Let's sum up and showcase a few recently mentioned crafting related ambitions with some screenshots.
As mentioned earlier we'll be featuring a new light source, shingles. They are thin and flat oblong pieces of pine wood which were burnt to produce light - especially for lighting up houses during the dark time of the year.
Shingles are lit by using [a]pply command. Once a shingle is burning you can drop and set it wherever the light is needed, or carry it with you. Traditionally shingles were burnt in a specific stand that kept them in a good angle for proper burning, but in the game the dropped burning shingles are imagined to be inserted between the wall logs or set firmly in place by some other means.
One shingle burns for about 30 minutes in the game so for continuous lighting a new one needs to be lit before the previous one fades out. This sort of shingle replacement is done automatically if your character is located beside the burning shingle and there's a stack of new shingles nearby on the ground. You character then automatically replaces and lights a new shingle when necessary, and you don't need to worry about maintaining the lighting even if the task you were doing would take a long time.
Here a cabin is lighted up by two shingles burning in place. There's also a stack of shingles on the ground and if the character remains beside it a new shingle is automatically lit when the previous one fades out.Shingles can be crafted by the player character, and they may be needed in quite amounts during the dark season. An axe and a knife and suitable block of wood are needed for splitting the shingles. The preferred tree species is pine so our shingle splitting requirements will look like this.
A block of pine wood is required for splitting the shingles.Currently the felled trunks in the game are all of the same generic wood type, and tree species don't have much difference in crafting.
But now that is going to chance as we'll be adding tree species property for big trunks and assorted timber products. At the first stage this addition only covers big trunks and
slender tree trunks will remain generic, but in the future also the slender tree trunks will get the tree species property.
So, upon felling big trees the tree species now gets derived into the produced tree trunk. As a result the tree trunks are now called as pine tree trunk, birch tree trunk or spruce tree tunk - depending on what species of tree was felled. There are also different tree trunk tile graphics for pine tree trunk, birch tree trunk and spruce tree trunk. The basic timber products made of big trunks eg. blocks and boards will now start to inherit the tree species resulting in eg. "pine boards" or "block of birch wood". And so the tree type will now start to affect to what type of wood is needed/preferred for crafting this or that. Some tree type preference adjustments based on this addition will be made to craftable items in the next version and it will continue to grow more detailed in the versions to follow.
Here our character has felled big spruce, pine and birch trees and they appear on the ground like this.The coding focus remains in the pausable crafting transition, but it also seems to grow more complex and comprehensive as we advance.
These are future adjustments - not yet functional in current version 3.84.2