I was about to tan a soaked elk skin with newly obtained bark. But I mistakenly chose birch-bark box of 'coarse grains' instead and, to my surprise, worked as tanning material. I had to fill the now-empty box and try it again to make sure. By not starting tanning but pressing escape during the pause when all conditions are met. Consequently, the birch-bark box, which was emptied when selected for tanning, did not refill when canceling. I repeat: I did not start the process.
Rye flour (made into sour mixture) can be used for tanning IRL, so initially I thought there was some purpose to all this.
But then, another thing was that I had a bag full of these same grains. That bag of coarse grains could
not be selected for tanning.
So now I suspect it was the "birch-
bark box of ..." that allowed the grains to be chosen in the first place. I have to test this with putting, say, dried meat inside a birch-bark container and try tanning with that.
I shouldn't even be reporting this, because now I want to use rye flour in this fashion in the future...EDIT: Confirmed. I just tanned a bear skin with 2.1 lbs of awful dried elk cut from a birch-bark
basket. Pretty sour stuff
EDIT: And I see birch-bark strip works too, even though the proper (reddish brown, used in tanning) bark was left on the birch... The white papery stuff shouldn't tan anything. This is a language problem, actually. Since in Finnish (for example) the
outer bark (white stuff) is called
tuohi and the
inner bark (brown stuff) is called
parkki.