Dyeing
| Dyeing | |
|---|---|
| Type | Clothing |
A garment stitched at a Sewing Machine arrives in whatever colour its ingredient gave it, and dyeing is how that colour gets overruled. The work happens at Emily and Haley's house on Willow Lane, where a bank of dye pots stands beside the machine, and both come to life after Emily calls at the farmhouse to say the machine is free to use. The pots want one item in each of six colour families and then hand over a set of sliders, which puts every shade in the game within reach, grey and black included. The machine works the other way round, taking one item on the spool and blending its colour into the garment in the feed. Shirts, trousers, skirts and shorts are what takes dye, and a startling share of what a farm grows, mines, catches or cooks counts as a dye.
Overview
Every item the pots accept belongs to one of six families, and a tiny tinted dot low on each icon says which family that is. The red pot takes Apple, Cherry, Strawberry, Tomato, Cranberries, Hot Pepper, Radish, Rhubarb, Tulip, Fairy Rose, Holly, Ruby and Fire Quartz, along with finished plates like Pizza, Spaghetti and Rhubarb Pie. The orange pot is the one that soaks up everyday clutter: Wood, Hardwood, Clay, Copper Ore, Geode, Pumpkin, Carrot, Potato, Yam, Acorn, Maple Syrup and the warp totems all belong in it. The yellow pot takes Corn, Parsnip, Wheat, Starfruit, Sunflower, Cheese, Hay, Honey of any flower, Gold Ore and every fossil. The green pot takes Kale, Broccoli, Green Bean, Artichoke, Fiber, Moss, Seaweed, Green Tea, Emerald and Jade. The blue pot takes Blueberry, Blue Jazz, Ancient Fruit, Crystal Fruit, Clam, Sardine, Tuna, Aquamarine and Frozen Tear. The purple pot takes Beet, Grape, Eggplant, Red Cabbage, Amaranth, Amethyst, Iridium Ore and Void Salmon.
Finding the sixth family is the usual hold-up, and the interface helps with it. Hovering over a pot lists whatever in the bag will go into that pot, which beats squinting at dots across a full backpack. Once all six hold something, the bottle in the middle of the menu wakes up, and opening it brings up three sliders for hue, saturation and value, the same arrangement used when the farmer was first created. Because the sliders reach everywhere, the pots are the only route to a genuinely plain outfit in white, grey or black. Everything in the pots is then used up, and whatever dyeable clothing is being worn at the time changes together, with no extra charge for the second or third piece.
Anything run through a machine keeps the colour of the thing that went in, and that is where the system gets deep. A jar of Jelly, a bottle of Wine, a crock of Pickles, a glass of Juice, Dried Fruit, Dried Mushrooms, Smoked Fish, Roe, Aged Roe and the targeted baits all carry the shade of the crop or the fish behind them. A cellar of Ancient Fruit Wine is therefore also a shelf of blue dye, and a batch of Cranberry Jelly is a shelf of red. The ready-made versions sold off the Traveling Cart have no crop behind them, so each falls back on a fixed colour of its own: her Jelly reads red, her Juice and her Pickles green, and her Wine purple.
The Sewing Machine reads items more finely than the pots do. Each item there carries one specific shade rather than a whole family, so an Acorn is brown, Aerinite is cyan, a Blobfish is sand, a Catfish is grey, Coal is black, Cloth is white and Amaranth is a dusty pink. Alongside the shade sits a strength. Most items are weak and move a garment only a quarter of the way towards their colour, which means four passes for the full tone. A medium item covers half the distance in one go, and a strong item arrives at full saturation immediately. Cranberries, Cranberry Candy, Cranberry Sauce and Dwarf Scroll I are strong reds; Beet is a strong dark purple; Blueberry is a strong blue; a Bone Flute or a Chicken Statue is a strong sand. Saving the strong items for a garment that needs a decisive change is worth doing, since a weak one on a dark shirt barely shows.
Because the machine blends rather than replaces, where the garment started decides where it ends up. A white item dropped onto a dark green shirt lightens it. A red item on a blue shirt pulls the shirt towards purple, and a yellow item on the same blue shirt pushes it towards green. Working to a particular shade that way takes a few passes and a little thought about where two colours meet. A Prismatic Shard or a Rainbow Shell skips the arithmetic altogether and opens the sliders straight from the spool.
Use
Trousers and skirts are the easy half of the wardrobe, because nearly everything the machine turns out below the waist accepts colour. Farmer Pants, Shorts, Relaxed Fit Pants, Relaxed Fit Shorts, Genie Pants, Baggy Pants, the Skirt, the Pleated Skirt, the Long Dress and the Simple Dress all take it. The Grass Skirt, the Dinosaur Pants and the two prismatic pairs keep the colour they were stitched in, which is part of the point of them.
Shirts are the awkward half. A shirt picked while creating the farmer holds its colour for good, and so do several one-off pieces handed out by events and boxes. The tailored twin of a starting shirt will often take dye, though, which is the reason to stitch a shirt that is already being worn. Several shirts share a name and a look while differing only in whether colour sticks to them, so the description panel is the only reliable test before the walk into town. The Sailor Shirt is the clearest case of it: the version offered at the start of a save is fixed, while the one stitched from a fish accepts dye and has a neckerchief that colours separately from the body.
Rings make excellent dye and nothing else uses them up half as usefully. A Sturdy Ring reads blue, a Slime Charmer Ring and a Jade Ring green, an Immunity Band and an Iridium Band purple, a Ruby Ring and a Vampire Ring red, and a Topaz Ring orange. That finally gives the duplicates piling up from mine runs and monster goals somewhere to go.
In practice both tools get used on one trip. A garment comes off the machine, the spool roughs its colour in with whatever is to hand, and the pots then finish the job precisely once six families are in the bag. The pots care only about what is worn, so the sensible order is to put the new outfit on first and empty the bag into the pots second.
Notes
Quality counts for nothing anywhere in the process. A gold-star crop dyes exactly as a plain one does and carries the same strength, so the right item to feed a pot is the worst in the stack and the right one to ship is the best.
The six colour families have a second life outside the wardrobe. Mr. Qi's Prismatic Grange wants a display sorted by those same colours, so the tinted dot on an icon has already done most of the sorting before the stall is even set up.
A machine of the farm's own arrives by post once Emily's gemstone order on the board has been finished, which takes the walk and her opening hours out of the equation. The dye pots stay where they are, so the sliders remain a reason to keep visiting Willow Lane.
All Clothing
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
| Name | Image | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Dyeing | - | - |
| Emily's Magic Shirt | 
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| Luau Skirt | 
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- |
| Mystery Shirt | 
|
- |
| Tailoring | - | - |
| Tight Pants | 
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