Loom

The Loom turns coloured string into bolts of patterned cloth. It is the seamstress's tool, and it is the one station in the game where the craft itself is a game.

Five cloths, all level 1. Each takes ten string and a pattern — wool cloth is ten plain wool string, silk is ten silk string, cotton ten plain cotton — except satin, which blends five linen string with five silk. Linen takes ninety seconds; the rest take sixty.

A pattern is not something you gather. You research it at the Research Table, then copy it at the Engineering Bench using parchment, which a ranger makes at the leather rack. Three professions stand behind a single bolt of cloth.

Then the puzzle. Crafting opens a sliding-tile game where you reassemble the texture, and anyone may use the loom — but a non-seamstress gets a harder grid. You play it once however many bolts you are making, and you stay at the station until the craft finishes. The app was rebuilt recently: a simpler layout, with numbers and colours on the tiles to work from.

The cloth goes on to the sewing line and into furniture as covers, sheets and blankets. And the strings themselves can be dyed at the Dye Tank first, which is how a colony ends up with patterns nobody else has.