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Generic leather

Animal-named leather

[Zucchini]

As far as the feature bloat goes bones are a good way to brach out from this as that does mesh well with what you are doing. Thankfully you'd only need the standard bone_template in addition to possibly strong_bone (for rhinos, elephants, etc), weak_bone (for an avians hollow bones), monstrous_bone (dragon, giant, FB, ect?), and legendary (Titans, FBs?).

That's along the lines of what I was thinking.  It's not nearly as complicated as skins.

I'd say a good rule of thumb to follow may be if a normal person in the word could tell that the leather, fur, or material came from a very specific creature (snakeskin, dragonhide, cheeta fur) then have it be identifiable as such. In that case you just have a special_fur_template that uses the pacific animal name and that should sort out a few problems with only one type. [ . . . ]

Wolf leather wouldn't be recognizable but its fur would be so given what I see you may only need two more templates: special_fur_template for distinctive furs (animal-specific of course); be it patterns, coloration, or properties (unicorn manes/fur could be used in a custom alchemical reaction by other players mods) and the presence of a carapace_vermin_template... That's only 20-21 skins right? And the potential 4 new bone templates it shouldn't be that bad outside of doing the material definitions for each. Iron and copper are good baselines to use in my experience for balancing the materials.

That's a good rule.  I hadn't thought of that possibility -- making the leathers for borderline animals like wolves and bears generic, but making the furs specific.  That sounds really good.

It's still up in the air for me how to deal with leather special enough to be more valuable than average, but not special or unusual enough to be named.  As far as I know, for example, deer leather is generally considered quite good.  I don't really like "rare leather," "exotic leather," etc., as a naming scheme so much, and it seems like "fine leather" may get confused with crafting quality.  Fine fine leather breasplate and so on.

The last resort is to just make such things specific, but if you or anyone else has a good suggestion on that I'm all ears.  Ignore the signature.  <_<

On whether the fur of standard large mundane animals (again, wolves, bears, lions, etc.) should be armorable, I'm on the fence on that one too.  I'm a bit inclined toward making them clothing only (I'm not aware historically of any serious bronze-/iron-age fur armor use), but if it's wanted I could easily tip toward making it armorable.  Suggestions appreciated.

EDIT: Idea.  Thoughts on this as a solution?:

For more valuable leathers (tier 2.5) that are good enough to be better than average but don't fully justify their own specific names on the stock lists, perhaps categorical flavor names like:

Deep Leather (weird underground animals like rutherer, draltha, blind cave bear, perhaps even giant earthworm)
Mountain Leather (black bear, deer, elk, bobcat, etc.)
Savannah Leather (giraffe, gazelle, dingo)

Just a thought that struck me. Probably too far out on a limb, but throwing it out there in case it might be kinda appealing.  Perhaps only one or two of them -- for example, ditch the mountain/savannah but keep deep leather, or whatever.  If it's something that resonates as a good balance, well alrighty-then.  But if the appeal for that sort of scheme is narrow, I probably won't go with it.  Please feel free to slap it down if it doesn't appeal strongly as a really good idea.

I was working on a boiled leather material and quilted cloth (for padded cloth/canvas armor like they had in medieval times) and it took a few tweaks to get it all working right. Mainly it's just using a quick way to run tests to make sure the aftermath looks right.

Actually, I was thinking about this too, along with studded leather (as has been done in a couple mods).  It seems it would easily double the leather population on the stock lists (rigid rhino hide, rigid ice wolf leather, all the way down), which is not so appealing.  How did you go about it?

It looks good, though you may want to add a vermin_chitin_template to round everything out.  [ . . . ]
--edit: didn't see the basic carapace template... but I know crabs and lobsters have much tougher carapaces than your average beetle or spider. So the 4th carapace template still may fit.

Another thing I was torn on.  Would it be easier to just vary the standard nontannable carapace on crustaceans to give it better stats?  Since it's nontannable, I was thinking that it could be easier solved that way.

Aaand thanks again for the in-depth feedback.  Much appreciated.

[Black_Legion]

It's still up in the air for me how to deal with leather special enough to be more valuable than average, but not special or unusual enough to be named.  As far as I know, for example, deer leather is generally considered quite good.  I don't really like "rare leather," "exotic leather," etc., as a naming scheme so much, and it seems like "fine leather" may get confused with crafting quality.  Fine fine leather breasplate and so on.

