Tailoring
| Tailoring | |
|---|---|
| Type | Clothing |
Tailoring reads an item and turns it into something to wear. Cloth goes into the feed of the Sewing Machine, one other item goes onto the spool, and the spool item alone decides whether a shirt, a pair of trousers, a skirt, shorts or a hat comes out of the other side. The recipe map is enormous and often very funny: a Pearl becomes a Bridal Veil, a Lava Eel becomes a sleek pink cap, an Ostrich Egg becomes a helmet, and a Treasure Chest becomes a pirate's hat. There is a logic running under it, so tree fruit tends to become comfortable trousers, flowers become skirts, tree seeds become warm hats and old bones become a skeleton shirt. Footwear is the one thing the machine cannot create, and the one tailored thing anybody in the valley will buy, which leaves the rest of the wardrobe running on curiosity rather than profit.
Overview
The pattern in the recipes shows itself once a few are known. Fruit off a tree makes loose-fitting clothing, so an Apple, an Apricot, a Banana, a Cherry, a Mango or a Pomegranate each produce Relaxed Fit Pants, while an Orange or a Peach produces Relaxed Fit Shorts instead. The small sweet crops make working clothes, and Cranberries, Pineapple, Powdermelon, Strawberry and Wild Plum all turn into Farmer Pants. Summer fruit makes Shorts, which is where Blueberry, Grape, Hot Pepper and Melon land. Flowers make the skirts and the dresses: Blue Jazz and Tulip make the Skirt, Poppy and Summer Spangle make the Pleated Skirt, and Fairy Rose and Sunflower make the Long Dress. The two luxury crops, Ancient Fruit and Starfruit, make Genie Pants. A Slime Egg of any colour makes Baggy Pants, and Honey of any flower makes the Simple Dress.
Hats follow the same kind of sense. Tree seeds make a Beanie, so an Acorn, a Maple Seed, a Pine Cone or a Mahogany Seed all do the job, while the sticky products of the same trees, Maple Syrup, Oak Resin and Pine Tar, make the looser Floppy Beanie. Awkward fish make a Fishing Hat, among them the Ice Pip, the Stonefish, the Scorpion Carp, the Slimejack, the Spook Fish, the Midnight Squid and the Void Salmon. Any of the totems makes a Totem Mask. A Jack-O-Lantern makes a Pumpkin Mask and a Golden Pumpkin a Witch Hat. A Dinosaur Egg makes a Dinosaur Hat, a Blobfish a Blobfish Mask, a Dragon Tooth a Swashbuckler Hat, a Cinder Shard a pair of Sunglasses, a Radioactive Bar a set of goggles, a Ginger a Forager's Hat, a Sweet Gem Berry a White Turban, a Miner's Treat a Propeller Hat and a tin of Caviar a feathered Fashion Hat. Fireworks and party food make the Party Hats, each colour from its own ingredients, and Cranberry Sauce or Stuffing makes the old-fashioned Flat Topped Hat.
Shirts are where the list runs longest, because most of the shirts a farmer can pick at the start of a save have a counterpart that can be stitched later. Clay, Sap, Stone, Wool, Mudstone, a Bat Wing, a Bouquet, a Cave Carrot, a Dandelion, a Duck Feather, a Complete Breakfast, an Omelet, a Bean Hotpot, a Vegetable Medley and a tub of Ice Cream each produce one of them. Bones of every description make the Skeleton Shirt, from a plain Bone Fragment through the fossils to a Snake Skull, and the same shirt is one of the few pieces that drops off a monster, since Haunted Skulls in the mines part with it and with two shades of grey trousers.
A Prismatic Shard on the spool is a lottery rather than a recipe. It produces one of the prismatic garments at random and will happily repeat itself, so collecting the set costs more shards than it ought to.
Footwear is handled completely differently. A pair cannot be made, only rebuilt. The pair carrying the wanted numbers goes on the spool and the pair carrying the wanted look goes in the feed, and the machine hands back the feed pair, renamed as custom-tailored and carrying the other pair's numbers. The spool pair is used up, which makes the trade one way and worth thinking about first. Footwear is also the only tailored thing the Adventurer's Guild will take money for.
The menu has one quirk worth knowing about. Items that cannot be used stay bright until Cloth is actually sitting in the feed, and an invalid item on the spool greys the Cloth out in turn, so an empty machine makes everything in the bag look possible.
Use
Everything runs on Cloth, and Cloth runs on sheep. A Loom turns one Wool into a bolt in about four hours, and the recipe for it arrives once Farming has come far enough. Good Wool often comes out of the Loom as two bolts rather than one, and the better the fleece the likelier that is, which gives petting and feeding a point beyond the animals themselves. Rabbits in a deluxe coop give Wool as well, more slowly than sheep do. The fallbacks are thin: a Recycling Machine occasionally squeezes a bolt out of a Soggy Newspaper, the Desert Trader swaps one for a handful of Aquamarine on the right day of the week, and Mummies in the Skull Cavern drop it when they are properly put down. None of those keeps up with a hobby, so a barn of sheep is what makes a wardrobe possible rather than a novelty.
The system opens with a visit rather than a purchase. Once a single piece of Cloth has reached the bag, Emily walks up to the farmhouse on the next sunny day to say that her Sewing Machine is there to be used, and the machine and the dye pots beside it both come to life at the same moment. Her own order on the board, once it has been filled, puts a second machine in the farmhouse by post.
Not every garment needs a machine at all. The Oasis in the Calico Desert puts one random shirt on its shelf each day for a flat thousand gold, and that shelf is the only way to buy several of the shirts that have no recipe behind them. Broken crates, felled trees, hoed artifact spots and dead monsters each give up a cosmetic item once in a long while, and panning a river is by far the most generous of them. Most of what drops that way is a shirt, some of it is a hat, and furniture comes out of the same pool.
Which recipes give a dyeable result is worth knowing before an ingredient gets spent. The trousers, skirts, shorts and dresses off the machine mostly accept colour, while the shirts that mirror a character-creation choice mostly keep what they were given. A recipe with several possible ingredients takes its starting colour from the one actually used, so the same shirt stitched from two different fish comes out in two different shades, and dye then moves it on from there. That is the usual working order on a farm: stitch first, then recolour.
Notes
Mayor Lewis's Lucky Purple Shorts have a use at the machine for anybody who has managed to get hold of them. The shorts in the feed and a Gold Bar on the spool produce a trimmed version that can actually be worn in public, and the reaction from Marnie and from Lewis is the whole of the reward.
Several shirts share a name with one another, and the three called Bandana Shirt are the worst case, because nothing on the icon separates them. The description panel is the only way to tell which is which, and it is also the only way to find out which of a pair will take dye.
The stat transfer on footwear exists precisely because late boots rarely look like early ones. A favourite pair found in the first year can keep being worn to the end of a save, picking up better numbers each time a stronger pair turns up in the mines.
All Clothing
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
| Name | Image | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Dyeing | - | - |
| Emily's Magic Shirt | 
|
- |
| Luau Skirt | 
|
- |
| Mystery Shirt | 
|
- |
| Tailoring | - | - |
| Tight Pants | 
|
- |