Nest Crafting Overhaul ~ Display by Material & Different Quality Nests

Hi everyone!

I was crafting nesting materials earlier, burying my 75 dandelions and ignoring my single bear pelt in my quest to make some 10-yarrow nests, and it really got me thinking about ways nest crafting could be improved upon. The two main points to draw from my recent experience is the difficulty in making nests from materials with first letters late along the alphabet and, more interestingly, the current futility of making nests out of bear pelts.

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First and foremost, the crafting menu could really use a change in how it displays eligible items in your hoard. I tend to end up with *a lot* of herbs like Yarrow, Tansy, and Spoonwood just because it's such a hassle getting to them on the crafting menu. It only displays the first 200 eligible items in alphabetical order, and for me right now, that list ends at Cedar Bark. I have to bury at least a dozen stacks of items to get to access certain herbs and that's really gross, I'm sure not gonna any of my 50 Ibis Feathers to make nests, toys are much more generally useful!

So please, give players a little more to work with while crafting nests. I think a nice dropdown menu that has each type of material and the amount in your hoard sounds perfect, that way people can click "Yarrow (x53)" and "Tansy (x42)" then check boxes among just the selected herbs to their hearts content.

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The second and final thing I want to address are all the trophy items and feathers that are seldom used to make nests, and for good reason! They're more valuable, useful, and exclusive items, yet there's no benefit to adorning a nest with bear pelts and condor feathers anymore than there is spamming ten Tansy into it. I think the option with the most potential and pizzazz on this front is to add different tiers of nests that can be crafted depending on the material used. These different quality nests can then increase the chances of pups born from it to exhibit rarer traits such as Higher-Tier Bases, Marking Inheritance, and Secondary/Primary Mutation Chance. The qualities of nests will be based on the amount of uses the item has, with trophy items being used to craft Perfect Nests. Here's an example of how the qualities could scale:

10-19 Total Uses: Standard Nest (No Influence on Litter)
20-34 Total Uses: Good Nest (10% Increased Chance of Traits)
35-49 Total Uses: Great Nest (25% Increased Chance of Traits)
50+ Total Uses: Amazing Nest (50% Increased Chance of Traits)
50+ Total Uses Including at least 1 Trophy Item: Spectacular Nest (75% Increased Chance of Traits)
50+ Total Uses Including at least 2 Trophy Items: Perfect Nest (100% Increased Chance of Traits)

This is all just an example and I personally don't know the coding or RNG behind the quirks of Wolvden, but in principle I think this could work out to add a new layer of nuance to the nesting mechanic of the game.

Leave your thoughts down below and thanks for reading!

This is a cute idea but the problem with this idea lies with how the breeding system rolls entirely.

A wolf's pups aren't rolled and generated at birth. Instead, their everything is determined the moment you hit that breed button and the mother becomes pregnant. That's why breeding items are used before breeding. For this to work the breeding system would have to be changed entirely. I think it's more trouble than it's worth.

The above, yeah. The only thing I can see which might be easy to add with the current system is to give pups a (flat, not percentage based, I would think) stat boost at birth depending on nest quality. It would be more "realistic" as well, since a pup in a warmer, safer nest would presumably get a better start in life health-wise and turn out stronger.

I do like that as an alternative! Like I said, cute idea but it just wouldn't work by effecting appearance.

Stats are determined at conception as well, but since adding more stats doesn't need to involve the parent's traits, it shouldn't be any more difficult logistically than a wolf gaining permanent stats from hunting (unlike inheriting of markings, bases, etc which could have changed on the parents in the meantime.)

support!! 

the main things about the nesting mechanic that i really want changed are just the way you select the materials, as spindaswirls said. i think it would be a lot nicer if you could see all the items in your hoard and could search with a search bar and have a counter of how many items you selected, pretty much i want the selector box from when you set up trades, but for crafting nest material.

i hope the mods look at this and consider updating the nest crafting! :)

(also i support everything spindaswirls said, just wanted to add my little bit on what i'd like that hasn't already been directly stated :) )