The last resort is to just make such things specific, but if you or anyone else has a good suggestion on that I'm all ears.  Ignore the signature.  <_<

On whether the fur of standard large mundane animals (again, wolves, bears, lions, etc.) should be armorable, I'm on the fence on that one too.  I'm a bit inclined toward making them clothing only (I'm not aware historically of any serious bronze-/iron-age fur armor use), but if it's wanted I could easily tip toward making it armorable.  Suggestions appreciated.

EDIT: Idea.  Thoughts on this as a solution?:

For more valuable leathers (tier 2.5) that are good enough to be better than average but don't fully justify their own specific names on the stock lists, perhaps categorical flavor names like:

Deep Leather (weird underground animals like rutherer, draltha, blind cave bear, perhaps even giant earthworm)
Mountain Leather (black bear, deer, elk, bobcat, etc.)
Savannah Leather (giraffe, gazelle, dingo)

Just a thought that struck me. Probably too far out on a limb, but throwing it out there in case it might be kinda appealing.  Perhaps only one or two of them -- for example, ditch the mountain/savannah but keep deep leather, or whatever.  If it's something that resonates as a good balance, well alrighty-then.  But if the appeal for that sort of scheme is narrow, I probably won't go with it.  Please feel free to slap it down if it doesn't appeal strongly as a really good idea.

I think you may be falling in the trap you trying to avoid, too many leather types. Essentially most deep creatures are like the mundane creatures. Their leather would be leather or hide depending on the creature. The only creature I can think of having 'distinctive' leather would be the crundle... which is infamous for obvious reasons but it's a small creature (with normal style leather) so using a simple template like skin_distinctive_template with a tier 2 strength, and the animal-specific attribute. That should be good enough for any creatures with exceptionally fine leather that is really distinctive (pond grabber, giant toads, and crundles come to find due to their skin and general descriptions). Having mountain leather, savanna ect seems like you fell back into the too specific for leather. Think of if a peasant saw this leather at a market... How would he know its mountain leather? For dragons, snakes, pond grabbers, they possibly could so it could justify them having a special leather. To make it more valuable just add the material multiplier tag in their definition. That should be fine.

As far as special fur you could have 3 tiers:
skin_fur_special_template: tier 1, animal-specific. This would be used by wolves, cheeta, rabbit ect.
skin_fur_tough_template: tier 2, animal-specific. Thick, matted or tough fur (could be named: 'pelts'). This would be used by trolls, cavern critters, or more monstrous (not-necessarily mundane) above ground creatures.
skin_fur_beast_template: tier 3, animal-specific. Another thing that could be named 'pelt' to differentiate it from normal furs. This I would apply to things like griffins, FBs, Titans, or other mythical furred creatures.

Think about those three additional furs and see if they might belong. After that I would say lock the amount of leathers you have. It starting to move to more specific leathers for everything which is what you wanted to avoid in the first place. With the current mix we have a good balance that should both simplify and add more diversity.

Actually, I was thinking about this too, along with studded leather (as has been done in a couple mods).  It seems it would easily double the leather population on the stock lists (rigid rhino hide, rigid ice wolf leather, all the way down), which is not so appealing.  How did you go about it?

With my research I found that studded leather actually didn't exist as far as armor. Mostly they would layer scales or pieces of metal and produces scalemail instead. The way I produced boiled (or cured leather) is to take a blob of wax or oil at a kitchen, an unit of any leather and produce a unit of boiled leather. It doesn't have a name or other reaction it just produces a unit of leather with the BOILED_LEATHER_TEMPLATE.

Research I did indicated historical versions felt much like wood and would crack or crumble instead of being cut. As such I took the existing wood and leather materials and went from there. I'm still tweaking it though but it's been straight forward. Just had to make a dummy creature to allow for embarking. Again just having 'boiled leather' should be fine. The process darkens and hardens the leather (as well as shrinking it to around 7/8s to 3/4s its size... Giving it different properties and making it more or less supple, couldn't map this accurately in the existing reaction framework so I didn't worry about it). I like it because it now gives more incentive to use bees and the oil presses and allows for alternative, and useful (you'll have surprisingly more survivors against those metal armored goblin ambushes than you though... Most with survivable injuries where they will [eventually] recover... Mostly) armor.

