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[Pilsu]

Flour sacks didn't become ubiquitous until the invention of the chain stitch machine in the 1800s. Certainly, sacks were used but mainly at home due to the amount of labor their production required. This should be reflected in the game.

[thekemp]

Hate to sound like a fuddy duddy, But this is a fantasy game, Not a history lesson.

[Geb]

I agree with this both on accuracy grounds (it can be a fantasy game and a history lesson in one, they're not incompatible) and on practical grounds.

A lot of the things dwarfs do with bags just need a container, not a flexible cloth container in particular. The hassle involved in making the bags is usually not worth it for the end result. I know that I never bother with flour until a few years into the game when the traders have brought along some bags with them.

[NW_Kohaku]

Of course, barrels are made without using any metal bands around them, and bags are made without sewing machines because dwarves can just magically turn one unit of a raw material into one finished product with no tools but a stone counter.

An argument that "dwarves shouldn't use bags that would be hard to make in real life" seems a little strange when, obviously, they just aren't that hard to make in this game - if you have them lying around, anyway, why not use them?

I could see an argument for using either bags or barrels, depending on what you have available, but the way that barrels are currently handled (can carry ten items, even if one of those items is a bag that holds 10 items) would make that a little strange, until we get volume-based barrels.

[Pilsu]

They should be very time consuming to make. Barrel management hurdles are irrelevant and need to be looked into either way.


You can make the hoops out of wood too you know.

[Footkerchief]

Flour sacks didn't become ubiquitous until the invention of the chain stitch machine in the 1800s.

Is there someplace I can read more about this?

[Pilsu]

I really only gathered bits and pieces of it from articles talking about the reuse of sack cloth for clothing. I even have trouble finding what search wording gave me the info of sacks being considered precious property. It talked about them being embroided with the owner's initials or name and was pretty specific about this.

[NW_Kohaku]

Honestly, this seems like one of those small ideas that needs to have a bigger idea as a prerequisite.

If dwarves are going to have to start treating bags as more precious because they are harder to make (and that would probably make them more expensive, as well) so that they wouldn't be used in flour, you need to actually make bags more difficult to make, which would throw this into the realm of requiring better-developed dwarven tool use and more finely tuned resource production times.

Currently, the notion of requiring something like a power loom is silly, because dwarves can turn pig tails into thread in a couple hours, and in a couple more hours of work, that thread can be a bag.  (And as part of the Improved Mechanics thread, I would have suggested a power loom that uses mechanical power to help improve production rates, but didn't, because it was farcical when you consider how fast dwarves can currently produce clothing.)

[Pilsu]

The bags are already more expensive than the flour itself. 

[Mel_Vixen]

But bags are reusable. Flour not so much. Also sewing such a thing with a machine might be faster but it isnt a that lengthy task to do it by hand either. I am fine with this anachronism. It would still be interesting if you could find your sources Pilsu.

[TomiTapio]

I think the migrants bring invisible workshop tools with them, like hammers for the forge and needles for the clothier's shop. Pots and pans for the kitchen.
I added a toy "bowl" and wooden cup, so the caravans bring kitchen stuff.

[NW_Kohaku]

Really, why is this limited to flour, anyway?  What else is held in bags?  Dyes, which are only barely more valuable than flour, seeds, (which seriously benefit from the 10 seed stacks in a bag, 10 bags in a barrel mechanic) which aren't particularly valuable, thanks to how common they are...

Really, why not make this "bags should not exist at all" if we're trying to limit their functionality?  Or at least, cloth bags...  I know that you could still make goat skin (or bladder) sacks that could still hold things, were cheap, and were used as far back as the Greeks.

[Pilsu]

http://www.quilthistory.com/feedsacks.htm

Even if you consider the 500-year anachronism to be of minor importance, I see no reason to not address it. You need to keep in mind that eventually we'll likely have access to off-map wood and will be able to import barrels in larger quantities. Hopefully ones that aren't decorated with platinum rings. Implementing this now would certainly be a pain in the ass but the convenience of bags being free to grow should not get in the way of historical accuracy.

The supply chain would likely go from grain to bag and from bag to barrel. Personally I'd also rename bags as sacks.

[loose nut]

Well, the big missing link here is pottery, which would be used for many of the long-term storage purposes listed at the top of that quilthistory.com article, and use of which would make dwarves more earth-dependent and less wood-dependent, something that seems thematically appropriate. Bags should probably be used mostly for short-term schlepping jobs (and the sooner the better). However any dwarf that weaves a basket shall be immediately pitched in magma.