Tying equipment focus in URW needs to be reasoned somehow

[Bedlam]

I came back to playing URW heavily again, with my last save dating years ago, back in good old version 3.51 or so. Back then, we had an important logical clarity that I took for granted and did not properly appreciate at the time: "OK, my crafting recipe calls for tying equipment, so do I have any? Right, got a cord from somewhere, will that work? Yes, works!". Same thing worked for ropes, and a player could think to themselves "hey how do I make these cords/ropes, is this even possible?" and easily discover the ubiquitous (at the time) URW abstraction of making all the tying equipment you need with 1lb of cloth. Since leather is also a kind of cloth, it intuitively made sense that you can make leather ropes with 1lb of that.

It was all logical, easy to hold in mind, and once you did it once, you know how to do it forever. That's the power of clarity.

Newest versions of URW have sought to improve the flexibility for players who prefer to live exclusively in the wilderness and may have no obvious sources for cloth, so many new options have been added, but has there been an unintended severe negative effect on player clarity and the logic of the game regarding the essential matter of tying equipment?

Consider what a new player may have to deal with nowadays: withes, cords, cotton/hemp/flax yarns, birchbark strips, leather ropes, strong tying equipments, weak tying equipments, generic ropes, retting, plant fibres, sinews, sinew fibers, sinew yarn... Have I even listed them all? I consider myself a veteran URW player and enjoyer, and that ... is difficult to hold in mind even for me, but consider too how an average new player feels when encountering this level of tying equipment complexity. Most modern players also have no linguistic idea what a "withe" or "retting" even are; their brain fails when seeing the word to paint a sufficient picture of what the game is trying to represent to them. So they may have no idea that they want to make a withe, or how one is made, or where it comes from.

Then there's the added complexity of certain tying equipment sources being seasonal, and the ever present question of "hmm, they have birch bark strips for sale, it has length, so is it a tying equpment or no?". After several hours of play, I still have no idea about most that myself, even as something of a veteran with a great "mental map" of how things work in URW,  having come back fresh from the old versions. Back then it was pure elegance, "1lb cloth, that's what you need, and you'll have your tyng needs sorted", but the current state of things is a major mental shock. How is a player supposed to know whether a hemp yarn is water-safe, but cotton isn't? How can they intuitively know the difference between a cord, a sinew, a rope, and withe, and yarn for crafting a fur mittens?  It's forcing frustrating trial and error for most players, for no good reason there...





Granted, one can always figure out even the most complex system with time. The problem is that someone who is away for a week from playing URW, will not be able to retain the confusing understanding of how things work now with tying equipment, owing to its overarching obscurity for most people's minds, it will be sure to slip away from their memories. And then you have to figure out all over, what was a "withe" again, or was it cotton that was water safe or hemp, or does sinew yarn work to make a small lever trap or did you need that other thingie...

My argument is that progress in tying equipment may have inadvertently gone too far. What do you guys think?  This is something along the lines of "not all progress is actually improvement, not all rollbacks are bad, if you went ahead on the wrong path then going backwards is the true progress". 

[Plotinus]

I don't mind it, but I have played every version between 2.92 and now so for me the changes came on slowly and there's not much new at once, so take that perspective with a grain of salt.

The reason I don't mind it is because the game tells you what you need when you try to craft something. If I try to make a fishing rod, it says "You need 6.7 m water-use yarn. Any yarn other than sinew yarn. You can make yarn from plant fibres using textilecraft skill." I don't have to remember it, because the game tells me.

I think a strategy of "try to make the thing with the tying equipment that you have" works most of the time, the game will tell you if you guessed wrong, and it tells you what to do instead.

Water safe is new in 3.87 and I haven't encountered it much yet, but as far as i read from the changelog, it's just sinews that aren't water safe, and probably just fishing rods where you need to worry about it.

You can think of a withe as being a cheap and freely available kind of rope, because it's craftable.

[Bert Preast]

I enjoy the variety of tying equipment, as it is a large part of survival.  If I don't know what something is, I look it up and learn something new, which is nice.

However, you're right that what's required could be better displayed.  Often, the tying equipment is not among the first couple of items in the recipe, so until you have those items you can't be sure what type of tying equipment you're going to need.

There's also a minor but in I think the recipe for making skis, where it tells you withes will work but then calls for 4 or 5 metres, and it's not possible to make a withe that long.

I'd like to see an option to view a recipe in a full screen pop-up, instead of having to squint at the message box.  That way the whole process and ingredients could be clearly shown, rather than having to rely on memory or guesswork.

[Matti-patti]

You can actually get by with just yarn and withes for practically everything. Ropes are only needed for leashing animals (use multiple withes if item calls for more than 4ft), cords for making nets (you can use yarn instead elsewhere, net is special hardcoded case).