Another thing I was torn on.  Would it be easier to just vary the standard nontannable carapace on crustaceans to give it better stats?  Since it's nontannable, I was thinking that it could be easier solved that

You could do that but for things like cavern critters with shells and such I would have that tough_carapace template. With the above materials it keeps the caverns dangerous to explore - you'll need toughened materials like sharpened beast bones and hardened leather armor (if you didn't have metal available). This makes the caverns more fearsome as even an iron armored warrior dwarf may not be enough to kill that rutherer. It encourages strategic thinking and less 'everything in that cavern area must, absolutely MUST, die... now'. You might be hesitant to deal with creature now that its teeth, bones, and hide can't necessarily be completely owned by your copper-iron bound militia with their shiny axes. That's just my preference though.

The only other thing I could think of after all the skins and bones would be fangs. 3 versions normal, tough, and mythical for beasts and such should be sufficient. Then you may want to relax and after start on making those materials. I could provide you with the boiled leather reactions and materials if you wish to use in your mod. Good luck!

[Grimlocke]

Looks like this is going somewhere, good.

For chitin I can recommend leaving it non-tannable. Its not a flexible material, unsuitable for most clothing items. Vermin-size creature chitin isnt realy usable for anything, largers ones could be used for scaled/lamellar/whatnot armors.

A few problems I predict: Using generic scale, fur and chitin materials will fail to carry over whatever color the creature had.
FB fur may prove annoying to add. I have in the past tried this using the hair body detail plan, but only found it that birds also use this, causing weird bird fur.

I should also note that for instance SKIN_STRONG_TEMPLATE and SKIN_TOUGH_TEMPLATE do not require a seperate reaction class unless you plan on changing the reaction itself for the one or the other. You can set a seperate product for each material, even when they share a reaction class.

EDIT: Also, on the subject of quilted and cured leather armors, I have recentely managed to make funtioning padded armor without needed a new material (saving me the hassle of forcing civs to use it properly) by simply increasing the mass of the armor like so:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[ITEM_ARMOR:ITEM_ARMOR_GAMBESON]
[NAME:gambeson:gambesons]
[ARMORLEVEL:1]
[UBSTEP:MAX]
[LBSTEP:1]
[LAYER:ARMOR]
[COVERAGE:800]
[LAYER_SIZE:16]
[LAYER_PERMIT:2]
[MATERIAL_SIZE:12]
[SOFT]

As for cured leather, I wonder if you found a way keep civs from using it for soft clothing items. I have been thinking about adding that myself but havnt yet came up with a way to restrict it to the right armors (beside making it a metal, or a fortress mode only thing).

[Black_Legion]

Carrying over the color of the creature wouldn't matter as you assign it's color when you create the creature. An example would be designating th snake had red scales. The current, vanilla, implementation is that all leather is brown and shows up as brown in game. Regardless if it came from a wombat, dragon, goblin, or other creature. Essentially this is truthful as when the tanning process occurs the skin/hide looses most of its original color and becomes, due to the ammoniac acid and other chemicals, varying degrees of brown. So this wouldn't be a concern, plus it adds some unneeded complexity. Until we get a [GET_COLOR_FROM_REAGENT:X] tag it's better just to not preserve the color outside special materials like dragon skin which may be green, red, purple, whatever the tanning process might do to it. Though that's left up to Zucchini. He/She has a lot on their plate.

Hidden as its a derail for the leather and templates discussion:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The quilted armor didn't cause me a problem as I gave it to a plant that doesn't grow and it has decent properties. Of course it can be made into bags and such but this is normal and understandable. A peasant or commoner might want a canvas cloak (keeps out the rain) or a heavy winter jacket which the gambeson (padded jack/coat) would be. It just might protect from arrows and such as a pleasant bonus.

You can keep cigs from using certain materials for things by remove item_soft, scaled, and such tags. Essentially it's just a material they produce and it can't be used for anything. Then you add reactions at the appropriate buildings and have them take that material and produce an item/equipment made of that type. This doesn't allow to embark with boiled leather boots but does allow you to e,bark with a bin of boiled leather, for you to turn into boots, bags, armor, or whatever.

