Leather Tanner

The Leather Tanner turns hides into workable stock. Five scrap hide, a unit of dung and five water become a single animal hide; run that hide back through with more dung and water and you get prepared hide, the form leatherworkers build from.

Hides come off huntables — deer and wolf — and off farm animals, and a kill can give you a clean animal hide or a torn scrap hide you have to make good five at a time. Everything else comes from elsewhere too: dung from the livestock pens, water from your own supply. Be aware the compost bin wants that same dung.

The dependency runs both ways, and it is the argument for owning one: nothing else in the colony consumes scrap hide. Where nobody runs a tanner, a hunter's torn hides are simply dead weight.

Both recipes are level 0, so anyone can use the tanner from day one — but only a ranger earns crafting experience and keeps the recipe; everyone else re-enters the ingredients each time. Neither is quick: a batch is thirty minutes and yields one item, so every prepared hide has an hour of tanner time and five scrap hide behind it. Set it going and walk away.

What comes next is the leather rack, where a ranger of level 1 or above turns prepared hide into leather and parchment.