suggestion Repairing Variant Bows

[Lumi]

IMO, the fact bow variants cannot be repaired effectively makes them trophies. I seriously think they've gotta be repairable.

My suggestion: when a player finds one, add a blueprint for the corresponding bow into their workbench tab. When one breaks, snap the string and replace it with a ruined/broken version. Using the stringless but intact body of the bow and cured guts (perhaps more than used for the survival bow, for a bit of balance?) the player can restring the bow, but it will be partially damaged (perhaps scaling with your archery? 50% at lvl 1, 60% at lvl 3, 70% at 4 and 80% at 5?), reflecting the lower-quality string and therefore having a drawback. Although the system sounds obtuse, it would keep one of the base bow's main flaws: the inability to replace it without workbench access. 

We should NOT be able to restring and repair the survival bow this way to infinitely preserve maple saplings. This is both for balance but also realism (forgive me for flaws in this next part I'm not a proper bowyer or trad archer) because, being a survival bow made of poor-quality green wood, the actual body of the survival bow will gain large amounts of set and eventually give out FAR quicker than seasoned wood or fiberglass would. 

This of course would make the variant bows substantially more powerful, and maybe they'd need some extra balancing. Besides the ways mentioned, one avenue I might suggest is perhaps damaging arrows slightly faster. Heavy bows need heavy arrows, and we can assume the simple arrows are not particularly robust or built for the strain of being fired from a proper hunting-weight bow and doing so would definitely put some wear n' tear on them. This would also give the players the fun extra consideration of preserving birch or maple saplings since one or the other will be used up faster depending on their choice. 

IMO this change is pretty badly needed in some form. It doesn't matter if the ruined version is the identical sprite with a big red X over it and it doesn't matter if the icon for the repair blueprint is the same as the icon for a survival bow (it would be nice if this wasn't the case but I survived when I saw the tipup icon was the same as snares lol), whatever makes it easier on Hinterland.

Pic attached is in celebration of actually finding this beauty! Since as those of you who read my (equally whiny) other post about bows know, I did NOT have the same luck finding its more traditional cousin, the WR's bow.

Anyway, curious to hear what you all think.

[Dx421]

I have mixed feelings on the subject. 

While the string could be the thing that breaks it's also possible the shaft breaks and that wouldn't be something we could repair.

Then again; there are parts on a rifle that could break and wouldn't be repaired with a rifle cleaning kit so...

Yes to bow repair 👍

(The 'sport bow' is def my fav 😁)

[hozz1235]

I've been asking for this since Woodwright's.  Maybe HL chose not to make them repairable is due to their usefulness?  They would replace the Survival Bow, which would also make Maple Saplings useless.  Then again, there are lots of other items which have been obsolesced in this way...

[Lumi]

7 hours ago, hozz1235 said:

I've been asking for this since Woodwright's.  Maybe HL chose not to make them repairable is due to their usefulness?  They would replace the Survival Bow, which would also make Maple Saplings useless.  Then again, there are lots of other items which have been obsolesced in this way...

Agreed, if maple saplings were made useless that wouldn't be great (although we SHOULD probably have some more uses for them... moose hide tent/snow shelter when? ;P) but at the same time the rifle variants have substantial enough benefits that at least in my experience I wouldn't touch the base rifle if I had access to one of them (especially in the case of the curator's rifle, which to my knowledge DOESN'T have drawbacks). 

Nonetheless, MORE things made obsolete isn't good, so I think it'd need to be balanced quite well and I will admit even with all 3 proposed options I put forward I would probably never touch the survival bow again if the variants were repairable. I still definitely think the variants should be repairable, though.

[Demetrious]

Requiring a trip to Bleak Inlet or Blackrock to use the milling machine/repair facilities there would seem to be a good balance of risk vs. reward for this. We already have the mechanic; may as well make use of it.

[Dx421]

Also; 

Making a new crafted bow would be nice - leaf spring bow (Googling will show more pics and vids but I'll attach an example)

Crafted at the milling machine this is more what I'd expect a repairable bow would be like (can replace various parts including the bow 'shaft') 

Of course this might just be going in a direction Hinterland doesn't want for their game.

[TeflonGoon]

Strongly agree. I just got my first sport bow and I'm surprised that I can't repair it like al other non-crafted weapons and tools (gun/knife/axe).