I don't really like the idea of restricting the alternative armor materials to just armor as boiled leather was used for book covers, sturdy boots, craft goods, ect. It's fun to see what players come up with sometimes given the materials at hand.

[Grimlocke]

Carrying over the color of the creature wouldn't matter as you assign it's color when you create the creature. An example would be designating th snake had red scales. The current, vanilla, implementation is that all leather is brown and shows up as brown in game. Regardless if it came from a wombat, dragon, goblin, or other creature. Essentially this is truthful as when the tanning process occurs the skin/hide looses most of its original color and becomes, due to the ammoniac acid and other chemicals, varying degrees of brown. So this wouldn't be a concern, plus it adds some unneeded complexity. Until we get a [GET_COLOR_FROM_REAGENT:X] tag it's better just to not preserve the color outside special materials like dragon skin which may be green, red, purple, whatever the tanning process might do to it. Though that's left up to Zucchini. He/She has a lot on their plate.

Hidden as its a derail for the leather and templates discussion:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The quilted armor didn't cause me a problem as I gave it to a plant that doesn't grow and it has decent properties. Of course it can be made into bags and such but this is normal and understandable. A peasant or commoner might want a canvas cloak (keeps out the rain) or a heavy winter jacket which the gambeson (padded jack/coat) would be. It just might protect from arrows and such as a pleasant bonus.

You can keep cigs from using certain materials for things by remove item_soft, scaled, and such tags. Essentially it's just a material they produce and it can't be used for anything. Then you add reactions at the appropriate buildings and have them take that material and produce an item/equipment made of that type. This doesn't allow to embark with boiled leather boots but does allow you to e,bark with a bin of boiled leather, for you to turn into boots, bags, armor, or whatever.

I don't really like the idea of restricting the alternative armor materials to just armor as boiled leather was used for book covers, sturdy boots, craft goods, ect. It's fun to see what players come up with sometimes given the materials at hand.

Thats why I specificaly listed fur and chitin, those materials should realisticaly not change color. Brown ice wolf fur for instance wouldnt be quite as interesting. Making a specific fur for each not-brown animal would be more specific than non-specific, and making seperate template for each color would also be kinda missing the point.

Especialy in the case of fur it is quite recognisable what animal in came from, allmost every animal has a different texture, pattern, color and length of fur. It may be better to simply limir the number of creatures with fur, and give all of them unique names (safe perhaps varients like 'lion, giant lion, lion man'. You could refer the varient to whatever material the parent creature uses.)

Spoiler: Derail: (click to show/hide)

Guess you went with the fortress mode only method after all. Well it does at least prevent cured leather socks and like, but I had hoped to see these things on invading enemies and adventurer mode characters.

[Zucchini]

I think you may be falling in the trap you trying to avoid, too many leather types.

Not necessarily.  After all, these would be 3 or 4 additional types of standard generic leather that account for a number of creatures that might otherwise either be (a) folded into plain generic or (b) each kept as a specifically-named sort of leather. They would do it without that list bloat, while still allowing for gradations of value among generic leathers.  Really, just a different name scheme for the the generic "rare" and "exotic" leather types seen in other mods.

Because, as someone noted, having all, value-2 leathers (elk, bobcat, black bear, etc.) folded into generic leather abandons that whole layer of distinction represented by MULTIPLY_VALUE:2, which is not really the goal so much as eliminating redundant overdistinction.

That's the idea behind it, anyway.

Of course, the SKIN_TOUGH/SKIN_DISTINCTIVE route -- in other words, just picking the most distinctive animals and making them GMFR leathers -- is definitely a pretty natural solution. I can see the mountain leather/deep leather/etc. route being meh-unappealing, but I don't see it proliferating where it should be cleaning up.  It still seems to retain both simplicity (3 additional types of leather instead of 20) and value-granularity (allowing value 2 and 3 generic leathers).  (Although I'm fuzzy-headed at the moment, so I might not be thinking it through...)

Having mountain leather, savanna ect seems like you fell back into the too specific for leather. Think of if a peasant saw this leather at a market... How would he know its mountain leather?

