Upgrading large items

[Barbamaus]

The main objective of the following suggestion is to allow players to upgrade SOME of their large items without having to destroy it and make a new one from scratch.

Let's talk real life for a second, then I'll move to in game content. What would you do if the frame of your bed breaks? Sure you could buy a whole new bed, including mattress, pillows and sheets. But most likely you'll just buy a new frame, or even fix the old one if the damage is not huge. And what do you do when you have to move your wardrobe to the new house? Wouldn't you disassemble it for easy storage and transportation? I know I would.

So let's see what this would look like in game:
- Let's take the bed as our first example. Building a Sturdy Bed requires boards, blocks, cloths, and feathers. Let's say you got lucky, and you got gifted some nice q100 wood and your flax is already well on its way over q100. Unfortunately, you just started farming chickens, and the feathers you have are only q10. Your bed quality is gonna suffer from that. So you have to make a choice: wait a few more weeks for your chickens to grow in quality, or use that nice wood you have only a bit of with low quality feathers to get your bed today? It's a hard choice, and either way you won't be happy.
But what if you had another choice? Build it today, and upgrade it 2 weeks later to only change the feathers of your pillow.

- Let's take another example: a loom. Unlike the bed, the loom is something you might want to upgrade somewhat often, to keep raising the quality of many other items you make. Looking at it, we find again very simple materials: string, boards, blocks, and branches. Let's say you manage to trade some amazing branches with someone else, but you know you already used your best boards for the old loom. Why not being able to disassemble it and just change the branches?

So how would upgrading work? I see two possible ways:
- 1st. Disassembling it completely: the item would break down to it's basic components, giving you back all (or most, given a small chance of some components breaking) the materials you used. After that you just use the ones you're still interested in to build a new item, changing the bad quality ones with new and improved ones (feathers, in the bed example).
This would also work as a secondary "scavenge" feature, allowing you to disassemble some abandoned/old large items for their materials. But that's another topic.
- 2nd. Upgrade by adding new materials, losing the old ones. This would require an "upgrade" features (much like the repair one). It would use items in your inventory to change the components of the item, improving it's quality. This method has a couple of issue the first one doesn't have: you would need a way to check the quality of each component (adding even more annoying numbers on your screen), and the chances of downgrading by mistake are much higher (unless some safety net would be involved, but that's more work). I don't really like this method, but it's still a possibility.

Either way, you wouldn't be able to upgrade just any item. Every item that doesn't involve quality, like most containers, doesn't require this system (it would still be nice to have for scavenging reasons). Items made with bricks, such as ovens, wouldn't allow you to "switch a brick" or to disassemble and reassemble elsewhere.

If the "disassemble" method is chosen, items made with bone glue could require you to put new one in, losing the glue component in the process of disassembling it. Large items made of metal could give you back bars (or nuggets) with an average quality instead of the specific one you used, since they were probably melted together to make the item (e.g. a coin press could give you 3 cast iron bars, two wrought iron bars, and one steel bar, all of average quality instead of the specific ones you used in the first place, making the process slightly less effective for metal items).
Also, the disassembling method would allow for skills to come into play again, both when rebuilding and when disassembling (based on the item Q and your carpentry/smithing skill you would have a small chance of breaking some materials when disassembling, getting only 75% to 90% of the materials back).
Disassembling could also get less effective the more you do it: every time you disassemble an item, the older components have a higher chance of breaking. Let's say it's the third time you re-build that loom, but you never changed the strings; you would have a high chance of them breaking, against a low chance of the item you changed the last time you did it.

It could take about the same stamina and time as building, but that's not really my concern right now.

I believe adding such a feature would mostly benefit low-tier players who often live off that few good q items they found or were gifted, rather than large villages or high-tier players that can improve all their mats at the same time and won't.

Enjoy!

[overtyped]

I like the idea of some level of salvaging items, but beyond that, not really.

[Barbamaus]

That's the thing, the idea here is not to scavenge for parts, is to have a way to upgrade existing items without having to rebuild them from scratch.

[MagicManICT]

Eliminate the obvious examples, such as housing or as mentioned, items without meaningful quality, that aren't necessary, practical, or possible to upgrade. (Note: housing is already on the drawing board for development sometime in the near future.) Eliminate those items that are just cheap to rebuild*--tables and chairs for example. Eliminate those items with a single material such as anvils (hard ingots) and tubs (boards). What's left other than a couple of examples like bed, spinning wheel, or loom?

*these should be considered trivial in cost: wood products, plant fibers and resulting materials, bones, bone glue (though annoying to make), leather, iron and bronze, copper, tin

It's a good concept, but is it worth developer time to implement without broader implications than this? I like the recycling ideas posted, and I'd like to see one of those implemented over the upgrading option.