Flax Alternatives

[Pallanza]

One of the things I've noticed in my playthroughs is that there isn't really a reason to stray from using flax as your K-type crop. Carrots, rice, soybeans and cassava don't even compare to the benefit of twine, especially since you can just get your food crops from the N and P categories. Combine this with nutrient depletion (which make no mistake, I do like as a game mechanic since it forces crop rotation and fertilization), and you'll find that there's essentially one combination that won't force you to make a ludicrous amount of farmland, micromanage your planting schedule beyond regular crop rotation, or suffer from reduced yields: Spelt/Rye + Flax + Onions/Parsnip. Furthermore, since Spelt is faster growing than Rye for the same amount of satiety and nutrient depletion, ultimately you just settle down on Spelt + Flax + Onions/Parsnip once you've gotten enough seeds to bother planting it.  This can get a bit monotonous unless you're purposely doing some sort of challenge playthrough where you avoid using flax.

What would help alleviate this and allow more player choice in terms of crops to farm would be a flax alternative in the N and P categories, something that can produce fibers for weaving cloth. Hemp and cotton are two that come to mind, and they could fulfill different environment categories; Cotton would grow best in warmer environments as an example. Now, you wouldn't be able to make a bowstring out of cotton (you can out of hemp), but you can make one out of sinew or rawhide, which would also open up additional player choice in that field. Overall, this would result in greater functional crop choice for all the nutrition types.

Someone has apparently had this idea in the past, as there's a Hemp mod in the database, but it doesn't seem to have been updated for later versions and the textures are just downscaled photos so it doesn't really match the aesthetics of the actual game (no offense to the mod creator, it's just the pixelization really stands out on the plant textures to my eyes in comparison to base-game ones).