Posted By RedStormBringer at 7:26 PM - Tue Feb 13 2018
Interesting, I think your county is the first I've seen to specialize in textiles. Will your textiles be for simple clothes alone or also those of the magical variety, assuming they exist?
I'd like to keep a level of realism around that, not necessarily non-magical realism, but an economic realism. I don't want to sell someone something that I can't reasonably provide.
At a bare minimum, I'd like to support designers (tailors interested in aesthetic and setting fashion for the region). If I can vertically integrate the city so that they have ample access to cheap but quality supply, I will do that. If I can't grow everything nearby I'll solve the logistical problems associated with getting the product and supplies they need to the city by other means (establishing an industry we can support and using that to bring in traders who have access to places that can produce the base textiles in the game).
The grand concept is festivals and events that support designers, support the industry that the designers depend on to make their product (tax incentive, infrastructure planning, and establishing access to them to increase their profits), and celebrate the colors of Elyria with the county as a backdrop.
My most likely tribe will be To'resk...while they aren't the most attractive option, they provide a very attractive backdrop. (Think Venice) This backdrop will be the showcase for designs during festivals that stress how you dress and celebrate the crafters in our region. Their region is also very fertile, which means a higher chance of many crops being able to exist nearby.
1) We can never be certain where we will end up. What fabrics/dyes that are readily available or are something we can even grow in the city is still an unknown. We don't know if they will port over real world crops (such as flax and cotton), if they will make up their own, and where they will place those objects.
The only confirmation we have is Kypiq will have access to silk. Whether their method of silk creation is the only one is yet to be seen. Worst case, I establish and access trade with Kypiq for my people. Best case, we can produce it ourselves upon porting over that knowledge to our people.
2) Magical variety of textiles, if there is a market, would of course be sold. Again, if we have the access to that.
In what way magic would actually be imbued into cloth remains to be seen. It could be talent based, but it could also be akin to apothecaries imbuing dyes and treatments for textiles with things that have certain properties that are magical in nature.
Dye creation will be an alchemist's pursuit, and likely a huge profit center for them (dependable). So incentives to promote alchemists are also a part of the plan. If people end up with talents that allow them to modify cloth with magic, we'd do everything we could to acquire them.
While tax incentive is one thing we can offer to tailors, suppliers, etc...we would like to eventually offer more avenues of support depending on what is available to us. We can explore those options with anyone who is interested, but for now we need to wait till closer to launch and settlement selection before I can guarantee anything. I will do everything I can to make sure being a tailor/alchemist/textile industry supplier is better in my town than any other reasonable option.
In the end, I'm really wanting to have a textile industry in my town because I think that'd be an awesome and colorful place to live. Couple that with a To'resk mecca on water and you have an in-game Venice with fantastical celebrations and vibrant citizens. A huge goal is to be a town so fun and interesting to be in, that you'd want to live there anyway.
I also seek to make sure other groups in the city benefit from the textile industry. Adventurers would need exotic cloths or could go off to far away lands to provide rare dyes and textiles, etc.
TL;DR
We can't make a living off things we can't produce...so it depends on where we land. Magical textiles is obviously something we'd like to do but for now...we are just going to promote a culture around an industry that we think we want to have...but that culture is not dependent on that industry being within the city if we need to move to something like mining, etc.