Madder root for midgame red dye

[ifoz]

Relating to my previous suggestion about how I thought clothing traders should also purchase dyed cloth, I think madder root would make a lot of sense as an addition to the game.

Madder root was used in the real life middle ages as a red dye. Currently, the only way we can get red dye in the game is through finding cinnabar, which is both rare and toxic.
Red should probably be a much more common colour of dye than it is currently ingame, with purple cloth becoming the rare/luxury colour in its stead.

Irl, madder root can ground up and then dissolved in sulphuric acid (both things we could do ingame, with the quern and sulphuric acid), which leaves behind the red dye that can then be used to colour cloth.
This still does need a mordant, so it would be more of a midgame dye, but would be more reliable than finding cinnabar.

Edited 18 hours ago by ifoz

[MKMoose]

The thing with cinnabar is that it's not even really a dye, because it's an insoluble mineral. Technically, cinnabar was used for pigments, primarily in art, lacquerware, and cosmetics, but it's generally not useful for dyeing leather, cloth and stuff, because it doesn't bind in the way that dyes do.

Red dye was primarily obtained from madder (brick red, usually more common, lower-quality and lower-class) and insects like kermes and cochineal (carmine and crimson red respectively, more luxurious generally, although common in some regions as well). Beetroot could also be used, but it tends to be more violet or pink.

Similar issues can be found with a few other in-game dyes as well. Though the current dye sources are arguably a matter of balance as well, so there's a chance that some clothing recipes would have to be changed if we were to preserve their balance.

[ifoz]

14 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Similar issues can be found with a few other in-game dyes as well. Though the current dye sources are arguably a matter of balance as well, so there's a chance that some clothing recipes would have to be changed if we were to preserve their balance.

The only real ones I can think of that would become imbalanced would potentially be the arctic hunter set - since it's intended as a lategame fur set upgrade that is on par with Tailor's warm sets. Reindeer herder would also become cheaper, but since Tailor now has other sets that use cheaper cloths (brown, blue, white) and are just as warm, that's less of a concern.
Still, since mechanical power is needed to make mordant in the first place, I think even if the arctic hunter set was put more firmly into the midgame through being more accessible due to madder, it'd still be gated well enough to keep fur relevant through the earlier parts of the game.

Tailor got a bit of a buff in 1.22 with their new winter sets, since stuff like embroidered fur and arctic fisher are just as warm as reindeer herder/arctic hunter, but only require brown and blue cloth. The shirts are the exception, with the embroidered fur shirt needing white (borax-dyed) cloth, and the arctic fisher shirt needing red cloth.
Still, a tailor with only linen, pelts, woad and tannin can still get a set comparable to reindeer herder/arctic hunter.

Edited 17 hours ago by ifoz

[Emeal]

I want arsenic green, I dont care if it will make me faint.

[Asatar]

Its honestly insane that red dye is locked behind a rare ore. Like this would be the perfect excuse to include beets as a crop or madders a flower. The poor romans and chinese would need a countries worth of miners and cinnabar to meet their red dye needs

[DeanF]

Ooooh, nice.  Madder- delightfully ancient.  I approve.
Isn't madder the reason that British uniforms were red?  It was available and cheap?  Or am I thinking of something else?

Also, like cinnabar, I'm pretty sure that lapis was used as a pigment in paints, not as a dye for cloth, wasn't it?

Edited 10 hours ago by DeanF

[LadyWYT]

16 minutes ago, DeanF said:

Isn't madder the reason that British uniforms were red?  It was available and cheap?

Partly. It makes sense that if you need to make a lot of something, you want to it to be both cheap and have enough supply that you can mass-produce it, and you'd also want it to be something you can produce domestically in the event of a blockade. That being said, at this time history, standing out on the battlefield was incredibly important, as that made it easy to tell which side was which. So having a bright red coat as part of the uniform makes a lot of sense as well.