Basketweaving Station

Every colonist arrives with a small basket, a seed bag and a billhook; every farmer gets a harvest bag on top. None of it lasts. A small basket is forty uses, a large bag twenty, a seed bag ten — and when one wears through, this is the table that makes the next one.

Reed is the whole material. Five of the six recipes take nothing else: 5 reed for a seed bag, 6 for a harvest bag, 7 for an empty pouch, 10 for a small basket, 15 for a large bag. Nothing takes longer than two minutes, and nothing spoils on the table — though an output left sitting there can be picked up by anyone who wanders past.

The small basket is the one you will make again and again. It is the gathering tool for clay and sand, for apple, orange, lemon, lime, fig, olive and cherry trees, for blueberry and blackberry bushes, and for collecting from chickens and pigs. A large bag is what a sand box wants, and it will take two hundred and forty loads out of a single one.

Two of the six are not tools at all. An empty pouch is a smith's business: a pouch and one ingot press into a copper, silver or gold coin bag at the forge, which is where coin comes from. And flax fiber is the odd one out — the only recipe here that does not use reed, five flax in and ten fiber out, and the first step of the cloth chain, since fiber spins into linen string at a spinning wheel and string weaves into linen and satin at a loom.

Three recipes at level zero, three at level one. It is a cheap table and an early one, and a surprising amount of the colony quietly runs through it.