TaimatCompany Is it alright if I split off your food recipes into a separate mod, at least the bone broth soup part? I'd like to make it compatible with the new 1.21.x bone items as well so it might turn into its own thing. Since in your last post you said you're not into VS or modding lately, and this mod is still not updated, I'll assume you'd be chill with it as long as I credit you for the base idea and code fragments that I'd be expanding upon.

Please let me know if I need to do anything in particular to credit you beyond mention and a link back to your mod! 

edit: it's called Bone Marrow Soup

TheSapphicSeas Tip! You can find vines on bushes and hanging from trees. These can be collected by hand and 3 place horizontally in the crafting grid makes 1 rope! It's usaully pretty easy to get a good amount of rope early game now. Honestly it's more efficent to use vines since that's there only useful recipe and reeds are used in so many other things. I prefer to save my reeds in the early game for baskets and horsetail poultices haha! Good luck out there!

How are you supposed to get rope to make a knife when the materials needed to make rope require a knife to harvest?

Brick I actually had considered that since in ancient days it was the specific type of wood you used that made a good bow - not the string. Mongols for instance would use three separate wood saplings to make their bows and they were well known for their proficiency in hunting and archery.

If I get back into vintage story and modding I will definitely take a look at that!

TaimatCompany Using a sapling for a bow sounds like a very fun idea! Because when you plant a seed, it sprouts into a sapling which you can dig out and pick up! I imagine adding a recipe sapling+knife = raw bow limb, which then has to dry out to use when crafting a bow. So instead of 3 sticks, have 1 dry bow limb. It is possible to even go into a rabbit hole of different types of wood making different quality of a bow. 
And make a recipe for a special bow string so that instead of 3 ropes you'd combine one dry bow limb and 1 bow string.

Oh I have an error, so there actually isnt a name FOR Bone Soup, or Bone broth, if you are making it primarily. Also it comes with 0 saturation.

Excellent, I may want to start a new game with this.

Aloy thanks!

based as hell

There's been some complaints that too many sticks makes early game starts too easy.

But sticks are plentiful in the woods IRL. If you have to make stick acquisition 100x more challenging than in real life just to make sure the game loop doesn't break - there's something else wrong with the game loop. I'll explore this concept a little more in my BasicBushcraft mod. You've given me a few ideas.

So the real question is, WHY does bountiful amounts of basic sticks break the gameplay and the challenge? Sticks are free. You can literally walk outside your door IRL and collect a truckload in like 15 minutes. And it's not like they're some treasure trove of hidden technology - they're just sticks.

What makes sticks so vital to early game?

TOOL HANDLES / AXES

Alright this one does make sense, and the Primitive Technologies guy makes it look like cake, so. We'll leave that alone for now.

TOOL HANDLES / KNIVES

This just feels very silly to me. Why would you use a stick for a handle. That doesn't make any sense at all to me unless you were using rope somehow to bind it together- and if you have rope you might as well just use a rope handle (i've already implemented this in this mod).

TOOL HANDLES / SHOVELS

No. Just no. This is not a thing. A flat bladed shovel on the end of a stick would never work. however...

TOOL HANDLES / HOE

This one is believable but there needs to be modifications for sure. An Adze is one of the earliest tools invented and was typically made with stone, stick, and rope. So this is a great candidate for a recipe tweak. And maybe i could even get it to mimic the shovel's abilities.

TOOL HANDLES / HAMMER

I have no idea why you can't make a stone hammer. This is literally like. You could just use a fucking rock. Great example of making something way harder than it ever, ever would be in real life. HOWEVER the hammer in this game is primarily used for smithing - which wouldn't be feasible with a rock or even a rock with a handle. Smelting, maybe, but not detailed anvil smithing. You could use it for crushing things though, like grain into flour, for sure... mmm yes. this idea has merit.

TOOL HANDLES / SPEAR

Ah. Yes this is one of the more practical applications of sticks. I do think spears should require rope however, especially with this particular mod where rope is craftable with drygrass.

FIRE

Fire is certainly difficult but grinding with the firestarter isn't exactly fun, so i understand why they made firebuilding easy. In real life, you can actually get a couple sticks and some drygrass (debatable) and make fire in a few hours. So we could increase the time it takes to get a fire going with the firestarter. Or even implement a flint and steel type mechanic for late game ease of use.

TORCHES

The fact that you can indefinitely store a burning torch in a reed basket is frankly ridiculous. Same goes for having a torch just burning on your person for all time. This needs to be addressed for sure. In games like The Long Dark, in the majority of situations, if your fire goes out? so does all hope. It's precious, it's necessary, and it's hard to obtain. I'll be exploring this problem for sure. There's also the more glaring issue of the fact that the recipe is completely ridiculous. Straw on a stick is going to burn up in an instant, not burn with an undying flame for all of eternity. There are alternatives though, like - funny enough - cattail reeds and a flammable substance like animal fat.

https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Torches

ARROWS

In reality, you can't just use any old stick for an arrow. It needs to be dried, shaved, and it needs to be straight. Do i want to grind through that whole process to get arrows for my bow when i need some? Hell no. Realism, in this case, would just not be fun. So i'm gonna let this be.

BOWS

A useable bow really can be made from a few good sticks of the right wood type. Traditionally you would use saplings to make a bow, and not dry sticks; however, i think a sapling recipe would look pretty ugly in the inventory menu. So. Idk about that one.

CRUDE DOOR

Can you build a door out of 2 logs and 3 sticks? Go ahead. I'll wait. Damn things falls off all the time anyway. Better to use two wattle gates stacked on top of each other.

WATTLE

Definitely 100% believable. Excellent implemention, even if you probably need more sticks to build this realistically.

TOOL RACK

I suppose you could drive some sticks into the side of a dirt wall at an angle and put another stick on top of it to hold tools, so i'm ok with this one.

LAYER OF STICKS

This is a mechanic i can get behind. Works great for chimneys and I don't see any problem with it. IRL, obviously this would be very silly, but it makes sense for the game.