I'd still stick with way the game handles it by default for two important causes.
1) Many creatures have value modifiers making their leather worth something of note.
2) It allows per creature detailing. Such as fixed temperatures, or special variations of leather to specific creatures.
3) It pears tanning down to two templates. The skin materiel template that flags something as a usable leather, and one generic template reaction.
( 4) You remove the sick fun of having goblin leather decorations if you mod a entity to allow butchering of sentient kills.)
The structure I've been working on is basically an enlargement on the other ones I've seen, mainly using the structure Deon used as a basis. It would go in 5 or 6 tiers, making for 12 or so material templates -- or 24-30 (see below), something like this:
- Tier 1: SKIN_WEAK (small or thin-skinned animals)
- Tier 1A: SKIN_WEAK_FURRED (furry small or thin-skinned animals)
- Tier 2: SKIN (most mundane animals)
- Tier 3: SKIN_STRONG (elephants, rhinos, etc.)
- Tier 4: SKIN_MYTHICAL (FBs, fantastical animals that warrant it)
- Tier 5: SKIN_SPECIAL (sentients, cats, other special -- or sick and twisted -- cases)
These yield:
- Tier 1: suede (generic)
- Tier 1A: suede or fur (generic, choice of a fur reaction or a suede one)
- Tier 2: leather (generic)
- Tier 3: hide (named)
- Tier 4: hide (named -- mythical creatures class)
- Tier 5: skin (named -- as in "elf skin gloves")
This leaves a lot of the more interesting creatures specifically-named and working as in vanilla by default. It simplifies things (hopefully) at the user level, and in terms of what the game tracks, but obviously is a lot more complex in the raws. More infrastructure and creature-raw-editing than just using the stock skin and leather templates, but then it allows for more fine-tuned naming (hide sounds better than leather for a lot of animals). And it retains the sick joy of elf, goblin and cat skin leather.
As for genericized leathers losing the animal-value variations... yeah, the structure above doesn't handle that, and that's not so good.
I suppose a good compromise could be dividing the lower, genericized tiers of leather into 3 sub-tiers each (1x value, 2x value, 4x value, or whatever). Possibly making the most valuable lower-tier animal leathers named again (ermine fur coat, mink fur gloves, giant bat leather, etc.). This would, again, make for more raw complexity and a few more entries in the stocks menus, but, hey, we're used to
hundreds of useless entries, many with apparent identical names, so 5-10 more won't, I hope, really have that disruptive workaroundness that workarounds often have.
I've decided to revert to animal-specific leather in the next version because it's easier than to make workarounds to make civs use leather at all. If there is just generic leather, the game assumes there's no access to animals with leather and does not generate leather armor at all.
Hmm...I haven't yet seen this problem in my own use of the generic leather mod, as both my home civ and others use clothing items made out of generic leather.
Veok's?
Why not just add the generic leather to a mundane creature? add [PREFIX:NONE] and there you go, non-specific leather.
Does this work? Is there any disadvantage? Sounds great if it does.
Or possibly you could modify the reaction product tag in the skin template. I know thats caused me some annoyance once with civs getting acces to materials they went supposed to due to that tag.
I don't understand this part very well... could you explain that a bit further?