Tool for Ptarmigan feathers

[UTC-10]

I am harvesting the feathers from five ptarmigans and I felt there had to be a better way to get four feathers than spending 21 (with a knife) or 28 minutes (by hand) to get just four feathers.  Two hours (and 200 calories) for four feathers?

How about a tool similar in form to what Will started out with in Wintermute to speed the process up.  Basically a shard of sharp metal. 

Increases the rate that feathers get harvested from one every 21-28 minutes to four every 21 - 28 minutes.  It take 1% condition loss per harvesting action and cannot be sharpened and is ultimately disposable with nothing that can be extracted from the ruined tool (like sewing kits or cleaning kits).  It just gets disposed of. 

With such a tool harvesting four feather from a ptarmigan carcass will be the equivalent to taking a hide of any other animal (by hand at Carcass Harvesting level 5).  The skill carcass harvesting could also have the same effect on harvesting time.  I am at Level 5 so think of harvesting a hide as taking 28 minutes by hand or 21 minutes by knife. 

One scrap metal at a work bench with (whatever time the devs decide on) to fashion into the tool.  It can be used to make the initial incision in place of using a knife,  hatchet, or hacksaw.  The incision cut or any harvesting on a "normal" animal would cost 5% condition.  If used like a knife for any other purpose - like fighting a wolf or cutting up a pillow - the tool takes 5% condition loss with each use.  The tool is not a good or replacement knife.  It is a field expedient tool.  An improvised knife or hatchet tool would be more durable and have wider use.  

I am sure that if this is considered OP the devs, if they decided to implement something like this, would make adjustments.  

[xanna]

It's not four feathers, it's four quantities of down. Five quantities of down is enough to stuff into your homemade wrap for your improvised insulation, so each down bundle is 20% of a insulated wrap, that's a heck of a lot of down in each harvest. Four down bundles is a huge amount of down.

The harvesting of down is already the equivalent of harvesting hides, pelts and guts. Without harvesting skill, depending on your tool, hides take 30-60 minutes, guts take 10-40 minutes each; ptarmigan down bundles take 20-40 minutes each. Very similar numbers. And they don't need to cure.

Down is a laborious thing to harvest, IRL. It takes time and is very messy. Especially to get that much from one bird we are being very frugal and not letting any go to waste.

It takes time to process (but not that much more than a deer) but look what you get for it - 2½ birds and you've immediately got the makings of two insulated wraps for a whopping 4°C warmth bonus. Compare it to deer and bunny hides that way and it's so cheap! Around the same to harvest, and you don't have to wait a week for curing.

Not meaning to lecture the OP specifically but I keep hearing people saying that ptarmigan down takes so long to harvest, and it really doesn't, so I've finally written my debunk.

[UTC-10]

It would have made a bit of a difference (to me) if the "feather" had been labeled "bundle of feathers".  Taking the labeling somewhat too literally and not realizing what all was involved in "harvesting feathers".  

Still won't make me happy about the time needed, as I was thinking in terms of animal hides, but your explanation made it more tolerable by changing my perspective.  The "I didn't think about it in that way" view. 

The price in time and effort to be paid to get them makes more sense now.  

[xanna]

This is a very classy response to my somewhat ranty explanation. You are an excellent human.


I agree that the description in-game could be much clearer. Using the word 'feather', while not technically incorrect (down is a type of feather) is going to be confusing, especially if it's the only word used in the description. And the way it's written it's ambiguous as to whether it is single or plural. Something like "A mass of fluffy down feathers" might give a better mental picture.

Edited January 6 by xanna

[hozz1235]

I was also somewhat surprised by the amount of time it takes to harvest a little bird - more time than a full size buck or wolf?  I do understand plucking feathers takes time.  Perhaps HL could have given us fewer feathers from each bird and shortened the harvest time.  Then it would have taken more birds to create items.  I'm sure the HL team discussed this and balanced it the way they saw fit.

[xanna]

20 minutes ago, hozz1235 said:

I was also somewhat surprised by the amount of time it takes to harvest a little bird - more time than a full size buck or wolf?  I do understand plucking feathers takes time.  Perhaps HL could have given us fewer feathers from each bird and shortened the harvest time.  Then it would have taken more birds to create items.  I'm sure the HL team discussed this and balanced it the way they saw fit.

It does seem like a lot per bird, in terms of realism. But until/unless you have a bow and fire-hardened arrows, you can only get one bird per nest, and of course the nests aren't always populated. Early game, pre-bow, it's a lot of work to get more than one bird.

It feels like a tricky thing to balance. I'm happy with it.

[conanjaguar]

This isn’t quite on topic, but…

Feathers are plucked by hand in real life, and by hand is the best way to do it in TLD. Which begs the question… why do we need a tool to harvest ptarmigans so we can harvest weathers by hand?

