Item quality level

[I-am-Erk]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Presently we do not do a good job of simulating the difference between a well-made or a poorly made object. In addition, it would be nice if different salvage materials were able to be represented somehow.

Item quality levels seem to be the answer to both. However, there are a few issues as brought up in discussion with Kevin and Mlangsdorf and myself:

• Item quality should not allow one item (eg a hand-forged hacksaw) to supercede a higher level, usually pre-cataclysm item (eg. a high speed steel hacksaw).
• Inheriting item materials (this hand-forged hacksaw is made from oak wood and aluminium and low quality steel) is not desirable as it would be nearly impossible to figure out a rational system with all the variables involved.

Describe the solution you'd like
In general, item quality level could be applied in three ways:

1. Durability. Well made items tend to last longer and need less maintenance.
2. Crafting speed. A shoddily made item should do the job it's needed for slower, and a well-made item could do it faster. This can be represented in a few ways - first of all, a good tool tends to be easier to use, but also this abstracts some of (1) durability above: a shoddily made tool needs to be tightened/sharpened/restrung/degaussed during the task and so takes longer to complete it.
3. Enjoyment: Using a crappy tool is frustrating. Using a great tool is a pleasure. A small enjoyment boost (and perhaps a Craftsman trait that amplifies both the enjoyment and the suffering from using good/bad tools) would be appropriate.

I propose breaking tool quality into four categories:

• Shoddy tools offer a 5% penalty to crafting speed and have 10% less durability. They impose a small penalty to morale during the task and for around an hour after finishing, "had to make do with shoddy tools" eg.
• Normal tools offer no penalties nor bonuses.
• Good tools offer a 2.5% bonus to crafting speed, but have no joy bonus nor durability bonus.
• Exquisite tools offer a 5% bonus to crafting speed and a morale bonus equivalent to the penalty for shoddy tools.

Crafting speed bonuses would be averaged, so the max bonus/penalty you can have is 5% for working with entirely shoddy or exquisite tools.

Determining quality:

• Quality of a finished item should be a randomized value based on quality of the tools (and possibly components) that went into it, plus character skill and attributes. Equation to be determined.
• Found items in the environment should be randomly distributed something like 20% shoddy, 50% normal, 20% good, 10% exquisite.
• Itemgroups and item spawning elements in mapgen should be allowed to specify a different quality distribution for specific items (eg the tools in a household basement are more likely to be shoddy, the tools on a jobsite are more likely to be good)

Future notes:
Items that are not tools, most notably clothing and food, could also have these quality levels. The code should be made extensible for this but for now should just apply to items with tool qualities, since we don't want to make people worry about if they're working with a piece of shoddy sheet metal to build their tin box.

Describe alternatives you've considered
While there are arguments for allowing quality to affect other things eg. item damage when used as a melee weapon, the granularity of our system doesn't really allow this to work. It would have to be considered carefully.

[Morat2255]

The simpler solution, and I've seen this suggested multiple times, would be to tie it in to the existing tool qualities system. For example, using a tool with Fine Screwing 2 on a task that requires only Fine Screwing 1 would make the job go faster. Adding in [shoddy], [good], [exquisite] modifiers and so on seems like more effort than just making sure that old-world factory made equipment tends to have higher tool quality. It already works pretty much like that with tree cutting. You want a tool with higher tree cutting not because it lets you do different jobs, but because it makes the job go faster, so you start with a crappy hand tool (stone axe) that takes forever and is inefficient, then move on to a more carefully crafted forged tool, then eventually find a chainsaw.

[I-am-Erk]

That's a completely different thing than what this is talking about, from the ground up. The very premise of this is to ensure that two salvaged wood saws might not be identical, or that two crafted hand axes can vary in usability, without one of them not being able to do the same things the other can. You're describing the opposite.

[FuelType-Memes]

Maybe "stylish" should depend on item quality too? Like if a jacket is shoddy it's no longer stylish because it's quality is so poor

[I-am-Erk]

There's a better idea for how to implement this