Craft Normal Wood Into Fine Wood at Prohibitive Costs

[Wesreidau]

One of the economic rules is that of substitutions; if coffee is prohibitively expensive and scarce, people will switch to tea or substitute it with chickory. The substitutes aren't as good, but the substitutes are cheap, until an equilibrium is met. Noticeably, hardwood beams are tremendously expensive, but a laminate wood beam can be found just as strong and far cheaper. You just have to go to the trouble of making it.

 

Another economic problem is waste materials in the pursuit of precious materials. Gravel spoil from a gold mine, for example, might be hauled away at a loss and dumped because the desired material, gold, requires processing so many tons of rock per ounce of gold. Other instances include early oil refineries, which operate by distilling crude through boiling it like a whiskey still, attempting to produce kerosene for lamps. They were literally dumping worthless gasoline into rivers before Rockefeller realized he could burn gasoline in his refineries instead of buying coal to burn.

 

Right now we have fine wood (and compass wood) as a prohibitively expensive and scarce resource gained only by harvesting normal wood. If I want to build an exceptional ship, there's no substitute. So I'm going to grind out plain wood I don't need and dump it onto the market for the fine wood I do need. That's okay for Oak, which can make planks, but Live Oak or Bermuda Cedar can't make planks. They're only useful for making ships. Even Bermuda Cedar, which should be ultra-valuable, won't sell because its dumped to the market as people grind away for Fine Bermuda Cedar.

 

The price of various normal woods are going to plummet unless...

 

A. All non-fine woods can be used to make planks, blocks, barrels, carriages, charcoal, etc, or can be converted to planks and then planks used to create barrels, blocks, carriages, etc. This allows surplus normal wood to be used elsewhere. However we still have market dumping and this may only serve to depress the value of other secondary products. Fine wood would still be expensive.

 

B. Normal wood can be turned into fine wood at prohibitive costs. This allows surplus wood to be bought up and turned into fine wood. If a hundred labor hours turned twenty oak logs into one fine oak log, by some elaborate act of carpentry, then surplus wood is destroyed, a market equilibrium can be met and the price of normal wood will rise. Eventually people will decide normal wood is too expensive to convert into fine wood at the current rate, and spend their labor hours farming some more.

 

(I suspect the devs plan to tweak the drop rate for fine wood behind the scenes to try and normalize the occurrence of Exceptional ships. If so they can have the exact conversion rate from normal to fine wood follow the same drop rate they set elsewhere and not tell us what we'll get in the crafting recipe.) 

[Sea Archer]

Maybe the wood can be converted in a fine wood substitution, which can only be used to craft common to mastercraft vessels, but no exceptional. This would give an incentive to craft those intermediate level ships.

[shaeberle84]

I like this idea and the economic concept behind it.