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Anandamide

Member

Registered: 2018-06-05

Posts: 142

Advanced rope making

Right now rope is pre stone age, as it can both be collected in the wild, or farmed using skewers(I guess farming is stone age since you must use stones and a sharp stone to build a kiln and make ceramics but whatever), using stone or steel hoes while certainly the better option is still "optional". Any tech advance would need to be high up in the tech tree, because while in real life, we had more advanced production of rope than by hand long before metallurgy, it would unbalance the game. I think there should be a newcomen era tool(or steel age) for making milkweed more productive. We should have not just a more advanced rope making machine, but also either get hemp or add a new way to harvest milkweed and have a production similar to hemp.

As you might be able to imagine, this doesn't inherently need iron, or even copper, but we will require at least iron. My imagined rope machine will be made by adding 4 short shafts into a pile, and then adding a wooden wheel to it giving  a wheel with spokes. Next you will make the bearing, make two steel cylinder blanks and a thin steel rod. Make one of those blanks into a precision cylinder and then use the newcomen drill to make a drilled cylinder, putting all three together will make the basic bearing(leaving room for future bearings for other tech) and then adding the bearing to the wheel will give you the rope wheel. Optionally, to include copper, adding a wire to the rope wheel will put loops on the end that the rope would pass through. Boards + fence kit will give you a rope machine base, and then adding adding the rope wheel makes the rope machine. Using shears or a knife(not sure on which but definitely not flint)on a grown milkweed will yield some kind of harvested milkweed plant, hitting it with a branch will give you something like "milkweed fiber", putting three of these together would be something like a "milkweed bundle" and feeding this into the machine would give one rope. This could be upgraded further, with some kind of tool instead of a branch to process the milkweed, where the shears or knife harvested milkweed would be bundled into a bale, and using the newcomen roller(or something like it with a newcomen engine) on the bundle would produce "separated milkweed" which would have two parts, the bast fibers and the waste, pulling off the fibers would give you a fiber bundle which when used on the rope machine would give you a lasso(2 milkweed per rope vs 3 or 4 for other methods) and then the waste could be used in the same way as straw for compost.

The rope machine could also have a limited number of uses, requiring a new bearing when it breaks. The second tier could be taken out of the newcomen era by drilling a lock blank with the flint drill and adding a crude piston to make the bearing(but I feel like that would take out a lot of the balance in the game). As mentioned earlier, we could also get a hemp plant exclusive to this process, which would be really cool because right now milkweed is used for thread and rope, but the higher tier of thread comes from sheep instead of a plant, so the second tier of rope could come from a completely different plant that you cannot make thread from. There could even be a rope requirement for the bales, that would be recouped, but would be similar to the compost cycle in that some of the soil goes back in to feed the cycle.

antking:]#

Member

Registered: 2018-12-29

Posts: 579

Re: Advanced rope making

what would also help in rope making if their were more then one way to make rope! their are 4 other plants that can be used for rope - Stinging nettle, Yucca, Dogbane, Western red cedar and the one of which can be used multiple times (Western red cedar). each could have its on advantages and disadvantages.

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Anandamide

Member

Registered: 2018-06-05

Posts: 142

Re: Advanced rope making

Well theres no need for four base level ways of making rope. Either they are all made equal, and then redundant, or one will be the best and then the others will be useless. Yes in real life there are a variety of ways of doing just about anything, but with things like early agriculture and textile production, people used the species that were in their area. In OHOL, you can grow anything in any biome, and seeds from any of the biomes can be found usually in less than a minute walk(assuming you arent searching and are just going to where you know they are), meaning that people will not waste time with other methods, save for eve/ her children doing a quick fix if those other seeds aren't quite so readily available. Thats why I think other rope methods, no matter where exactly they are in the tech tree, should be somewhere higher up in it. Doing this even without any new plants would give a real use to the machine tools, because currently its cars and planes and radios which while cool, have negligible actual benefit.

*** Also, all of those plants IRL(and there are way more than just those) have anywhere from huge to subtle differences in their properties, which is too much for this game; we don't care about a ropes luster, smoothness, tensile strength, water resistance etc. Like with thread, a thread is a thread is a thread, it doesn't matter if it comes from milkweed or sheep. Same for boards, we dont get different butt logs from each of the trees, branches might be different but they all turn into kindling.***

****Unrelated but IRL, yucca rope making is such a pain in the ass omg. Im weaving a coil basket out of homemade yucca cordage and grass and it took days to make just like 10 meters of cordage.  You have to boil the yucca, and then let it soak for about a day before stripping it of the leaf matter(less time if you boil it for a long time but its a lot of fuel to keep a large pot boiling for 10 hours and dangerous to leave unattended). You can do it on raw yucca but its so hard and wastes a lot of the fibers. Even with the long soak, that thin diameter of cordage that I made still took about 3 hours to strip and clean it and that was with a nice flat countertop and a knife; I can only imagine the work to do it with just rocks and whatever else you can find in nature.****

Last edited by Anandamide (2019-03-24 19:53:12)

Guppy

Member

Registered: 2019-03-14

Posts: 202

Re: Advanced rope making

"Well theres no need for four base level ways of making rope. Either they are all made equal, and then redundant, or one will be the best and then the others will be useless."

Or, there are worse and better ways of production, but the better ones are locked behind machines up in the tech tree

Anandamide

Member

Registered: 2018-06-05

Posts: 142

Re: Advanced rope making

Well theres no need for four base level ways of making rope. Either they are all made equal, and then redundant, or one will be the best and then the others will be useless

Or, there are worse and better ways of production, but the better ones are locked behind machines up in the tech tree

As in exactly what I recommended in my post *faceplam*

BlueDiamondAvatar

Member

Registered: 2018-11-19

Posts: 322

Re: Advanced rope making

I love this idea!  Good suggestion, and good job thinking about how it would impact game balance.  There are so many crazy ideas posted on the forums without thinking through how they would impact the game.

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--Blue Diamond

I aim to leave behind a world that is easier for people to live in that it was before I got there.

NoTruePunk

Member

Registered: 2019-01-25

Posts: 321

Re: Advanced rope making

hemp