Where to buy bulk fabric?

[Sekkho Asmadi]

My kingdom for fabric! I'm running all over the map and only finding vendors selling 1-8 fabric at a time. There has to be a vendor that sells more? Making it myself is not possible at this moment, just looking for a temporary spot to buy some fabric. Any help would be appreciated!

[caverat749]

it sounds silly buuuut have you considered mods that increase the amount of items shopkeepers have?

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by Sekkho Asmadi:

My kingdom for fabric! I'm running all over the map and only finding vendors selling 1-8 fabric at a time. There has to be a vendor that sells more? Making it myself is not possible at this moment, just looking for a temporary spot to buy some fabric. Any help would be appreciated!

Your best bet is to find a town that has several shops that sell it, no matter the amount, and just buy all they have once they refresh their inventory. "General" Shops tend to have it most often.

You can produce it yourself very easily. You can fit several Fabric Looms in the smallest building as well as Fabric Storage chests and probably a few Hemp Barrels. (Cotton Storage would need a bigger building, I think.)

So, find a town that has both a Fabric seller and a seller of Cotton or Hemp and camp out there a little while and collect fabric. The amount that they have will vary, but the General Shops in the UC seem to have a good supply. (In Sho Battai, I bought quite a bit while making quite a few Merc Armors for several days to sell to replenish my cash supply while running around the map.) The Shek General shop in Squin tends to have a decent amount and Waystations can have it as well.

Caravans, when they have it, tend to have a nice sized stack.


Just curious, but what are you using the Fabric for?

If you're trying to level up an Armor Smith, just hunt animals that drop Animal Skins and then set up a full Leather Armor crafting suite in a Small Building. You can put several Animal Skin and Leather storage barrels, a Tanning bench and a Leather Armor crafting bench in a small building. Converting about 100 animal skins to leather will get you enough Skill points, probably, to be able to realistically start crafting Leather Turtlenecks for great Armor Crafting exp gains. If you are in a region that has a good number of animals that drop skins, you'll progress very quickly.

Note: The "Sell Bandannas" strat for making cash while leveling up Armor Crafting is... Well, it's not something I would suggest since the amount of materials you need to do that is prohibitive and the returns on your investment, having to buy the materials, isn't "time efficient."

Animal skins -> Leather -> Leather Turtleneck (Or Dustcoats if you don't have the Leather Turtleneck recipe) is the progression I use.

[Egal]

I also think UC / Great Desert is best for a Industry-Town-Operation when you want to produce weapons/armor in the safety of a city. This is not only for fabrics but for all input materials, steelbars, armour plating...

Settle / Produce in Heft and make the tour
-Heng-Stoat-ShoBattai-Bark-Heft
Doable with mediocre athletics in 2 ingame days
Eeach town has 10-20 (if you are lucky) fabrics and on the way you encounter many caravans to also buy.
With one tour min 70 fabrics

[Sekkho Asmadi]

@Morkonan Making armors/weapons is a part of my economy, and I really need to upgrade the armor for most of my squad. Just never seem to have enough fabric! Everything else is good. I've found selling bandanas to be quite lucrative price wise, but it's a waste of fabric when I can be making other things. Caravans sound like the way to go, I need to focus on finding more of those.

@Egal I just did my first trip to the great desert last night. Stoat I think it was had like 20ish, was amazing :D

[SmallGespenst]

resource availability is probably the biggest reason to deal with the hassle of managing an outpost instead of setting up a workshop in an existing city. shopping runs around multiple cities can mitigate the problem, but given the effort involved it's not a real solution. given that fabric is used in armour and medicine and (not-trash) weapons it's almost certainly a deliberate resource bottleneck.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by Sekkho Asmadi:

@Morkonan Making armors/weapons is a part of my economy, and I really need to upgrade the armor for most of my squad. Just never seem to have enough fabric! Everything else is good. I've found selling bandanas to be quite lucrative price wise, but it's a waste of fabric when I can be making other things. Caravans sound like the way to go, I need to focus on finding more of those...

As you've discovered, doing the whole "Bandanna" crafting thing as a money maker is... not necessarily desirable. And, it's also an expensive waste of a sometimes hard to acquire resource. The amount of crafting time spent on each piece is negligible after the first few crafting points, so it's not an efficient way to skill up, either.

Set up a Leather Armor crafting area. You can do it all inside the smallest purchasable house in a city. You want to set up in a town that has a General Store or otherwise sells Cloth, maybe even Leather in a pinch, and that is in a biome or near one that has animal spawns that drop Animal Skins. Send a squad out to hunt animals and any bandits and the like that they can find, collect all the skins and meat, get the bandit loot too, come back to town and sell off the bandit loot, get a Cook trained up by making Dried Meat (Bonus if the town sells Bread - Meat Wraps) and dump all the Animal Skins in storage in your Leatherworking shop. Get your armorer making Leather, store it, rinse and repeat. When they're around 60, switch over to making Leather Turtlenecks. The Mastercraft version of those is good for the whole game for many characters. Make Dustcoats as needed.

Crafting Experience comes from time spent crafting as is not awarded on a per-unit basis. So, pick the items to craft that take the longest amount of time. A Leather Turtleneck will take basically "all day" to craft. For the amount of materials spent, crafting Leather Turtlenecks is the most efficient way to skill up. Dustcoats take awhile, too, and are just as useful for your characters. (Mostly for Crossbow users or those traveling in biomes with dangerous weather effects.)

Money from selling basic crafting items who's raw materials have to be purchased is difficult to justify until you can truly make big-ticket items like Specialist and Mastercraft grades. Later, you can make a good bit of cash selling armor/weapons once you entirely control the means of production. :)

I've crafted/sold/skilled up in The Hub and Sho Battai. The Hub, because it's easy to get into Vain and buy/sell in Squinn, Stack, two Waystations and Admag as well as two different Hiver villages. (A true "Hub." ) Sho Battai because of its supply of raw materials and Garru packs will spawn in the Desert. But, Skinners pop in the Desert in large numbers as well and they drop Meat.(Not as frequently as in some other areas.) The Border Zone also has Garru and Bonedog packs and Vain is filled with Beak Things and Gorillos.