I see what you're saying.  That argument cuts quite a bit further than that, though, and favors even broader genericization, though, because the other side of that coin is... how would any but the most visually-distinctive leathers be distinguishable to your average peasant?  As you say, special visually-obvious ones (ostrich, alligator, crundle, etc.) would, but deer, bear, wolf, etc. probably wouldn't.  Even lion/tiger leather, since the fur would be removed and the leather made to look like other types (unless there's some visual distinction I'm unaware of).

So...  that criterion would essentially dismiss the bulk of the value 2-3 leathers as indistinguishable from generic, and eliminate their reason to be specifically-named at all. 

If I'm not mistaken, wouldn't creating differing ANIMAL, ANIMAL_VAL2, ANIMAL_VAL3 creatures with multipliers just do the same without visually-noticeable name change?  It's either populating the stocks list with additional leathers at the material template level, or secondarily at the creature variation level, but either way it's more leather types on the stocks list, if I am understanding correctly.

This method, though, I'm kind of wanting to avoid.  If at all possible, I want to create only one spoof [CREATURE:ANIMAL] on the creatures list because I really hate seeing false entries on dwarves' preferences -- just me, really, but that spoils it for me.  So I want to keep it stastically extremely unlikely that Urist is going to "like  for its   ".  (Or "like tough for its  .")

For dragons, snakes, pond grabbers, they possibly could so it could justify them having a special leather. To make it more valuable just add the material multiplier tag in their definition. That should be fine.

Right.  Ones that don't use the generic leather material reaction products would be fine, since the value multiplier would do everything we need done.  Again, if I'm understanding everything correctly.

As far as special fur you could have 3 tiers:
skin_fur_special_template: tier 1, animal-specific. This would be used by wolves, cheeta, rabbit ect.
skin_fur_tough_template: tier 2, animal-specific. Thick, matted or tough fur (could be named: 'pelts'). This would be used by trolls, cavern critters, or more monstrous (not-necessarily mundane) above ground creatures.
skin_fur_beast_template: tier 3, animal-specific. Another thing that could be named 'pelt' to differentiate it from normal furs. This I would apply to things like griffins, FBs, Titans, or other mythical furred creatures.

The third category seems a little messy, but the other two are close to what I have in mind.

With my research I found that studded leather actually didn't exist as far as armor. Mostly they would layer scales or pieces of metal and produces scalemail instead.

Huh.  I had no idea.  I always thought it seemed weird.  To hell with studded leather then!  But maybe brigandine...  anyway, that's another matter.

The way I produced boiled (or cured leather) is to take a blob of wax or oil at a kitchen, an unit of any leather and produce a unit of boiled leather. It doesn't have a name or other reaction it just produces a unit of leather with the BOILED_LEATHER_TEMPLATE. . . .

Cool!  Sounds interesting.  Yeah, I think perhaps just generic boiled leather might be the best way of it.

Incidentally, my quick searching fit your thing about studded leather inspired took me to some links that suggested that even boiled wax-leather might not have been how they did it, although it does make wax useful. One guy seems to suggest that it might have been, literally, just water-boiled leather (done at certain temperature), and that wax-boiled leather might have made it less resistant to shearing damage.  The water-boiled leather would be more resistant, but more brittle, requiring fairly frequent replacement of lamellae.

You could do that but for things like cavern critters with shells and such I would have that tough_carapace template. With the above materials it keeps the caverns dangerous to explore [ . . . ]

I like it better that way, myself.  I'm currently working on tweaking physical characteristic values for the different materials, so I'll have a much better idea of how to distribute them once I get that done.

(I'm currently going through Arkhometha's material properties research, implementing them, and also doing some of my own tweaks.  Which was on the drawing board, not mission creep, in this case.  :p)

The only other thing I could think of after all the skins and bones would be fangs. 3 versions normal, tough, and mythical for beasts and such should be sufficient.

That does make sense.  They should definitely be more competitive.

I could provide you with the boiled leather reactions and materials if you wish to use in your mod. Good luck!

Sure...  I'd like to see them.  Thanks again for the in-depth feedback!  I should have something to show pretty soon.


EDIT: Argh, I hate accidentally clicking save.

