Wood ash to produce Lye and Potash

[Fancysaurus]

Wood ash has been used for centuries (as Early as 500 A.D!)  in all kinds of processes such as creating fertilizer in the form of potash and producing lye which among other things can be used as an alternative for lime in the leather working process. Perhaps down the line it could also be used for pottery glazes or soap making. 

Since you do need a high heat fire like a large fire pit to get the right kind of ash, maybe you could get it by creating something similar to a charcoal pit but without the top being covered?
Once you have the ash you could use the already existing barrel mechanics, adding wood ash to water and waiting for the water to dissolve the soluble materials to produce lye water. 
If you wanted to go for a more realistic approach by modifying a barrel to act as filter by placing loose gravel and straw in the bottom of it and drilling a few small holes into the bottom. After this is set up you simply place the wood ash in the barrel and run water though it several times until it leaches enough lye from with wood ash.

In order to get the dried version you simply boil the water off in a clay pot (which is actually where the name 'pot ash' comes from) 

[Kazeoni]

Good one and pretty based.

 

But we kinda already have it in the "Better Than Heresy" mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/898

Overall neat tweak package. But yeah, would be nice in vanilla as well. However it being implemented nicely via mod I don't think that's a priority.

[Hal13]

2 hours ago, Kazeoni said:

But we kinda already have it in the "Better Than Heresy" mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/898

Overall neat tweak package. But yeah, would be nice in vanilla as well. However it being implemented nicely via mod I don't think that's a priority.

The mod changes way more than only this and therefore isn't an alternative to implementing it separately (if via mod or vanilla doesn't matter).
If there was a mod changing only this single behaviour without interfering with other mods that would be an alternative to vanilla implementation, but sadly many mods tweaking some thing tweak way too many things at once.

Don't get me wrong I did use BTH in the past, but imo tweak mods should change as little at once as possible and only things that are connected at once. That way there wouldn't have to be several mods tweaking the same thing in different or even the same way and it makes trouble shooting and finding incompatibilities (and fixes for them) way easier.

I really like the works of for example Apache, copygirl, Craluminum, DArkHekRoMaNT and Mr1k3 for keeping the changes mostly as small and on a singular topic as possible.

[Kazeoni]

True dat... you nicely elaborated on the 'kinda' part of my previous comment.

Sweeping tweak mods should be more modular with config. With BTH we are kinda lucky, that mod .zip only has subfolders and .json files, so with a very rudementary coding knowledge we can introduce homebrew tweaks and trims to these. Still tiresome but not impossible. Where the .dll comes in, that's where at my level I just call the exorcist and close the text editor admitting defeat LOL.

[Hal13]

8 minutes ago, Kazeoni said:

with a very rudementary coding knowledge we can introduce homebrew tweaks and trims to these

Most gamers don't have that much coding knowledge though and most modders (and coders in general) don't document inside their code good enough for amateurs to follow (heck, I know of not few instances where professionals aren't able to figure out parts of the code of programs they have to maintain anymore, because of lacking documentation). Additionally messing inside that code may create unforeseen instabilities and left over snippets (or through config disabled features) may still cause incompatibilities. Hence imo creating mods as clean and on point as possible should be what modders, publishing their work for broad use, should do ideally.

But we're getting offtopic.