This is pretty cool! I always thought that leather was woefully underpowered. It can be next to useless in combat against enemies using real armor.

I do like that you marked changes to the files with ##: it makes figuring out what exact changes you made easier. I am interested to see what you were going to do with the "Blood Extraction" reaction; it'd be rather dwarfy to boil your armor to iron-toughness in the blood of your enemies/kittens. comment last edited by Saint on Jan 25, 2013, 10:10:14 am

Thank you! I was in the same boat with leather. It seemed that it made almost no difference, and it usually went to waste. It feels great cranking out some really heavy duty Kobold Leather armor for my squads.

You are spot on with the blood boiling. My original idea was to make some use of the barrels of blood the merchants sometimes bring, and allow you to use it to harden the leather to iron strength, or maybe the runic leather (because it sounds pretty morbid ). This was switched to boiling in booze, because I was having trouble targeting some of the correct materials for the reactions. Plus, if I am going to allow you to use the blood barrels, I should probably allow you to make them as well. I was trying to find a good way to extract blood from corpses, and maybe use that for batch processing more leather at once.

I'm still looking for ways to balance, but I'm pretty happy with the initial results. My ideas the for next version involve adding some additional armor, reactions to create blood barrels, use those barrels to make some sort of enchanted armor, and perhaps find a way to upgrade already created armor with some bonuses.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it, and let me know if you find any bugs or balance issues!

• I've noticed that runic leather can utilize bones, as well as fresh corpses. I dunno if that's intentional or not (not a big deal IMHO).
  
• Making items out of the better leather can be difficult, as you would literally have to forbid every other leather to get your dwarves to use it (not much you can do about this)
  
• "Studs" can get frustrating, as you need to make four to upgrade one leather piece and most of the "make stud" reactions produce only two to three. Consider changing the ratio? Maybe they produce "a pile of studs" and you only need one "pile" to upgrade?
  
• "Plate Leather" sounds weird, maybe call it "Molded Leather?"
  
• In the raws file reaction_LeatherUpgrade you have:
  
  [REACTION:MAKE_UPGRADE_LEATHER4]
  [NAME:3-make hardened leather plates(2) from stude strips]
  
  Did you mean "Studded" strips?
  
• Also, you have the reactions produce two at a time:
  
  [REAGENT:A:2:SKIN_TANNED:NONE:NONE:NONE] [ANY_LEATHER_MATERIAL]
  [REACTION_CLASS:LEVEL_1]
  [HAS_MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT:TAN_UPGRADE]
  [REAGENT:B:1:CLOTH:NONE:NONE:NONE]
  [PRODUCT:100:2:SKIN_TANNED:NONE:GET_MATERIAL_FROM_REAGENT:A:TAN_UPGRADE]
  
  This is fine by itself, but you have "GET_MATERIAL_FROM_REAGENT:A" What this means is that if you have some fine GOBLIN LEATHER and some SHEEP LEATHER and your tanner grabs the SHEEP LEATHER first, it produces two SHEEP LEATHER's instead of one of goblin and sheep. A better way to do this may be:
  
  [REAGENT:A:1:SKIN_TANNED:NONE:NONE:NONE] [ANY_LEATHER_MATERIAL]
  [REACTION_CLASS:LEVEL_1]
  [HAS_MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT:TAN_UPGRADE]
  [REAGENT:B:1:SKIN_TANNED:NONE:NONE:NONE] [ANY_LEATHER_MATERIAL]
  [REACTION_CLASS:LEVEL_1]
  [HAS_MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT:TAN_UPGRADE]
  [REAGENT:C:1:CLOTH:NONE:NONE:NONE]
  [PRODUCT:100:1:SKIN_TANNED:NONE:GET_MATERIAL_FROM_REAGENT:A:TAN_UPGRADE]
  [PRODUCT:100:1:SKIN_TANNED:NONE:GET_MATERIAL_FROM_REAGENT:B:TAN_UPGRADE]
  
  What this does is individually produce the upgraded leather for each type. You have this weird leather-changing error for each of your reactions, I noticed, so if you make the change you'll have to do it for each one.
  
  
  
  These are all just little things I've noticed, you don't have to make any changes.
  Otherwise, I love your mod! I modified the "wastelanders friend" mod with yours so I can upgrade leather, raising my Adventure Mod survival rate from 2% to a solid 3%, maybe even 3.5%.