[Zucchini]

Looks like this is going somewhere, good.

Thanks!

For chitin I can recommend leaving it non-tannable. Its not a flexible material, unsuitable for most clothing items. Vermin-size creature chitin isnt realy usable for anything, largers ones could be used for scaled/lamellar/whatnot armors.

That's my sense too.

A few problems I predict: Using generic scale, fur and chitin materials will fail to carry over whatever color the creature had.

I hadn't thought of color yet.  I'm not quite sure I'm going to have furs be generic at all, but if it end up being generic at all, I think it would be appropriate (and no more in-game complexifying than before) to make FUR_GENERIC_WHITE, FUR_GENERIC_BROWN, etc.  But as it stands right now I'm thinking furs are better specific.

FB fur may prove annoying to add. I have in the past tried this using the hair body detail plan, but only found it that birds also use this, causing weird bird fur.

Yikes.  Yeah, and I'm still in fairly early stages of learning, too.

I should also note that for instance SKIN_STRONG_TEMPLATE and SKIN_TOUGH_TEMPLATE do not require a seperate reaction class unless you plan on changing the reaction itself for the one or the other. You can set a seperate product for each material, even when they share a reaction class.

Yep, that's what I've been doing.  I'm trying to be very conservative about reaction classes, only making new ones where there is a genuine meaningful distinction.

EDIT: Also, on the subject of quilted and cured leather armors, I have recentely managed to make funtioning padded armor without needed a new material [ . . . ]

Nice!  I wasn't aware of the trickiness of non-player civs using it as clothing, so I now know to watch out for that...

[Black_Legion]

Alright I see where you are going with the other leather types. Seems good to me now. Guess I was thinking in a bit of a skewed manner.

I'm thinking the generic peasant recognizing different leather may be a bit of stretch. We may want to use an experience adventurer as the 'identifier'. Assuming they've been around a bit (and survived) they should have some experience and be able to pick out the difference between snakeskin and dragonhide r other such scenarios. If the leather is distinctive enough to explain in simple terms to a peasant I think it may work:
Example:

"Have a hammer mate? See to tell if its dragonhide, it turns a bit reddish from the tanning process and if you hit it like *this* it should make that little gong noise... See? That other stuff in you pack is some cheap scale from some creature dyed to look like dragonkin. You may want to go have a... chat with the shopkeeper. Did I mention I'm currently free of work and my services go at a very reasonable 15 gold gilders a day?"

The adventurer isn't a master of beasts but they know their way around a few creatures. If you can fit it into a narrative like this that may help you figure out which leather/fur/skin/carapace the critter needs. Of course what dragonhide/scale and things are up to you.

I read the same water-boiled article and that's where I got a lot of my info as well as around the web. I wanted to use wax or oil (you can use either one in the reaction) because it gives those things some use. I'm still tweaking the boiled leather material so its useful, mostly accurate historically, while not replacing metal armor. It's a stopgap for militia or metal barren forts until the goblinite or trade starts rolling in. I'll provide the boiled leather material tomorrow but I'm still not satisfied with it just yet. I need to run a few more 50 1x1 copper v b. leather, iron v. b. leather, and leather v. b. leather tests till I get it to be close enough. I wish I could just save the set up and then run tests from there. It takes about 15 minutes to set up by hand... mind its a bit mind numbing. Aftermath a fun to read through though.

Alternative Armor spoiler:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I was actually working on an alternative armor mousing reinforced cloth and boiled leather and I ended up making brigandines. Essentially you take a padded jack(gambeson) or padded leggings (the only other armor piece is a padded cap for the cloth armor tier) made from reinforced cloth and add a bar of armor grade metal and get a brigandine (coat of plates w/sleeves)or brigandine (splintmail) leggings if you used the padded leggings. My logic is it splits the bar into plates and sews this into the existing armor(I'm debating if I need to make metal plates a tool... I already have reactions splitting a Dwarven mechanism into cogs to make mechanized or heavy crossbows). It's balanced out as the brigandines have around 78-85 (still tweaking) coverage representing the gaps and spaces in coverage of the plates for movement or what-not. True metal armor has 95-98 coverage. I'm thinking I may rename the reinforced cloth to canvas as it is produced by compressing 3 normal units of any cloth into a single unit. Plus it allows me to branch out to books and allows the cloth reactions and leather to be useful in another way

Can't wait to see what your progress looks like. Should be pretty interesting how it turns out.