[UTC-10]

I was thinking for four "feathers" each taking 28 minutes by hand or 21 minutes with a knife (Level 5 carcass harvesting)?  I wasn't thinking bundles of feathers so why not a stupid tool to get a feather faster???  I have no experience plucking feathers so it was a problem to think I could harvest an animals (moose, bear, deer, wolf, rabbit) hide in 21/28 minutes but not a bird.  I still have no experience with plucking feathers but the idea of a bundle of feathers taking a while each time makes it seem more reasonable. 

[hozz1235]

Realistically, @conanjaguar is correct - feathers are plucked by hand.  I can't think of any tool which would make the process faster - unless you have access to an industrial chicken processing plant

Edited January 9 by hozz1235

[xanna]

2 hours ago, hozz1235 said:

Realistically, @conanjaguar is correct - feathers are plucked by hand.  I can't think of any tool which would make the process faster - unless you have access to an industrial chicken processing plant

Alas, I only have access to an industrial whale processing plant.

[hozz1235]

23 minutes ago, xanna said:

Alas, I only have access to an industrial whale processing plant.

Now all we need are some whales.

[UTC-10]

Was watching a video about a Russian who hunts and lives, when out in the wilderness, hunting and fishing, in a small (actually tiny) cabin.  He had shot a grouse and as  he was talking on the video he was doing something that I realized was he was pulling the feathers off the carcass.  

Although I think that the length of time to harvest the ptarmigan down feathers was a result of the devs using an existing game mechanic (the removal of an animal's hide) a future tuning of the process for ptarmigans might be a shorter time, maybe significantly shorter time, per bundle of feathers when done by hand and a longer time if one chooses to use a tool like a knife (presumably less efficient).  Also pulling down feathers should not require a tool to start if it died due to being stoned or shot by the character. 

 This would seem more realistic though I can foresee that it would require a new mechanic which would have the potential to have bugs and complexity (in the programming) associated with it.  Always the possibility of unintended and unknown side effects from this kind of change.  

Of course this would be obviously favorable to the character since spending almost two hours to collect four [bundles] of feathers from a carcass that is under three kilograms still feels rather excessive.  Fifteen minutes a bundle by hand (so an hour to process a ptarmigan carcass for four bundles of feathers) still seems long but I could see it taking that long since one wants to be careful and not damage or destroy what one is trying the harvest. 

I am reconciled to the existing time to get four bundles of feathers from a single carcass but it could use maybe more thought.  🐦🖐️ 

[xanna]

My suggested solution from another thread. Requires minimal reprogramming
 

1 hour ago, xanna said:

I think the right answer would be to reduce the amount of down per bird, maybe 2 lots instead of 4. That way it's about an hour per bird, which feels a bit more realistic, reduce the amount of complaints, and it also makes getting to the improvised insulation and down bedroll take longer, which is good as they're a bit OP.

 

[UTC-10]

Two bundles instead of four would work for me.  I just found two hours to get the feathers from a two kilogram bird carcass to be excessive (even given I have no experience with defeathering a bird carcass).  I would suppose, if it came down to it, that one bundle of feathers for the same time as to get the hide off any other animal would have worked too.  

Then I could complain about how many ptarmigans I'd have to shoot with fire hardened arrows to get the needed bundles of feathers.   😁

[hozz1235]

On 1/8/2024 at 7:34 AM, xanna said:

It feels like a tricky thing to balance. I'm happy with it.

 

[Semple Fi]

So there actually is a commercial defeatherererer

 

[Leeanda]

7 hours ago, Semple Fi said:

So there actually is a commercial defeatherererer

 

That looks more for cleaning the chicken than getting useful feathers...  

Someone did something they shouldn't with a washing machine to figure that out lol..

[Semple Fi]

10 hours ago, Leeanda said:

That looks more for cleaning the chicken than getting useful feathers...  

Someone did something they shouldn't with a washing machine to figure that out lol..

That won’t attract the attention of wolves at all…. 🤣

[Leeanda]

1 hour ago, Semple Fi said:

That won’t attract the attention of wolves at all…. 🤣

Lol....   If we could get the washers and driers working during the aurora we could pluck,cook and clean our food and hides in one go😁 

We can lure the wolves into the basements lol..

Edited January 25 by Leeanda

[Captain Jamesy]

I've been giving this some thought.

I also think the balance is wrong... but I'm leaning towards the amount of down per bird is the issue.

I think maybe only getting 1 amount of down from 1 bird should be the way to go.

We won't have the issue of spending hours plucking a single bird, and also makes it so we have to hunt more of them to stuff a bedroll.

[Semple Fi]

On 2/16/2024 at 10:38 AM, Captain Jamesy said:

I've been giving this some thought.

I also think the balance is wrong... but I'm leaning towards the amount of down per bird is the issue.

I think maybe only getting 1 amount of down from 1 bird should be the way to go.

We won't have the issue of spending hours plucking a single bird, and also makes it so we have to hunt more of them to stuff a bedroll.

Then the problem will be the lack of birds and hours spent hunting them.  
How about Rob Schneider as a tool?