Fletching

What it governs

• Archery arrives before metal does. Knapped flint and bone make arrowheads, and bronze later makes them visibly obsolete.Charter, Part IV — Production group
• The wood ladder is the quality curve, so Woodcutting decides how good a bow can be.
• Crossbows sit deep: smithed limbs and a trigger, gated by how far discovery has gone rather than by a level.

What happens today

A citizen holding wood and a stone it has just struck sharp cuts the wood to shafts — fifteen to the log, and the log is gone — or does not. The cut rolls on the citizen's own Fletching, a quarter of the time for an untrained hand and every time from level 40, the same curve fire has; a crooked stick stays wood and teaches a third. Every piece of wood in the arms is worked in the one act and each is paid for itself. Fifteen shafts and a feather become fifteen fletched shafts, and fifteen of those and a keen stone become fifteen arrows, each batch on the same roll. From level 3 a shaft and a stone to SPARE become a javelin: spare, because the stone a fletcher cuts with is the stone a point is made from, and the world will not spend a body's last edge. From level 5 a sinew twists into a cord, a cord in the arms turns the next log into a springy stave instead of shafts, and stave and cord become a bow — each on the same roll. Shafts, fletched shafts, arrows, javelins, cords, staves and bows are things in the arms now — carried, laid down and picked up like wood — and are felt at the next waking without ever being named.

The order it goes in

Two chains. The bowstring is a three-skill recipe, and the charter says plainly that it will ache before it is solved.

1. Arrows: shafts cut from logs with a knife.Charter, Part IV — Production group
2. Then feathers, which come from Hunter.
3. Then heads.
4. Bows: a stave.
5. Then a bowstring — flax, spun, strung; or sinew, which is the stone-age way round it.
6. Then the bow.