As the quality tags for items is implemented into the game shortly, I'd like to hear your suggestions what the actual tags (bad, good, fine etc.) for different types of items could be.

The quality in most cases is divided into four categories (0-3), and we will use these for this tag suggestion thread.

Examples of quality categories:

0. Bad/Nearly unusable
1. Below average/Usable but low quality
2. Average/Fairly good
3. Superb/Fine

The average category (2.) calls for no tag, but for the categories 0, 1, 3 a tag depending on the item type will be added.

So, now I'm requesting for a sharp and neat tag suggestions separately for foods, furs and do-it-yourself items, and for even more separate item types if it feels necessary to you.

For example, in a case of food the tags could go like:

0. Yucky
1. Poor
2. - (average. no special tag)
3. Delicious

...and for furs/hides/leather:

0. Worthless
1. Inferior
2. -
3. Fine

...and for selfmade weapons, tools etc.

0. Poor
1. Crude
2. -
4. Fine

Ok, you got the picture now. Waiting for the suggestions/discussion.

Part of me wants it to be really simple and consistant and just use

Awful, Poor, ---, Fine for everything
(At least we'd know what everything meant)


But another part would like a bit more flavour:
Food: Awful, bland, ---, delicious

Furs: Worthless, poor, ---, fine

Weapons: Crude, poor, ---, fine

I'd particularly note the fact that there is obvious confusion in whether poor or crude is worse - I tend to have a different definition in my head, and I'm probably not the only one for whom the weapons qualities may seem a bit confusing....

The more I think about it, the more I prefer a simple consistant scale... (Or the dwarf fortress way of doing it....)

Yep - I'd also prefer a one simple scale for everything, but it indeed brings some flavour if there's a "crude javelin" and a "beatiful bear fur shirt".

Poor and crude... yes, verbal expression is tricky...

How does the dwarf fortress system go?

Symbols flanking the item's name. A *bronze spear* is much higher quality than a -bronze spear-. The text-based system definitely adds more flavor.


Food:
repulsive, bland, -, delicious

Leather and skins:
ragged, scarred, -, flawless

Weapons and tools:
primitive, clumsy, -, superb

Clothing:
tattered, ugly, -, beautiful


As a suggestion specifically to food, food should have another qualification: its freshness. Food should start out Fresh, then degrade to Stale, and finally Moldy as it gets closer to being spoiled. The quality of the food should suffer as it gets closer to spoiling.

So: a Delicious Fresh Roasted Pike would become in turn,
- Stale Roasted Pike
Bland Moldy Pike
Repulsive Spoiled Pike

Something that started out at a lower level would bottom out at Repulsive. So a Bland Fresh Roasted Reindeer Cut would become a Repulsive Stale Reindeer Cut, a Repulsive Moldy Reindeer cut, and finally a Repulsive Spoiled Reindeer Cut.

Just some thoughts. Hopefully you find them interesting.

The weapons and tools scale here seems pretty neat and descriptive to me. (altough 'superb' could be replaced with 'fine')

I think we will have separate quality tags for different item categories. However this calls for more pondering.

In case of fresh animal skins, ragged and flawless sound like good tags to me - but what about using 'inferior' instead of 'scarred'?

But when it comes to tanned furs the quality tags should be something else: poor, inferior and fine - for example. Since a succesfull tanning produces a flawless fur - no mistakes, the procedure has been completed correctly - but a skilled craftsman can produce 'fine' furs. And if you have a flawless skin you can't tan it down to a holey, ragged one - but yep, it can turn out to a 'poor' one upon bad tanning.

Of course the system (related to the food freshness suggestion) should work so that you can't produce fine fur out of ragged skin - only an inferior fur at the most or so.

