Textiles and Scissors

[amyhistoria]

Hi, I've picked up 3.50 beta again and found the quest system interesting.

I still remembered that 3 years ago I suggested a lot  (in the old forum, named Amy Xu) to get some fellow players annoying. I still have this kind of suggest habit for games those days, so I'll try to cut it short:

Players will need textiles to craft their own choice of cords or clothes. And it's weird to strip a specially tailored clothes into cords.

So why the villages not store some bolts of nettle/linen/woolen clothes?Also leathers from leather-bearing animals, some times leathers from fur-bearing animals (dehaired)


Scissors can do more precise things.

Small/regular scissors can be used to make common items like cords and clothes. Also optimal for cutting branches. Can be used to shear small amount of wool after shearing system implemented

Huge/Gardening scissors can be used to harvest, and also shearing and branch cutting.

[Helldiver]

The suggestion for bolts of cloth is a good one, I think. It also seems more realistic for the time period than to sell articles of clothing fully made.

But as to scissors, I am skeptical about adding them for the main reason that scissors were not necessarily around in the time/place Unreal World is based on. I will have to look at my sources again, but from what I can tell, there were only small scissors used to cut threads, and they would have been forged as a single piece with no handles, quite different from the scissors we use today. And no hedge clippers.

Also, you are aware that cords can be made from furs and leather as well as cloth, right? If it bothers you to take apart a piece of sewn clothing to make a cord, you can always use a hide.

EDIT: I have looked around and found these Viking Age scissors exhibited at the National Museum of Denmark. These are not Finnish finds, but the description of Finnish finds from the same era coincide with the shape of these. It seems the smaller ones were primarily used for hair trimming, helping with shaving, and other grooming needs, or for sewing. And the larger ones shown here (which are still quite small) would have been used for cutting fabric and shearing sheep.



I have still not found any verifiable instances of scissors used for wood or agriculture... and indeed, everything I know about grain cultivation + harvesting (as opposed to ornamental gardening and landscaping) suggests that scissors would get in the way more than they helped.

[amyhistoria]

EDIT: I have looked around and found these Viking Age scissors exhibited at the National Museum of Denmark..

Thanks for the research. I've never really do the "buy a clothing - make cord from it" thing (except for back to 2014, when the Njers are quite easy to hunt, and I make decent quality ones from their loots). The problems is that it's hard to get decent and better from animals. Also I think floral textures are always more efficient, as today we usually got from those.

For the scissors I think it can be somewhat a "semi-luxury" items, since making clothes by knife cutting is really weird and inefficient. But we can do without them perfectly now.

[PALU]

I turn Njerp/robber clothing into bandages and use hides to make cords (unless I use a mod to allow me to make cords in other ways).
Currently there is no point in bolts of cloth in villages since UrW doesn't provide means to make clothes out of them. Once clothes making makes it in bolts of cloth would make a lot of sense.

I find hide working to be one of the skills that increases the fastest, so high quality cord is one of the first thing I can produce that's of a high quality (and since most cords are used for drying/smoking I don't care about the quality for the bulk of it anyway).

Scissors/shears should probably be included when sheep shearing makes it into the game, with the attendant clothes making (Ah! some warms socks and mittens for the winter!).

Sickles were probably the tools of choice for grain harvesting during the UrW time line, as I think scythes were introduced later in history.

[Helldiver]

Currently there is no point in bolts of cloth in villages since UrW doesn't provide means to make clothes out of them. Once clothes making makes it in bolts of cloth would make a lot of sense.

Well, making cloth is very labor-intensive and also requires a very particular skillset (spinning + weaving can turn out very different results depending on the skill of the manufacturer), so it might not be feasible to add cloth-making as a function anytime soon. But I don't see why the current "make fur/leather clothing" code can't be utilized so characters can make a shirt or leggings or whatnot out of bolts of pre-woven wool / linen / nettle cloth.

Scissors/shears should probably be included when sheep shearing makes it into the game, with the attendant clothes making (Ah! some warms socks and mittens for the winter!).

I would like to see nalbinding make it into the game someday... it's a technique a bit like crocheting, used to make socks and mittens in Scandinavia since the Viking era and probably before then. Scraps from what look like mittens made with nalbinding have been found in Finnish graves as well, the most famous example being from the Eura grave find:



A fragment of what is thought to be a mitten, from the "Eura" find. Included in a paper by archaeologist Krista Vajanto, permalink here.

Unlike spinning, it doesn't require a lot of dexterity or skill or even a huge time commitment to turn out a wearable product, so I think it's well-suited to the average URW adventurer who doesn't want to buy their mittens in a store, or maybe who is just bored on a cold winter's night.

Sickles were probably the tools of choice for grain harvesting during the UrW time line, as I think scythes were introduced later in history.

I doubt any but the most modernized farms in Finland were using scythes for harvesting even into the 20th century, as the design of the most commonly used scythe in Finland does not seem to have been conducive to the harvesting process. (Of course, many farms in Finland now are probably using machines to harvest). Correct me if I'm wrong, but any harvesting scythe would need to have a cradle of some sort, to catch the falling stalks of grain so that the harvester could lay them aside neatly, without scattering stalks / single grains all over the place and wasting a lot of precious crop yield.

In fact, not only does the Finnish scythe seem to have no cradle (as described at this blog post), but it also doesn't have the second handle seen in the Austrian scythe, making it even less suited for reaping grain. It's quite awe-inspiring to watch the Finnish farmers make hay with it, though. The following video (which can also be seen at the above linked post) was filmed in the early 20th century, and shows Finnish scythes in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OAPRyNWwdM

Instead, harvesting seems to have been done largely by gripping the grain with one hand and cutting it free with a sickle held in the other hand, and the cut sheaves would have been carefully bundled together as the harvester went.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaxubH3Nw7o

[amyhistoria]

Currently there is no point in bolts of cloth in villages since UrW doesn't provide means to make clothes out of them. Once clothes making makes it in bolts of cloth would make a lot of sense.

Still the clothes making is the "common" skill now. I think the general handicraft, or a tailoring skill can be implemented, like the way firemaking and ritual was moved out.

Clothes making can be implemented easily, I think. 

[amyhistoria]

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...

[PALU]

It's a known exploit ("known" in the sense that it's been mentioned at least once on the old board).

Another related exploit of the UrW logic is that anything produced from a single type of source materials can result in products of the higher quality(+1)  if you mix any amount of higher quality into it (if you also have a lower quality involved (-1) the amount of the higher quality input has to be at least marginally larger than the lower one). Thus, one harsh elk skin plus a decent willow grouse leather can yield decent quality cords, provided you select the willow grouse leather first and then "fill it out" with the harsh elk skin. You can even start with <0.1 lbs of the higher quality material. Using hides and leather is the most common case, but you can do the same in other cases as well.

If you've got multiple materials in the recipe the rules are different and not fully identified.

[amyhistoria]

Another related exploit of the UrW logic is...

Yeah, I know this years ago. In 3.50, a cord made from 0.24 lbs decent leather, and 0.26 lbs from harsh ones result in one good cord.