Salvaging

[tyrtix]

This mechanics works pretty well in salem, objects remembers materials quality, so salvaging returns exact quality, but lesser quantity
Don't think that implementation of object ingredient memory is a big deal.

tbh is pretty simple: there's already the q stored in the item stats, and it's just the reverse of making the item in terms of products that the deconstruction will give. I proposed something like this a lot of time ago especially for those anvils and other stuff that's pretty hard to bash...besides, this could finally work on our damn deeded palisades so we can upgrade or change the walls easier than now, or bring down a house that was not as cool as we expected.

[Agrik]

We currently do not save -- nor do we wish to -- the exact list of all items used to produce an item, but rather only the final product and its qualities.

It doesn't have to list exact items, it can be a list of basic materials in the form of "generic" items, e.g.:

• "used string" — a kind of string that fits any such requirement, but isn't that particular kind of string (that was used to produce the item) anymore.
• "wooden stick" — a kind of branch
• "salvaged board" — a kind of wooden board
• "metal piece" — a kind of metal bar
• "worn cloth" — a kind of cloth
• "recycled leather" — a kind of leather
• etc.

And these can be stored like variable ingredients in food, just Qs instead of %s.

IIRC, we already have a "generic" type of hide, "Hide Patch" or something like this, which is created by splitting proper hides.

Using the final quality as the output quality for salvage would, however, lead to a situation where you can grind the qualities of certain inputs upwards by crafting and salvaging, which is undesirable. Setting everything recovered to Q10 is perhaps an option.

No need to resort to Q10s.
You can use median instead of mean, and limit quantity of salvaged resources to a half of what was used in craft. So a player would be able to get back a "top half" of a used resource with Qs trimmed down to the lowest in that bunch. At best it would be exactly what Q he used, if all that top half was the same. At worst, no resource item would become of higher Q than it was.

Though it would allow to dismantle and rebuild items with exactly the same top half... It doesn't look too bad at first glance... but can be fixed with lowering the quantity of salvaged resources to less than a half. To a 1/3, a 2/5, a half minus one, or something like that.

A downside I see is that it may make a bit harder to implement an item repair later. I'm not sure how to recalculate that median when repairing an item with resources.

Edit: rephrased the list of materials a bit.