About the food:

'bland' is a descriptive word but doesn't very much reflect the fact the cooking there has failed a bit. A big roasted pike is very 'bland' sometimes - without any spices - no matter how well cooked. But then again, no matter how great cook you are - it doesn't bring any extra flavor to this big roasted pike anyhow. Making a porridge with a great care and skill rarely produces a meal that can be called especially 'delicious'. :) So a 'fine' tag maybe could applied here instead of 'delicious'. Or then the system should recognize the complexity of the recipe and tag some of the meal 'delicious' or 'fine' depending on that.

Well, this is just mere pondering about the difficulty of reflecting the result by the words and stumbling on a path to find the correct expressions. Repulsive, bland and delicious suit the purpose and could be you used just fine.

However when thinking of what spoils the roasted meat you are cooking, it is usually overcooking, or burning it.

Have a word here, community. Let's see what we can can up with.

......
Food:
-1:Spoiled
0:Yucky
1:Poor
2:---
3:good
4:delicious

Furs/hides/leather
-1:shredded?(google translate)
0:Worthless
1:Inferior
2:---
3:Fine
4:Rare

Weapons/tools/armors:
-1:broken
0:Crude
1:Poor
2:---
3:tough
4:Excelent

Clothung:
-1:Unusable
0:tattered
1:ugly
2:---
3:beautiful
4:Superb
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Food, Furs, Weapons, Clothing

Could you use double words? I.e. -

Poor quality roast elk steaks

Poor quality elk hide

Poor quality short sword

Poor quality leather boots

~~

Mediocre quality

~~

N/A

~~

Good quality

~~

Which would make it easier than providing different labels for each different type.

That's too longish and could fill up the inventory screen very quickly.
"Spoiled good quality wild reindeer cut"....
And as everyone already knows, or at least soon discovers, that the poor/good/fine _are_ quality tags the 'quality' word itself would't be needed.

I like this idea! Cooking quality and freshness as two factor for food quality would be good, especially since sometimes you just don't realize that a whole batch of food is going to go bad soon and you find yourself without sustenance...

Also the other tags seem good, like primitive - clumsy - normal - fine for weapons and so on.

Any gimmick that conveys some quantitative idea of freshness would be great and it could be done in a way that doesn't take up more space on the inventory screen. It could be added as an extra description when it's eaten like "crunch crunch crunch... tastes a little stale". It'd be a little ambiguous until people got the idea that it conveyed first quality then age. Of course it would be very weird to see things like "This tastes delicious! This is starting to get rotten!" from a well prepared but 4 day old pike... Another idea might be an option to smell food from the inventory screen and get a message back about its general freshness.

Do poor tanners produce less workable material than good tanners or just worse quality?

Even something subtle like sorting the food inventory so that the oldest food is first would solve the problem. Granted in a less obvious way.

More flavour is definitely the choice over simplicity. This can be achieved without filling the inventtory screen with "Burnt Tattered Bear Fur Shirt": graphics. You can do this with item icons or by changing the item's text colour or have a different coloured background for the item's text. Basically the way Dwarf Fortress does it, but without unnecessary marks all over the place. Quality info would be shown with a text and other information could be told by colour codes.
This will bring another use for examining items: the item info would then tell basic info about the item in a way: "This Bear Fur Shirt is Tattered. It has been burnt nearly useless." When the player opens his inventory he can see that his Tattered Bear Fur Shirt has some sort of special quality because his shirt is displayed in a dark-grey text. By examining the item he finds out what the problem is.
Eventually the player knows the colour codes by heart and recognizes burnt clothing and rusty weapons without much effort. :)

Examples of colour codes:

Food:
Text implies whether the food is processed, as in roasted, salted, boiled etc.
Green backgrounded food is fresh and the colour would change to tan (for example, some other colour might be better) when it has been in you backpack for some time. Eventually, spoiled and rotten food could be shown with a purple background.
While background colour implies freshness, the text colour tells any specialities about the food, like whether it's delicious, repulsive or burnt. Food should loose it's deliciousness when it is not fresh anymore. Raw meat that has been in your backpack for some time and is no longer fresh (but isn't spoiled either) can be cooked and as a result the roasted meat is fresh again, but cooking not so fresh meat would have a slightly bigger chance of turning out average or repulsive rather than delicious.
(One shouldn't be able to eat large quantities of repulsive food, resulting in messages such as "You don't think you can eat this much longer" and in extreme cases vomiting, which harshly detoriates your food meter and after that you'd be unable to eat anything for a while without vomiting... but this is off-topic.)