-- Edit: Also be warned on the fact that Grimlocke's gambeson has 800 coverage. So in game terms it covers 800% of the wearers body part it's mapped too... Which appears to be everything. This may have the right behavior (I've never tested anything like that armor configuration) but it may end up being wonky as well. I think the game doesn't really recognize anything past 100% coverage, but again I haven't tested it. It seems silly but if it works that is indeed quite clever.

If you want a civ to have access to multiple types of armor for a body part (like the common problem: access to low boots but no high boots) add the FORCED token instead of COMMON and they will have access to both instead of one overwriting the other. Think of it as a civ has only so many slots for equipment types and after the first [SHAPED] torso item they look long and hard to see if they need another one (by default they say no with the forced token they don't have a say, they will use it and anything else you designated even if there is a conflict).

[Grimlocke]

Increasing coverage past 100 does not increase the actual surface of bodyparts covered. It just increases the mass of the armor. Since the game calculates an armors strength and thickness by its mass its a useful way of increasing protection without mucking up the layering system, silly as it might be 

From what I know armor mass is muplilied by coverage, upstep+ubstep+lbstep (1.25 for each), layer size, and the size of whatever creature part the armor is attached to. Only the last one does not seem to influence the the actual protection the armor gives (so thankfully gauntlets dont have to weigh as much as plate armor to have the same protection).

I tested that gambeson fairly extensively. It protects all the parts it should, none that it should protect and can stop an iron sword (though heavier or blunt force weapons still make mincemeat of it). A full set of padded armor isnt as good as iron armor, but certainly enough to be worthwhile and should give the clothing industry some real usefullness.

[Zucchini]

Alright I see where you are going with the other leather types. Seems good to me now. Guess I was thinking in a bit of a skewed manner.

Hehe, no worries.  I get all turned around about 4 times a day on this stuff. You don't realize it until you get into it how many different ways there are to do something thing, and then you end up getting into the methodology for method B while you were actually building around doing method A.  Bleh!

I'm thinking the generic peasant recognizing different leather may be a bit of stretch. We may want to use an experience adventurer as the 'identifier'. [ . . . ] If you can fit it into a narrative like this that may help you figure out which leather/fur/skin/carapace the critter needs. Of course what dragonhide/scale and things are up to you.

That makes sense. A sort of common-sense check to keep it from getting too implausible.

I wanted to use wax or oil (you can use either one in the reaction) because it gives those things some use.

I've also been expanding the library/training systems I've seen (mainly based on Civilization Forge's) as part of the same overall project, so if one was to use that, there would definitely be a fairly significant use/need for wax (alchemical jar seals and candles for studying/manuscript-writing reactions).

I was actually working on an alternative armor mousing reinforced cloth and boiled leather and I ended up making brigandines. [ . . . ]Plus it allows me to branch out to books and allows the cloth reactions and leather to be useful in another way

Definitely sounds interesting. I think I'd like to see brigandine on the humans.

If you want a civ to have access to multiple types of armor for a body part (like the common problem: access to low boots but no high boots) add the FORCED token instead of COMMON and they will have access to both instead of one overwriting the other.

Hopefully I'll remember that tip when doing the civ permissions!


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Alright, I have Arkhometha's thermal and density values incorporated, along with my own research, so up next is coming up with decent material properties for all the skins, leathers, bones, and teeth.  If anyone's interested in taking a look, here is a rough documentation of it, and here is the material_template_default (minus skin, leather, chitin, scale, and bone entries, which are moved to a separate file).  I'll probably be ready in a week or two to put up a formal thread, but I want to be careful about Big Promises and all that.

And I'll definitely appreciate any guidance on physics values for armor and skin types anyone wants to throw out.


EDIT: Preview of the library system too here.  I should note explicitly and clearly that this WIP stuff probably does not attribute sufficiently -- I lean very heavily on Mephansteras's, Arkhometha's, and Deon's work.  And the library system is *quite* complicated...  And there are probably *huge* mistakes... and and and...  :p