tree tapping and more tree materials

[talkingsoup]

I'm sure there's a mod for these, and I apologize if this has been suggested before (I'm new to the game) but I think it would be cool to expand a few things about the existing trees in the game. There are so many trees in this game that have had all kinds of uses through human history beyond just their wood. Being able to craft a simple metal tapper would allow us to collect pine or acacia resin more easily, but we could also tap maple and birch trees for their respective syrups. Having maple syrup in particular would give us access to sugar, which could be used not just for expanded meal recipes but also maybe for brewing, and it would likely be a bit easier to find and access than bees. The peak time of year for maple tapping is midwinter, so this could also provide a source of nutrition in the colder months.

Birch sap might be too much of an overlap, but birch bark could be used as an early alternative to parchment for crude notes that might degrade over time (to balance things). We have oak and walnut trees already; acorns could provide another emergency food source, while walnuts could be used in meals. Kapok could provide a crude, early-game fiber material before we have ready access to flax. I just think it would be cool to get a few more uses out of the tree we already have, so long as it didn't unbalance the game.

[EmperorPingu]

Rubber!

[talkingsoup]

9 hours ago, EmperorPingu said:

Rubber!

Yesss that would be amazing too, we could even turn it into vulcanized rubber. 

[Yggdrasil Burnes]

I agree too, and I believe other posts have talked about this. I would love to have syrups as an alternative to honey, but I think the current concern is that Resin is sort of a high value, high rarity resource, when in reality is just isn't. I think the problem balance wise is that Resin doesn't have enough uses to justify having measurable quantities or being able to cultivate it, and it's important in Mechanical Energy, so I have a few thoughts. 

Taps could have their production be balanced by being attached to the temperature system and producing more resin, more efficiently, but getting to metal, especially Bronze, already produces a lot of Quality of Life additions, and the economic balance to that is simply having enough metal and wanting to spend it on anything but taps. Meanwhile, there's been times where I've only found a single leaky pine in thousands of blocks.

I would also like to suggest a much more primitive tapping, which isn't tapping, but really just tying a bowl to the pine or placing one at the bottom and scraping off it's bark so it bleeds into it over time. This could be used as a much more primitive way to make Resin sources from your resin trees. Wikipedia has a few examples of what I'm talking about. Note how much of the bark they often have to strip to effectively produce resin, often going the entire length of the tree. This could be balanced a few ways.

Not only would it probably eat through tool durability in the Stone Age, but you'd still need to get to clay to make bowls, which probably couldn't hold much at their size and still be incredibly slow to fill. Buckets would be a much more efficient container, but you'd need to get to a metal saw first, and I have thoughts on buckets too. I will say that being able to produce your own resin inherently makes it's rarity null and void, but my suggestion to that would be to make resin less valuable by giving it more uses and needing more of it as well to balance around the resource economy. I have a few concrete suggestions.

• Pine Sap is flammable, and would easily work as an alternative to Fat in making oil lamps, but would require a double boiler to safely liquefy, perhaps using both a crucible and cooking pot at the same time? I will also note that this would require some moss as perpetuating kindling, so a combination of Peat and Pine Sap would be necessary to properly make a Resin Lamp. They're value is in how they burn forever in-game, but this would make Fat less valuable for lighting. I will note that Pine Sap can NOT be used to seal things like crocks, as it hardens and would shatter the crock on unsealing, potentially contaminating the food with clay shards and toxic resin too, nor can it be used to preserve hides. This doesn't make Fat redundant, nor will the following suggestion. 

• Pine Sap is an Antiseptic, and could be mixed with bees wax over a fire in a crucible or cooking pot to simulate a double boiler to create a salve, maybe for poultices, though I will note this would normally require an oil of some kind too to reduce thickness.

• (Incredibly Off Topic, but maybe salves could be another use for Fat, and to append to this, the Juice Press could theoretically be used to create oils by using them on theoretical Olives from Olive Fruit Trees for Olive Oil or Rapeseed Flowers for Canola Oil. You could also field the flowers as your beekeeping flowers, to acquire the wax and oil for the poultices in the same system like we do with Horsetail, but I admit I don't understand how flower cultivation works, or if it a thing in VS. I know plants like Horsetail sometimes just spawn while you're away. Such oils would also obviously have cooking uses, such as adding pure Satiety to an item via frying, perhaps through proper copper or iron Cookware.)

• Pine Resin is a great waterproofing agent, and I think could be added to the recipes for the many wooden roofs. There are alternative materials as it stands for roofing which already justifiably reduce moisture penetration, such as the Thatch, Sod, and Tiled roofs, but the wooden roof recipes as they stand wouldn't prevent moisture leaking, even if I think they look nice on my patios. Consider this for a detail for realism, and while you are at it, consider it for the recipe for Buckets as well. (I will mention on a related note that most barrels do not need resin, they get cut to shape, charred, and pinched closed for a seal.)