It wasn't intentional, but I don't have issues with it. Since most reactions like this use the entire bone stack, It kinda balances it out. It will have to be addressed whenever that bug in modded reactions gets fixed. Thanks for the heads up!
Yeah, I have noticed this, and I knew it was going to be an issue when I started it, but I may have found a solution, and have started using it in my forts. I'm going to take some screen shots, and I will post it over at the forum when its done. Check there later on today. Basically, I have sorted the leather out with multiple stockpiles (Since each tier is a different material, and its sorted animal-material) I was able to make each one only accept a specific tier of leather. I then set those stockpiles to give to a workshop, and then I make suits of armor from there. Its not a perfect system, but once set up, it makes life much easier.
Since this is the point where the armor starts to get a little more serious, I wanted to add a bit more effort to create the armor. Also, I thought it was silly to get the same amount of studs out of rat bones, and a stone block. However, Fun is more important here, and I think I am going to adjust to piles as you suggested. I have been play testing a lot the last few days with this in my fort, and it did get a bit annoying. I think I am also going to move the reactions from the Tanner, to the Leatherworks. It seems to make more sense there. Currently I have lots of dwarves running back and forth to the other side of my fort, because I built my tanner under a deep channel to provide light, and stop miasma. I don't want to built tannery workshops by my industries for fear that some of the overlapping dwarves would bring their rotting pieces in with them. I'm also working with the reaction changes sackhead posted on the forum to give more leather. Basically changing skin to a glob, which is dropped based on the animal size. Now, large creatures give much more leather! I think I am going to add it in as well.
The image in my head was that the dwarves would create lots of hard, studded leather plates, and then the leatherworker would arrange them into (probably uncomfortable) clothing. Your right though, Molded Leather sounds better. I'll probably change this.
This is why you should always have a peer review! I have been playing with it the entire time, and I never noticed this! Oops. Yes, its a typo. I'll correct it. You can pretend, if you like, that its the french pronunciation of 'stud'.


Aha! Why didn't I think of this! This is a fantastic solution. It never occurred to me to just have two products, and that way, you only have a strange leather switch when its being made into armor. Actually, I'm not sure how much leather is required to make the different pieces of armor... I should find out. I'll be adding your modded reactions shortly. Thank you for this!
I think the best indicator of success is the amount of feedback your work returns. 1 thoughtful and helpful comment like this is worth 40 downloads in my eyes. Even negative feedback is good as long as its detailed. It feels really good that somebody enjoys something I made, and your comment is very appreciated. I know I have been having lots of fun with it, and I'm just happy that others are hopefully finding it useful or fun as well.

No problem!

I personally don't mind having the reactions at the tanner; the leatherworks shop screen is crowded enough as it is, and working at the tanner makes things a little simpler.

As for the leather reactions, I suppose producing leather one-at-a-time would eliminate all nastiness with the production glitch, but I enjoy making items in bulk (I have my smelter modded to churn out steel in multiples of 5). Also, all leather items (like armor, greaves, gloves, etc) only require one piece of leather to produce. It seems that toady forgot to fix that when he made metal items require multiple bars, so you're golden--for now.

If you wanted to make things [more] difficult, you could always have higher reactions consume a leather piece to produce the upgrade, such as requiring 3 leather and producing 2 (although this would, again, cause some odd leather-switching nonsense in which your valuable Forgotten Beast leather gets combined with Sheep leather). Personally, I think the hoops you have to jump through now to produce iron-level leather is on par with actually mining out iron and smelting it yourself.

One last thing, I noticed a [huge] speed reduction in Adventure Mode when donning plate leather armor. I dunno if the weight is the same as that of iron, but it was a bit of surprise that some wombat leather greaves and armor cut my speed in half. I suppose that if it is, that's fair since metal-strength leather is pretty cheaty anyways. However, that gave me an idea for a possible upgrade: higher tier leathers (runic, or another level if you wanted) could be lighter? IDK, it's your mod and I'm just glad someone finally made a leather fix.

Its up in the air... I could make another workshop for it. I'm a bit torn. Aside from the Molded leather reaction, There isn't a good reason that the reactions for crafting all the leather types would need to take place at the Tannery. Since it would involve sewing, soaking, boiling, plating, and imbuing the tortured souls of the murdered victims, It makes more sense that it would be at a different workshop. What would you call a Leather Upgrading Facility?

I liked the batch reactions, and since it was taking so much time to make the other additives, I thought it was fair to make it in batches of 2. Thanks for the heads up on the leather requirements for crafting! That also makes me feel better that if you were to forbid leather, except for the cool forgotten beast leather, you would definitely get your crazy monster armor.

The speed reduction is a combination of a few elements.
1. I thought that the (kinda OP) leather armor doesn't need any additional benefits, and should be heavier anyway. I mean, we are adding additional materials to it (Like lumps of bone and stone), so it would get heavy.
2. I was (am) a modding noob, and I directly copied the base material values.
3. I didn't find out how the weight was calculated for materials until it struck me to search 'weight' in the wiki. That was 5 minutes ago.

I plan to make Runic armor (being that its a long road to get there) have the added benefit of being the same weight as base leather, as its magic properties were pretty tame. I think a bunch of dwarves running around top speed in enchanted Runic Leather is pretty cool.

I'm still getting the hang of what all the properties are for, so if there is anything else I seem to have overlooked, feel free to ask. Again, thanks for all your helpful suggestions and observations.