Tanning – Redux
This is a rebalance of tanning and leather production quantities. It doesn’t use globs and has non-linear scaling, in line with the vanilla scaling for other creature butchering byproducts. It also keeps the original skin graphics intact.
This makes skin drop from butchered corpses in stacks of units, like other byproducts such as meat. Quite simply, it makes skin butchering drops scale in the same way that all other body parts do. For reasons of balance (and sanity) it now takes 6 pieces of skin to tan into one piece of leather. The default scaling works very well. A cat will drop enough skin for 1 leather, a cow 2, and elephant drops enough for about 20 leather.
There are a few reasons why I much prefer this method to the traditional "glob" scaling method. In order of personal preference:
- It drops skin that has the original skin graphics.
- It doesn’t scale linearly. A creature twice as large doesn’t simply drop twice as much skin.
- It doesn’t fundamentally alter the material properties of skin, or the mechanics of how butchering drops work in vanilla.
- It makes it potentially easier to balance the tanning job time and leather production quantities.
Notes: The tanning job will always ask for 6 skin. 6 cat skin will make one leather, *but* the skin units themselves scale with the size of the creature it comes from. To give you a rough guide; 6 cow skin will give 2 leather, 6 elephant skin, will give 7 leather and 6 giant elephant skin will give 10 leather. You can see here, how the number of skin units butchered, and amount of leather per skin, scale in a more interesting way than a 1:1 skin to leather ratio would.
For reference; a giant elephant is 8000 times larger than a cat, but it drops 75 leather rather than 8000(!?) leather. This seems to me like a good balance between that higher number, and something disappointingly pitiful, for butchering the largest land animal in the game.
I left auto-tanning on for convenience and to stay in-keeping with vanilla. If you mix two or more animal leather in one tanning batch the first one will be the dominant "name" of the leather type. If you need to control this, you can pause the automatic tanning and select the preferred skin type, or forbid any scraps you don’t want included. Due to tanning working in batches, it will only occur on the first batch, in most cases.
Compatibility: Unfortunately, as with the other leather scaling mods, there doesn’t seem to be a practical way, at the moment, to implement this without cutting or duplicating raw entries. Given the choice I went with cutting rather than duplicating, as I’d rather people know there may be mod compatibility problems due to cutting, than not know there are bugs in their save due to duplication errors. This means that the skin template and tanning reaction have been cut and replaced with a few new tokens and arguments. As long as another mod doesn’t cut either of those files too, and is below this in the load order, there is a good chance they will work together without any problems.
Here I’ll add to a list of any mods I notice, or am informed of, that are related to tanning and are compatible:
– This should be compatible with Vattic’s Scale Tanning mod.
I spent a long time working on this, trying some very elaborate solutions, only to conclude that the simplest solution I found was the best. It has given me some interesting ideas though, for more tweaks to leather, that I may or may not get around to looking into further at some point.
