TheOvermind
commented
4 years ago My issue with Mortared Stones is that they are useless. Let's say you have done a big Hewn Logs house, and now you're going for a Tier 2 thing. You can easily re-use all of that to make a lot of furniture, or heck, even mass produce them into lumber or boards. In the other hand... well, i gotta admit, they look pretty; but that's it.
Mortared Stone could be used at least for making Concrete, since it's pretty common IRL to use any kind of stone as a 'filler' for concrete. And talking about Concrete, it's kinda weird to me that it doesn't need Sand. The recipe could be something like: Any kind of stone/mortared stone + Sand. You could add a specific material as a replacement for the cement and it will be as realistic as it could get (and using stone has a 'filer' for using less prime material overall, kinda like shale brick), but that could be a little too much. Sand/Mortared in the other hand... they're kinda in the game right now.
As it stands, the tutorial heavily favors the Minecraft approach of 'punch a tree to start' to pick up Hewing in order to process Hewn Logs and thus make your first room.
On the other hand, the various mortared stone variants get no such treatment, where they are required from the onset to get hewn logs (without any efficiency if solo, or from a nearby Carpenter) to be able to make their own profession work from the start. Enabling a recipe for mortared stone (and mortar) from the workbench without efficiency would still be a (much) more expensive route to take, but would get masons started that much better.
Additionally, allow the tutorial to offer a choice between the 'easy' Hewn Logs or the harder Mortared Stones (and thus offer a choice between Hewing and Mortaring) recipe to teach new players the basics.