Weird Crafting

[amyhistoria]

Preferred Tool

Let's look at this bandage-making session first:


The character has a small knife in hand, but the system choose M. Shortsword for her.

So this is a preferred-tool issue. We know that the handicraft is a fixed hidden skill, and unless heavily penalized there are no effects (In lumber making (not sure it's timbercraft/carpentry or general handicrafts) there are seldom one 1 inferior one accompanied with the decent ones)

Same when there are no preferred-tools in some sessions - There are Board knife, Knife and Small knife. When crafting the player certainly want small knife for easiness, but the system would choose a board knife for alphabetic order...

I also noticed that, in lumber making, M. craving axe is a "satisfactory" tool, but appear in red. In one of my save branches, the character get one M. handaxe, and the handaxe session is without the "warning", and seems to make more smoothly...

I'm not sure about the (plain) knife. In new version the knife price decrease its price from 48 to 6, and becomes much lighter. I think this kind of knife may be the preferred tool to light works like cooking. Or it's just a light general tool?

Make Good from Bad

It's possible - I mentioned a exploit in this thread:

I've just found a "exploit", or it's intended?

Bandages made by harsh textiles are decent, and the decent bandages can be made into decent cords...

While PALU mentioned that items can be combined to increase quality ridiculously - like 0.01 lbs decent with 4.99 lbs ragged makes a decent product if the order was placed right.

So why make it "official"? Like you pay more efforts or have more skills, the "bad" can be increased only one quality level. Like if you bother use the high-nutrition fat of the same animal, the fur quality has a chance to rid of "ragged"/"harsh".

[amyhistoria]

Also please consider making the lumber/stone/rock quality implemented, and the handicraft is a visible skill that started with a high value...

[amyhistoria]

For arrow-making:

I'm not sure that using different types of feathers in one an arrow - like one hazel grouses with 2 black grouses, makes a curved one.

And I think maybe the goshawk/eagle owl feather is/could be better than the grouses'?

[PALU]

Some skills have a preferred tool for some tasks, while others only require a general category. When there's a preferred tool that one is used even if of low quality (while red text indicates the tool is not the preferred type). If several tools match the a broader category the one with the highest quality is used, and if they're equal there the first one found is used (based on inventory/ground stacking order). This means your short sword was either a higher quality cutting tool than the knife, or encountered first.

The Common skill isn't directly hidden, but that's the skill used when no other skill is specified. Instead of making this general catch-all skill trainable, recipes should probably use dedicated specified skills (and UrW might introduce new ones). However, in some cases I think it's intentional that the Common skill is used for reasonably simple tasks where you can't really get an outstanding result. Superior clothing, for instance would require a lot more work than characters put in to throw something usable together, but one could envision a improvement steps, such as adding decorations to a wooden bowl, or embroidery to Fine clothing to upgrade them to Superior. It's also possible to imagine the character being allowed to try to make Fine clothing by putting in all the extra efforts that would go into it once clothes making becomes pausable.

I don't think you need a high level in a skill to allow decent results, as modifiers can be added to the skill roll to account for difficulty.

Fletchery is quite simplified in UrW as it stands now. There are mods that try to enhance that part with custom recipes.

And, by the way, you've scrambled the names of the tools: the knife is broad, not for cutting boards (actually it's for skinning), and the carving axe is used for carving wood, not craving chocolate.

Rather than multi posting, you can modify your previous post instead, as that tends to make it easier to read.