Clothing traders should probably buy cloth and dye materials

[ifoz]

I just realised it was a little strange that clothing traders both sold and bought items of clothing. Buying a few items of clothing makes sense, but not buying any sewing supplies at all seems a bit strange to me given they have things like dyed fabric placed around their huts.
I think it could be a nice change if clothing traders would buy clothing, as well as sewing supplies.

This would give non-tailor players a bit more of an incentive to make some colours of dyed cloth as well, since they could be sold to clothing traders.
Blue and brown dyed cloth would sell for the least due to being easiest to acquire and not needing mordant, while red cloth would sell for the most since it's the rarest to acquire and needs mordant.
(This also doesn't really make sense - red should probably be easy enough to obtain from something like madder root, while purple cloth should be the rare one, but that's not really the point of this suggestion). 

Edited Monday at 08:20 AM by ifoz

[LadyWYT]

12 hours ago, ifoz said:

This also doesn't really make sense - red should probably be easy enough to obtain from something like madder root, while purple cloth should be the rare one

I think this depends heavily on the shades of reds and purples in question. In some cases the price depended on what ingredients were required to get the color in question, as well as how bright the color was as well. Bright colors tended to be a little more demanding on time and resources to get, so they were often more expensive as a result. Probably also worth noting too that color terminology was a little different in medieval times as well, so "red" and "purple" could very well refer to the same color in some cases.

Does all that really matter for a videogame?  Not really, but it's fun to read about.

[Thorfinn]

Shouldn't green be the cheapest? Dry grass is pretty easy to come by.

[ifoz]

On 5/6/2026 at 4:05 AM, Thorfinn said:

Shouldn't green be the cheapest? Dry grass is pretty easy to come by.

While dry grass is the easiest ingredient to acquire for dyes, green cloth still needs to be mordanted first before it can be dyed. Making mordant requires a pulveriser setup, as well as alum, tin or chromite.
Blue and brown on the other hand are the only two colours that don't require mordant at all, so can be dyed prior to having mechanical power.

[Thorfinn]

Oh, ok. Thinking about it, the only time I've played with dyes to any extent at all is a modded server that used tannin (oak) as mordant. I made green to be a ranger-type, then wondered why I bothered. I was rarely playing at times when others were on, so apart from "C" and 3rd person camera, it had no effect at all.

[EDIT]

Makes me wonder, though. Grass stains are pretty colorfast even if you use stain remover before washing. How is it remotely possible you need mordant?

Edited Thursday at 03:21 AM by Thorfinn