Weapons:
Different weapons have different properties: metallic weapons can rust whereas clubs can't. I would ditch "primitive" as an implication of quality, because a "Primitive Club" could be any thick branch you can pick up from ground or snap from a tree without any tools. (Btw I want to be able to do this, actually. Using bones from animals and people would be nice IMO as well :P)
Broken, Crude, (average) and Fine would do well as basic information for all weapons. A light gray background for the weapon implies that the weapon is dull (for anything sharp) or worn (for bludgeoning weapons). The grey background gets a little darker the duller/more worn the weapon is and eventually the weapon breaks. Dull blades can be sharpened but wooden and other weapons can't be helped much. Broken weapons can be used, but they're far less effective than even a dull crude counterpart. How useful a weapon is when broken depends on the weapon: broken swords can be used to cut things but a broken club is virtually useless.
Rust would be displayed in a maroon background colour. Metallic weapons will rust if you don't take good care of them. A dull blade might rust, especially if the weapon has been left around lying in snow or grass or when wielded a lot in rain. That rusty sword may break apart aytime soon and if neglected it'll be beyond sharpening... and a cut from a rusty sword might be very nasty. Little rust can be shown with a maroon background and a thoroughly rusted weapon could have a bright red background.
Special qualities such as great balancement would be shown in text colour. A weapon would lose it's fine balancement if the weapon is broken and it can't be regained even if you found a blacksmith who could fix the weapon. :(

Icon graphics would greatly enhance the clarity of colour codes, but they would require a ton of work and they would take some space on the inventory screen. Item icons would depict the basic quality: Rusty swords and tattered clothes, rotten meat etc. Small overlayed effects (like those you use for raging and running NPCs) would depict food's deliciousness, a sword's fine balancement or a gauntlet's reinforcement.

If making a crap load of icon graphics for every item and every condition seems like an insuperable task, I can help. For free. PM or email me if you're interested.

Sami,

This doesn't fit into the current game interface, but I think it would be interesting if the interface had the Item name, and then showed modifying characteristics next to or below it; which could go beyond quality.

So, for example, this way, you can (if you wanted) build in the ability for clothing to get wet (causing sickness, and requiring you to dry it) or bloody (marking down their value if they're not cleaned right away).

A linen shirt can then be listed as:

Linen shirt
bloody, tattered

Then each quality has an indicator somehow , next to it, showing as to whether the status is repairable. For example a linen shirt that's tattered may be able to be repaired through sewing to a better state, or it may not be. The indicator on bloody would indicate whether it can be cleaned.

Of course, this would all be added complexity to the game, so you know better what should be implemented.

But this way you could have more than one characteristic for food, so for example:

Roasted trout
burnt, moldy

We are getting very nice suggestions here - and at some point more complex item descriptions will surely be added. However the problem with having for example the food state indicated by the background colour, or a separate description in the inventory, is that you can't then find out the whole item statistics by looking at an item that is laying on the ground or worn by NPC. Of course a separate systems could be added to have a verbal description if the item isn't in your inventory, and colour/description line if it appear in your inventory - but that's some extra work and maybe even confusing.

So it's best to have a verbal item descriptions.

But let's keep on thinking about the all quality, freshness etc. tags. They surely bring a lot of extra to the game when implemented.

At first I'll add simple quality tags for hides and food -> "Delicious roasted pike", "Ragged wild reindeer hide". And we'll move ahead from there.
Adding quality for weapons/tools/clothes follows shortly - but would require maybe adding few more character skills.

And it could be useful for physician skill:
With exellents bandages and tools it would be better than with a normal bandage.

Anything Eternal said makes me giggle like a school girl.

Damn I love this game.