewing kit.

Crafting with felt: wool felt coats can be crafted with say five felts for the mackinaw, seven for the pea coat (I'm really spitballing numbers here now) and half a sewing kit, wool shirt with four felts, wool longjohns with three felts plus 1/4 sewing kit. 

Crafting with yarn: make the tuque, wool scarf, wool mittens, and wool socks take three yarns, long wool scarf and thin wool sweater craftable with five, thick wool sweater with seven, fisherman's with ten, and cowichan with fifteen. Now, with crafting, generally the success is 100%. This should remain. However, how long it takes to make these items will depend on the knitting skill and should really punish people trying to knit at skill 1. However, by the time one gets up to skill five, then a tuque or socks should take about three hours, scaling up to fifteen or so for the big sweaters. Idea here is that if you try to knit a cowichan sweater at skill one, it should take about a hundred hours.

Whaddya think?

 

[KinoUnko]

would be great for TLD VR!

[Mroz4k]

Skimmed it so sorry if I am oblivious to some part of a suggestion.

I somewhat agree and dissagree. I dont think this needs to be a new skill - and the game shouldnt really have 10 000 skills if you think about it. This, in itself, is rather similar to just tailoring in general. I think the skill can stay the same.

HOWEVER

I do agree with you that it would be awesome if the materials had bigger variety. I would see three tiers here:

Cloth - for general low quality clothes like linen and cotton goods. 

Wool - for the better, second tier goods - that are made of wool. Like the ones you described.

waterproof membrane cloth - for the best tier goods - parkas etc.

 

Each cloth would be either found, or harvested from their respective clothes. Additionally could be found via beachcombing, and finally, I think it would be cool if Timberwolf mountain had a rare animal spawn - the alt ram or whatever it is called - an animal that lives in Canada and it very similar to bighorn ram - which could be hunted for wool on its body.

Clothíng repairs would be more immersive - as specific clothes would be harvested for specific ingrediences and for repairs, would require those. For example, tearing up a sports vest would yield one waterproof membrane cloth, 1 cloth and 1 isolation stuffing (you know, that cotton-ish thing used instead of feathers in modern clothes).

And, say you wanted to repair expedition parka - you would need waterproof membranes, cloth, and several of insolation stuffings because that is what makes the parka so warm.

 

This brings new usage of cattail heads - the cotton found in cattail heads can be used as said insulation. I can see a "crafting" option of turning two heads into a bundle of this insolation material... and cattails could be found via beach combing to make this repair "difficult but renewable".

 

These are some ideas I have been saving around over the years - I really think that if clothing repairs were more complicated, it would bring a new challenge into the game, and in general provide new challenges as people would think twice about wearing great clothes while hunting for a fear of durability damage and expensive repairs.