Scattered remarks of pausable items and core functions

[Sami]

Oh yes, there's been decent workflow going on in september. And some rainy days too, which always increase the coding endurance.
Here are some brief remarks and additional details to where we were at with the earlier posts from the late summer.

The main work remains the same, transition to pausable item crafting. At this point majority of the Make menu item categories are now pausable.
If all goes well, only clothes and transport categories will still persists in to-do non-pausable stage upon release of the next version.
The upcoming tree species based timber is now in effect with the applicable craftable items
and specific tree species is occasionally preferred, or sometimes even required. This brings in a whole new approach to acquiring timber and item crafting.

To give a few examples birch tree is preferred for making wooden shovels, cups and bowls. For wood slats pine is preferred, and shingles need to be made exclusively from blocks of pine. For crafting a paddle spruce is required. And the bows are best made out of pine or birch.

The tree species preference is indicated within the material and tool selection dialog the same way as all the other preferences.
In the screenshot below you'll see how it goes when longbow crafting is initiated:


In cases where certain tree species is preferred it's still possible to use material of any tree species, but if it differs from the preferred types the quality of the produced item will be lower. In that case the generic "...can't make good out of bad." message will be shown upon obtaining the finished craft.

..

As we undergo transition to pausable crafting many item recipes go through adjustments and additions.
Recently we introduced raw material yield property, which is also available for modding as [yield:num].
This property defines how many crafted items a certain raw material can yield. It's in use for example with making staves, so that you can make
three staves out of one slender tree trunk. The yield information is now also indicated upon starting to craft something,
and before selecting the desired number of items to craft. This way crafting can be planned sparingly.
In the screenshot below you'll see the slender trunk yield indicated when staff crafting is initiated:



It's likely that the crafts that are currently made in batches will be checked for possible use of the yield property to make their crafting more informative and intuitive.
The yield property is not practical for all the items, but in cases where you are kind of asked for "how many batches of items that are made eg. 5 items in one go" it
can help to simplify things to quite an extent.

With all the new properties and tags and preference specifications we've had to touch the very core functions of item crafting that lay deep within the game.
It's been quite unnerving to open these functions up for tweaking as if we make mistakes there the whole game will suffer from the consequences.
Thus, we've led easy paced and precise coding and testing periods with these.
So far, so good.
So let's continue.

These are future features - not yet functional in current version 3.84.