Barrel Crafting Adjustments

[AmicaNiiya]

Long time lurker here, recently updated from 1.19 to 1.20 (had to fiddle with NixOS a bit), love all the new additions! Though, as someone enjoying reading up on ancient technologies, there's quite a few items and systems I'd like to be a bit closer to real life; Of course, I know there has to be a balance between realism, what the team can implement and what is enjoyable for the player. 

Something that has always kinda rubbed me the wrong way though is the barrel recipes - bark tanning, dyeing, alcohol brewing, pickling, salt curing, cheese making, composting and mortar mixing. Because of the barrel, these are all functionally locked behind having achieved smithing which feels anachronistic to me as most of these technologies have been known since at least the neolithic (some of them have other limiting factors in-game like salt, mordants or animal husbandry, but that's for another time).

I'd suggest adding a vat made from clay bricks (any type) and with something like beeswax or pitch glue applied inside to make it watertight (ever seen images of the famous tanneries in Fez, Morocco? Kinda like those just the size of one block). The vat should be functionally fixed in place, and if the player tried to move the vat, they'd have to dismantle it, resulting in loosing some of the base materials like with the bloomery or the sailboat. To cover the vat there could be a wooden lid, included in the vat's crafting recipe or crafted separately with some firewood and a stick or something like that. The vat could also be used for general mixing of liquids and items, like limewater or the mortar recipe, and for composting and alcohol fermentation. Just like with the cooking pot, non-food uses should "dirty" the vat (don't want any mordant or compost in your ale, do you?).
For tanning and dyeing, I'd also suggest adjusting the crafting method to be more in line with chrome-tanning, whereas the tannin, mordants and dyes are made by cooking the ingredients in water with a cooking pot. These liquids can then be transferred to the vat for soaking. Maybe add a metal cauldron, so that metallurgy allows for cooking large batches at a time. (also, how does a whole bearkin fit into a 6L cooking pot? just saying)
As for the food stuff, the roadmap already has a point regarding more ways of food preparation. I'd just like to say that small batches of cheese or pickles/cured meats could be made with the cooking pot and crock respectively (crocks in real life are used to pickle and ferment things too), while the barrel would allow for large batches. (and cough - boiling seawater to get sea salt - cough)

One point against making specifically leather tanning available that early on would be the leather backpack, the currently second-best inventory item, as all you need is 8 leather. To that, I'd suggest that the crafting recipe be changed to include nails and strips, maybe even made from at least bronze, to mirror the saddlebag. Same with the sturdy backpack. This would keep the leather backpack securely in the metal age without having to lock all barrel recipes behind metallurgy.

[Thorfinn]

Welcome to the forums, @AmicaNiiya

Check out the mod, Clayworks. It adds a clay barrel (and bucket) with smaller capacity than the wooden versions. Not sure about cooking a log in a cooking pot to get tannin. More realistic, maybe, but that is a pretty small vessel to hold, say, 1/6 of a fully-grown tree. Plus, it would get seriously tedious.

Smaller batches of things like cheese and compost? Sure, why not?

Sea salt, yeah, I guess. I think the idea there is not so much realism as to encourage you to explore the world for halite. (Turns out it's nowhere near as difficult to find as I had thought. I just wasn't very good at prospecting when I reached the conclusion it wasn't worth doing.) I'd suggest adding one of the several seawater-to-salt mods and see how that affects gameplay. My guess is it makes that part of the game way too easy to bother with exploration.

[-Glue-]

I agree with all of this. No notes.
I like the idea of having more primitive versions of tools and crafting areas, which get the job done, but lack the convenience and aesthetics of a more proper setup. Would really sell that feeling of advancing in technology. Going from raw wood and clay, to metal and furbished wood.