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Recycle clothes and armor (cloth and leather)

Do you have an excess of unused poor quality leather armor from various sieges? Tons of worn clothes filling up your stockpiles? Here is a solution to these problems.

This mod adds new reactions to allow your dwarves to try to extract cloth or leather from any clothing or armor made from these materials, destroying the clothing/armor in the process. The chance to extract useful material (i.e. 1 piece of cloth/leather) is 50% for upper body wear/headwear/legwear/shields and 25% for footwear and handwear (since they are created in pairs). If the reaction fails, the clothing/armor is destroyed with nothing in return.

New reactions:

Clothier's shop: 5 recycle clothes reactions are added, and take clothing of the specified type made from any woven material (e.g. plant, silk, yarn).

Leather works: 6 recycle leather clothes/armor reactions are added, and should take any clothes or armor (including shields) made from any type of leather.


For technical reasons, there are separate reactions for each main type of clothing/armor. This includes upper body wear (e.g. tunics, cloaks, leather armor, etc.), headwear (caps, hoods, leather helms, etc.), legwear (pants, leggings, thongs, etc.), handwear (gloves and mittens), footwear (shoes, socks, leather boots) and shields (leather shields and bucklers).



When you set a dwarf to work on one of the reactions, the dwarf will grab the nearest piece of clothing that fits the reaction chosen. This can be a XXPig tail sockXX or a ☼Giant cave spider silk sock☼; the reaction does not differentiate by item quality (this is in fact not possible to do with the current modding system as far as I know).

Thus, it's a good idea to build a Clothier's shop and/or Leather worker, and set the workshop to only take from a specific stockpile of poor quality clothes/armor before starting the reactions.

To get rid of worn clothes your dwarves are hoarding, you can use DFHack with the command cleanowned scattered x, which marks all worn owned clothes for dumping. Then put the dump zone in the middle of the stockpile linked to your Clothier's shop, wait for your dwarves to dump everything, unforbid the clothes, and then start mass recycling.


This mod must be loaded after the vanilla_entities (e.g. at the bottom) to add the reactions properly.

This mod should enable recycling of clothes or leather armor added by other mods, as long as their material is woven (e.g. plant cloth/silk/yarn), or leather.

I haven't yet tested if this recycling works on adamantine cloth clothes, but it might. Let me know if you try.