Add sewing machines

[Jninja1]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

With the inclusion of various other corded and battery powered tools I feel there is a need for sewing machines. The only sewing method we have in game is hand stitching, while this has its own merits it seems to make sense to add machine counterparts for sewing to make the CDDA world feel more lived in.

Solution you would like.

The general idea I have thought about is adding a sewing machine item that is either corded or battery powered, yes those exist! The method that I believe would be the most streamlined is to only allow the machine to work on normal clothing materials, such as cotton, leather, Lycra, etc.

The existing recipes can be copied from and the time cut in half or so. Take a t-shirt for example, it could take the same materials, or slightly more thread, but take half the time to craft.

Describe alternatives you have considered.

While it may not be necessarily worth the time I feel these inclusions would be natural as there is already looms, spinning wheels, and other textile related tools in the game.

A possible different solution is to simply add the sewing machine and make it a viable tool to use in select recipes while keeping times separate to avoid, essentially, duplicating recipes which could bloat the crafting menu even more. This method could act very much like the countless other recipes that have "tool x, tool y, tool z" as possible tools to use for the same job

Additional context

Amazon result for a battery powered sewing machine.

Battery powered sewing machine

[natsirt721]

This would be a great addition, however...

I think the issue is that there is no easy way to have a crafting tool modify the time cost of a recipe. You have to make a separate recipe for the manual and powered methods individually. This is less than ideal and is used for some basic things (thread, planks), but to have duplicates of every tailoring recipe in the game is untenable.

There might be some new way to do it but not one I'm aware of.

[harakka]

Every sewing recipe needing to be duplicated is not viable, there needs to be some better system for this.

[Zireael07]

IIRC we already have an open issue for recipes modifying times, and it's such a big rework no one has touched it

[PatrikLundell]

The problem with tool selections modifying production times is that it's not a static factor, but rather depends on how large a part of a recipe the tools is used (in the case of the T-shirt, you'd have to measure the pieces onto the fabric and cut the fabric accordingly before you get to the actual sewing part). It might be possible to have a static factor as a property of the tool itself and combine it with a new property of the tool recipe entry stating the percentage of the recipe time the tool is used, so only that time (and corresponding "fuel" usage) is affected by that tool category. I would take a conservative approach to recipes that don't specify tool percentages by neither providing any speed benefit nor any "fuel" cost until percentages are provided. The reason for this is that updated recipes would provide benefit to players, and thus an incentive to update them. The opposite approach of defaulting to 100% would mean improving the recipes to be more accurate would make the situation worse for the player, and that's not liked generally, even though the end result still is an improvement over the situation before the introduction. One effect the introduction of such a system could have is that you'd be able to use sub optimal tools usable but at a time cost by having them have a speed factor of over 1.

Another approach is to wait for recipes to be split into phases, and then specify tool usage for only the phases where it is applicable. However, I think a tool time proportional usage functionality would be useful in this context as well, so it might be a complement rather than a competitor.

[DalenTalas]

Why not implement the sewing machines, and deal with the issue of reworking crafting times later? Machines can be something like power tools / deployable furniture supplying tool qualities as long as they are powered. There can also be rarer, antique hand-powered machines.

The question is whether they would be able to be used as sewing kits (repairing / adjusting clothing), and how keeping track of the thread charges would work on the electric versions.

[Zireael07]

If they don't make crafting times faster, then what is the point? I do not think there are any clothes IRL that can only be done on a machine, which is what a tool quality would represent