• I don't think there's any plans for a disease system, but it also has a good use as soap if sanitation is ever an issue, as do animal fat/oils and lye, but potash is not currently in the game or currently useful in game, and again, I don't think there are any plans for diseases. (Edit: Potash is actually in the game, but only as a fertilizer currently. It can be bought from traders or made with Sylvite and Water in a cooking pot. IRL, it can also be made by soaking plant and wood ashes in water for periods of time, and has multiple primitive uses itself.) 

TL;DR, I absolutely believe that even just letting us tap Pines currently would open up some alternative tech trees and allow you to give resin more uses than it currently has as a result of it's rarity, but that it should take a lot of effort and a lot of time to properly tap and extract resin, at least if doing so primitively. 

Edited January 17 by Yggdrasil Burnes
Correcting information.

[EmperorPingu]

58 minutes ago, Yggdrasil Burnes said:

but my suggestion to that would be to make resin less valuable by giving it more uses

I think you mean here "more valuable" (by giving more uses).

Yes, brilliant work. You're thinking about it the right way (imo) and it's this kind of attention to detail we need in all our updates (imo). Absolutely love the primitive resin tappin/collecting you got there - it enables a method of difficult collection in the early game whilst still providing more efficient methods later on.

Personally, I'm not a fan of infinite light sources (law of conservation anyone?), but the additional functions of various blocks I'm all for.

[Yggdrasil Burnes]

I actually do mean less valuable, considering every single piece of resin is currently worth trekking thousands of blocks for. It might be more useful, but this would put it more at the value of Cooper's Reeds. 

[talkingsoup]

7 hours ago, Yggdrasil Burnes said:

I actually do mean less valuable, considering every single piece of resin is currently worth trekking thousands of blocks for. It might be more useful, but this would put it more at the value of Cooper's Reeds. 

It's funny how what's rare changes depending on your seed in this game. I spawned absolutely surrounded by pine barrens (gravel + pine trees), so I'm drowning in resin. Meanwhile I can't find anything other than granite and peridotite to save my life, so I still have no way to make leather.

I do think it would be nice to have more uses for pine resin, and it's cool you mention earlier forms of tapping as well. One indigenous tale in the northeast is that people learned to tap maple trees by watching squirrels tap the trees using acorns. If the player can get pine resin that's just sitting there on the tree, theoretically we could do the same with maple sap even before the copper age. Metal taps could be a natural progression from the less efficient early methods of just scraping bark with a stone axe or knife or something. Likewise maybe a pine tree could give two sap instead of one if you use a metal tap instead of just collecting it off the surface. There's all kinds of things the devs could do with the progression.

[Monkeylord]

As you all have said, we should be able to tap pines for resin (where I live resin pines (Pinus pinaster) are extremely abundant and are actually tapped for resin) and, i turn, give resin more uses.

Other tree resources that could be really cool would be nuts (higher drop rate for walnuts, edible acorns that require soaking, chestnuts, pinenuts, hazelnuts, pecans, pistaccios...), wild tree fruits (Hackberries,strawberry trees, sloes, crabapples... , bark (obtained from debarking, usefull for tanins, firestartes and even the somewhat edbile bark flour), oak galls to make ink and black/brown pigments, chlorociboria-stained wood, actually black ebony (there are a bunch of ebony species)...the list is actually endless

[Tabbot95]

On 1/14/2026 at 8:26 PM, talkingsoup said:

It's funny how what's rare changes depending on your seed in this game. I spawned absolutely surrounded by pine barrens (gravel + pine trees), so I'm drowning in resin. Meanwhile I can't find anything other than granite and peridotite to save my life, so I still have no way to make leather.

I do think it would be nice to have more uses for pine resin, and it's cool you mention earlier forms of tapping as well. One indigenous tale in the northeast is that people learned to tap maple trees by watching squirrels tap the trees using acorns. If the player can get pine resin that's just sitting there on the tree, theoretically we could do the same with maple sap even before the copper age. Metal taps could be a natural progression from the less efficient early methods of just scraping bark with a stone axe or knife or something. Likewise maybe a pine tree could give two sap instead of one if you use a metal tap instead of just collecting it off the surface. There's all kinds of things the devs could do with the progression.

lye and soap (among other things) would be ideal tanning agents; 

fat itself is too rare at start (though it's plentiful when you've got a decent herd of pigs or down of hares).. having animal butchery bit a little more intense would be good even if it's too much for some; it would allow for things like the specific organs in addition to meat; so like bladders, stomachs and intestines, which can be used for all sorts of things.. brains can be used for tanning, kidneys and livers are often nutritious (though some arctic animals have poisonously rich livers)