Rethinking the pelt requirement changes

[Kent]

The change to the amount of pelts required is ponderous.

Consider the manufacture of the armors to protect one human torso: a cuirass, jerkin, or breastplate.

One Large Black Bear yields four pelts.

The former system required six pelts to make one torso armor. A large black bear and a half.

As it was before, it was hard to understand why the complete hide from a large bear would not suffice to cover one human torso, but, ok, a bear and a half - perhaps there is wastage in the manufacture process or other reasons.

The new system now requires fifteen pelts. That's nearly four large black bears!

I can't see any realism in this. From four large black bears one should probably be able to armor oneself from head to toe.

The other way of looking at it, perhaps one large black bear should be yielding eight pelts if successfully skinned all the way. It's one pelt only from a rabbit, right? A large black bear would easily yield eight times the peltage of a rabbit. A bison would probably yield double of a bear, a wolf, a third of a bear.


My 2 cents anyway.

[Drayla]

I think you're closer to the fix qith rethinking the pelt output. I could see it taking at least two bears to make sufficient leather armor. The whole idea of armor is to provide protection, not simply covering. So, while you may be able to make a shirt or pants from one bear completely successfully skinned, you would need more to make leather armor so that the item in question could be thicker than the average leather jacket. Who knows, maybe four whole bears IS realistic.

[Kent]

I dunno, Drayla. Have you ever seen the size of a large bear, perhaps at the zoo? Even if you double up the layers of hide (or triple?) two bears would still wrap around your torso a few times, let alone almost four.

[Drayla]

Yes, but this also assumes you skin the bear in one huge piece. I would guess that if you were to skin it in patches as we do on CLOK, some of that skin and fur is going to become scrap pieces that are too small or irregularly shaped to be used in leathercrafting.

[Rithiel]

In CLOK we always seek to find a balance between making mechanics realistic and making a game.

Let's talk about real world trapping. Trappers would go out into the wilderness (very far away from civilization), giving up all those amenities for weeks or months, in order to be where the animals were. And if too many people trapped in an area, you would quickly find the animals were gone and the trapper would have to move on.

Let's talk about CLOK skinning. You can go and farm the same, what, five? rooms over and over again to get pelts from bears and wolves. There's no mechanics for over-hunting, and you are literally two wilderness rooms away from Shadgard.

So the increase in the number of pelts required is meant to throw some scarcity in CLOK, since that scarcity doesn't exist on the supply side.