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Re: Effin' lynx.
Deadfalls. Of course!
June 20, 2023, 10:52:26 PM |
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Re: Effin' lynx.
My protection method is to build a stable (a 3*3 or other shape building with one or more fence tiles "inside" to allow you to tie down animals inside of it). Bears can open doors, but not other predators. BEARS can open doors? We're doomed. We're all doomed. I just built my cow and sheep a nice "barn" and now I have to put a giganto deadfall in front of it. Brr imagine a bear opening the door to my home and being all "Y HALO THAR". June 22, 2023, 12:21:39 AM |
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Santa might want to put out some want ads.
I've some trap-fences surrounding my fields, and some deadfalls in front of the trap-pits. That's largely to protect my little clearing and the livestock within from predators. I also have the door to my little barn protected by a fence with a heavy bear deadfall in it. Well, Rauni, my character, was about to retire to the warmth of her fur-padded bed, when she heard an awful racket outside. She grabbed her spear from its position by the front door and stepped out to behold a bonanza of meat. Six forest reindeer had walked into the traps. It took her all night (and she was crawling before she was done) to mercifully dispatch all the reindeer and reset and re-bait the traps. The skinning and butchering took two more days. Drying the meat and curing the hides (she was out of bark) took three more. There were daily sacrifices of reindeer cuts over those messy days, but what she put up to dry for trade was a staggering 525 reindeer cuts. And then after that meat party was over, she walked her trap lines south of her little homestead to find an arctic fox in its thick winter fur trapped in one of her paw-board traps. More sacrifices to the forest spirits followed. Rauni is going to have a very good spring. She'll hardly need to fish and she can trade a lot of that meat with the nearby Driik village (in walking distance) for furs or trade goods to stock up on. Nonperishables. June 24, 2023, 05:48:37 PM |
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BAC Mod Weaving yardage.
Now, for balance and sanity reasons this probably shouldn't be changed, but I happen to be a spinner and weaver IRL, and I've some thoughts on the yardage of thread used in weaving. Weavers calculate the yardage of thread based on several different factors: the length of a given piece of fabric, the width of a given piece of fabric, its sett (how many threads per inch), and lastly shrinkage factor. Shrinkage comes into play because threads are stretched to have them woven, and when you take them off the loom their elasticity shrinks back in. Normally shrinkage, depending on the fiber, is about 10% (with wool especially). There's also the header and the foot of the fabric, which is loom waste. You find especially little loom waste with the warp-weighted looms in the BAC mod, and with backstrap looms, so I'm not too concerned about this, but typical loom waste for a rigid heddle loom is about 12 to 18 inches, and loom waste for a jack, countermarch, or counterbalance loom is about 24 to 36 inches. The sett depends on how thick or thin the threads are. In general most fish yarn (cotton yarn used for warp in Scandinavian rug weaving) weaves up at about 12 ends per inch. So that's 12 threads of warp, + 12 threads of weft, for 24 threads per square inch. Multiply that by the length and width of a given piece of fabric — let's say we're weaving 2ft by 4ft sections here. That's 1152 square inches, multiplied by the threads per square inch, + 10 percent for shrinkage. That gives you 2534.4 ft of thread required, without calculating loom waste OR the amount of clothing you need for a garment. I'm honestly not sure anyone would continue spinning and weaving using BAC if you actually did change the numbers to be accurate to RL weaving, though. But it's just a little curiosity fact stuff that I happen to specialize in. June 25, 2023, 07:51:09 PM |
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Re: BAC Mod Weaving yardage.
This is great! It should take months and a lot of labour to make a garment, that'd be historically accurate. 12 ends per inch is what you get out of a rigid heddle loom — backstraps and warp-weighted looms, as well as contemporary floor looms, go ridiculously fine and at the upper limit it's about whether you want fine threads catching on the roughness of your normal human skin or not. June 26, 2023, 02:54:46 PM |
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Re: BAC Mod Weaving yardage.
Moreover if you want to talk spinning — I'm actually more of a spinner than a weaver because I spend a lot of time knitting my output. I use a spinning wheel. The spinning wheel was a technology that increased the efficiency of spinning a fiber into thread by more than an order of magnitude. I can spin with a spindle, and for very specific technical tasks it's preferable. eg: spinning very delicate threads is easier on a drop spindle than on a spinning wheel. Now, on how the rhythms of spinning and weaving fit into agricultural life around the Iron Age and after, into the pre-industrial revolution: making yardage was a family affair. The retting and shearing could be done by anyone. Carding and combing were simple tasks that you could delegate to children. After that, the women and older girls would spin the thread. Spinning was often saved for a winter task — you didn't need much light to do it competently. Weaving, on the other hand, was a summer task — the kind of thing you could use the long daylight hours to do. This is because if you slip up in your weaving you can threaten the entire structural integrity of the cloth. Moreover, what people value in weaving and spinning then and now is completely different. Back before the industrial production of cloth, girls and women were trained extensively to turn out fine, delicate handspuns. I have seen a delicate piece of linen cloth dated to the antebellum era of the US that was translucent, woven as a sampler to show off a young lady's skills. Consistency and regularity were vital. Such consistency and delicacy was heavily devalued with factories turning out stuff, so nowadays consumers prefer handwovens and handspuns that reflect a slight human irregularity in the touch, or a method of spinning and plying that machines cannot replicate. So back in the era of UnReal World, a young woman who could spin fine thread and weave fine cloth would be considered extremely marriageable, because if she was swift and efficient at it, and also knew how to dye cloth appealing colors, she could put some of her spare cloth on the market because it was ULTRA-VALUABLE. As for historical dye plants: people used all kinds of dyeherbs. Woad for blue, onion skins or dyers' chamomile (Anthemis tinctoria) for yellow, madder root for red. Note that this is a very, very short list. Most of these natural dyes require a mordant, or a metal salt, to make sure the colors chemically bond to the fabric. Some of the mordants used are pretty harmless — alum, for example, is used to mordant some colors, but too much of it will leave wool and other protein fibers with a weird sticky texture. Other mordants are shit you need chemical disposal facilities to get rid of. As a contemporary fiber crafter, I use acid dyes, which bond to protein fibers effortlessly with the addition of citric acid or vinegar. A large amount of the colonization of Mexico by the Spanish was driven by a consumer craze for lightfast intense red dye, which was derived from the cochineal insect that fed on prickly pear cacti. Similarly, both indigo and cotton drove chattel slavery to a great extent (although not as great as the consumer desire for sugar.) (I know most of this stuff because my university education is on theatrical costume production — but I was already spinning and weaving before I became a costume technician, and my gateway craft was knitting.) July 02, 2023, 04:58:47 PM |
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