Salem

The goal is encourage players to specialize their characters in a limited number of professions, thus achieving greater results in those, and then trade with each other.

As it stands, evey kind of profession has its own tools and buildings and the specific buildings are unlocked by the profession specific skills themselves. So to speak, everyone is a carpenter when it comes to the buildings specific to his trade but not for the buildings he hasn't unlocked.

But what if carpentry was a profession of its own?

Every character would retain some very basic construction skill allowing him to set up the basics, but avanced stuff would have to be built by a carpenter...

Problem is you don't want a carpenter to actually visit your base to place buildings.

A possible solution could be: Swedish Carpentry
The skilled carpenter of Swedish tradition would build the requested furniture in his laboratory and then deconstruct it into, possibly multiple, packages (and an Assembly Instructions sheet) that he can then ship to the market for trade.

The packages could be all the same item being the assembly instructions the one that determine what type of building the buyer will assemble at home.
Proficiency in Hammer and Nails could determine the time needed to assemble the piece, so that buyers are still encouraged to put some effort in it rather than just silver. It could also be made so that you have a chance of damaging some materials so you have to buy some "spare parts", additional packages, to finish the building. (Optionally also the witch curse: The Extra Screw)

It's a nice ikea idea, isn't it?

Or you could have carpenters produce only some components required by some buildings. As in everyone can make those components, but carpenters can make better.
But it stands in opposition to the announcement that devs plan to get rid of purity on objects / buildings. But they still might introduce something different, like current difficulty on cloths.

I LOVE THE SWEDISH CARPENTRY IDEA! the equivalent of carpentry right now is turning dry boards into planed boards, as i see it... there could be more to it, and i would love if there were more decorative items or buildable things... i really want a bed.

thais wrote:I LOVE THE SWEDISH CARPENTRY IDEA! the equivalent of carpentry right now is turning dry boards into planed boards, as i see it... there could be more to it, and i would love if there were more decorative items or buildable things... i really want a bed.

Yea it's a pitty artifacts for carpentry no longer support regular board making. It'd be nice if the carpenter would get something more to do.

The higher end buildings could require some fancy woodwork for that swedish carpentry idea.

We already have that kind of 'pre-fabrication' in the Board making process, the Boards go through several upgrades from Fresh -> Dry -> Planned -> Oiled and because these upgrades are so difficult they boards gain a lot of value and end users buy the boards to make what they want. I see this a good way to make Carpenters viable market participants alongside other crafters who can bring their metal workers who get to turn out massive quantities of very marketable nails.

But the thing that seem to me to be the biggest reason it is boring to be a Carpenter is that their are no real choices to make when making Boards, their is always only one thing to DO at any point in the process and only one step is even affected by your key Proficiency, it's a rail-road and you just keep milling the wood until you sell it. Contrast that with Farming where we have multiple permanent fields on the attributes and a whole little mini-game around upping your fields to produce tier 3 crops, lots of choices involved, what kind of inputs to chose, what kind of seeds to plant, where to plant them etc etc.

If Carpentry was more like this even if it was just to make boards it would make carpentry a lot more interesting, some possibilities

* Wood type matters - we have 8 types of trees, lets use that diversity to add some meaningful spice to the carpenter, selecting the 'right' kind of wood was a big part of Carpentry and selecting inputs is a big part of the fun of crafting. This is not to say that every piece of wood forever has 'Birch' or 'Elm' in front of it's name, when a log is processed the resulting raw lumber could carry attributes like 'hard/soft', 'flexible/stiff' which are more or less likely to result from certain trees and which have meaningful impacts on later crafting steps, and the ultimate product like boards might not need any attributes.

* Other forms of lumber - some alternatives to boards so the carpenters is choosing which kinds of outputs to produce and the carpenter is thus trying to create an optimum match between variable inputs and variable outputs. Some options include 'hoops' for barrels and canoes, 'timbers' and 'shingles' for houses. Some items are more risky to make some less so. Recipes simply substitute these new forms in place of boards.

* Different responses to Defects in wood - wood already develops flaws like moldy and warped boards, but the only solution is like Sisyphus pushing that boulder is to just plane the board and restart. Giving different responses with different risk/rewards, say for example you have a warped timber, do you try to straiten it and possibly crack it or split it into boards and be guaranteed something.

* More sustained lumber demand - outside of some curios and foods that take some wood inputs no one consumes lumber on an ongoing basis, it's only used to create things which are then (typically) inside claims and never decay. No one wants decay over TIME but perhaps decay with usage could provide a bit of a market for wood tools.

ImpalerWrG wrote:* More sustained lumber demand - outside of some curios and foods that take some wood inputs no one consumes lumber on an ongoing basis, it's only used to create things which are then (typically) inside claims and never decay. No one wants decay over TIME but perhaps decay with usage could provide a bit of a market for wood tools.

Because characters can raise their humours to make raiding easier and the only way to counter that is by building more walls and braziers there is a constant need for more boards to build more walls.