[ Suggestion ] Flags and Banners

[Creative Principle]

Edited March 31 by Pika

[Prin]

Hopefully there will come an option to customise and/or create textiles. Should something along those lines becomes available, it wouldn't be hard to add a micro-colouring feature that would allow for things like customised banners. 

[Creative Principle]

I wonder if it could work in the way the clay making system works but with your own array of colors. It would also be interesting if there could be a way to mass produce these designs too so it's not too tedious. 

[Prin]

I think the gathering of materials to make the dyes would be the most tedious. Once you have those, the actual dying process isn't so bad. With a brush and frame, someone can paint designs onto silk with limited bleeding in the real world, though the colours are - IMHO - arguably more muted in that process.

The biggest thing is considering the purpose for making things in bulk quantities - perhaps for a big payout from traders, but I feel like the potential for it to come up as rarer for that reason. Home customisation would be another good reason, not least for the banners, but for things like warmer bedding and curtains to keep your home warmer/cooler depending on the time of the year. Also, ways of cheaply making storage containers for bulk items - bags for grain, for example. Some of these wouldn't necessarily need to be dyed, but we could also look at the dying process as another kind of lock system; something coloured with a player's "mark", for example, could be restricted in such a way that no one who isn't said player can move it.

[Hal13]

Potentially you'd have to dye some kind of twine and use that to craft stuff?

Then maybe, comparable to the helvehammer, weaving could be automated.

I'm always in for more automation of tedious processes. I'd love to see simple production lines later on...

[Prin]

16 minutes ago, Hal13 said:

Potentially you'd have to dye some kind of twine and use that to craft stuff?

Then maybe, comparable to the helvehammer, weaving could be automated.

I'm always in for more automation of tedious processes. I'd love to see simple production lines later on...

For most textile applications, you're right, but there's still the odd one that works a bit more like painting on a canvas, silk screening only with dyes, if you will.

Automation of weaving was, in terms of European history, something that happened in the first industrial revolution - so circa 1700-1800s, to be generous. Before that, looms were basically people-powered, and was one of the few industries that was largely operated by women. Very literally, before the industrial age, someone could spend hours in front of a loom passing a shuttle back and forth and only have a couple of inches of progress by the end of the day. Setting one of these more advanced looms up was not an easy business, either; just running the threads through the loom itself to get it ready to use took hours. It literally came down to running several metres/yards of thread through each hole and then wrapping these neatly around a dowel that made it reasonable - it meant that they could set one up and have it in operation for weeks before they would run out of weaving space. Manual looms have been around for almost forever, some of the oldest style looms dated back to something like 500-600 BC and were basically just a standing wood frame with strings running top to bottom that people wove bits of fibre between. Arguably, these would have been much more limited, unable to hold projects that were very big.

And don't even get me started on the actual process for making the thread. That was another job that was manual only for a very long time, too.

[Hal13]

6 hours ago, Shaelin said:

so circa 1700-1800s,

with Steam Age being the planned last vanilla age of technology that's totally in the range.

6 hours ago, Shaelin said:

to get it ready to use took hours

don't forget the vanilla day only is 20 minutes long, if getting started took 1-2 minutes, that should be enough to give the impression of taking long to set it up. maybe you'd have to set up the pattern manually, starting from a blank canvas each time you want to change it? and then it would take 16 twine for a tapestry/carpet tile (twine that got dyed correctly of course)? on a manual loom you'd have the same setup but would feed the twine manually, similar to how helvehammers and automated querns make your life easier, while not having that big differences mechanic wise.

To simplify things twine material could just dictate how vivid colors can be? Silk could be dyed nearly any color, while flax twine always would go slightly in the whitish-yellowish range (kinda like concrete vs. terracota in Minecraft).

 

6 hours ago, Shaelin said:

That was another job that was manual only for a very long time, too.

But so was milling grain. i mean sure there were some kind of windmills since babylonian times (i think for pumping water), but waterwheel powered mills were invented only around 300bc and the big windmills we know today came up only around 900ad.

And coke ovens came up around 1600ad, at least if we ignore china using coke since around 1100ad to make steel, and they're already in the game, I'd say implementing an automated loom should not be a matter of age of technology, the method of steel making used in game seems to be even more modern.

Edited March 15, 2021 by Hal13

[Prin]

15 hours ago, Hal13 said:

But so was milling grain. i mean sure there were some kind of windmills since babylonian times (i think for pumping water), but waterwheel powered mills were invented only around 300bc and the big windmills we know today came up only around 900ad.

And coke ovens came up around 1600ad, at least if we ignore china using coke since around 1100ad to make steel, and they're already in the game, I'd say implementing an automated loom should not be a matter of age of technology, the method of steel making used in game seems to be even more modern.

Excellent points, and very valid.

There have been all sorts of grain milling tools used before the invention of windmills/waterwheels. While they were manual, they weren't necessarily all day jobs, though one can also argue that they weren't milling on large enough scale to really warrant it. Saddle style querns were in use from all the way back in the Neolithic age in China, so that's not such a hard thing to see in terms of technology progression. It makes sense.

So, I think we agree, coke ovens are a late arrival in terms of technological advancement, both in game and in history. They're also pretty well gated in the game, you need iron first, for example and you can't get iron without having procured bronze; also need a pulveriser to make the bricks. To me it makes sense for a fully automated loom to be likewise gated, because it would require some very precise machinery. As far as steel goes, there is a historical grey area. The person generally credited with its invention did so in the 1800s; around the same time as the automated loom. However, the earliest known production of steel was actually found in pieces of ironware in Anatolia and are almost 4,000 years old, dating from 1800 BC. It really depends on where you want to turn to for your historical sources. With this detail, I would argue could be less gated than it is, but that's me.

Ultimately, once all the tools and tech necessary to make something becomes available, people would just do so. So, I guess it's really a moot point. People going to progress however they can within the limits of gated tech, and that's really something to be decided by the developers.