Herty Cups

<p>Resin in Vintage Story is a finite, scavenged resource: a small fraction of wild pines and acacias bear a slow natural leak, and once you've found them, that's all the world will ever give you. Herty Cups turns those finds into something you can work &mdash; implementing the real resin-tapping system Charles Herty introduced in 1903: a metal spile hammered into the trunk, guttering resin down into a hanging clay pot.</p> <p><strong>What you get</strong></p> <p>- Steady resin from trees you own. A tapped tree accrues resin continuously &mdash; no ticking, no chunk-loading tricks, it simply adds up on the calendar while you're away and is waiting when you return.<br />- A real metal progression. Every tier from copper to steel smiths its own spile. Copper matches the vanilla leak rate (1 resin per 7 days); each better metal taps faster, up to steel at 1 per day. Hammer a second spile into a cup to complete the V and the two rates add together, mixed metals welcome.<br />- Trees wear out. Extraction scars the living wood: after enough lifetime resin a face runs at half speed, and eventually it dries up for good. Better metal gets the same total out faster &mdash; it never increases what a tree can give. Manage a rotation of trees, not a resin factory.<br />- No automation, ever. The pot exposes no inventory &mdash; hoppers and chutes can't touch it. Collection means walking your stand, by design.</p> <p><strong>How to use it</strong></p> <p>1. Clay-form a resin pot (or the large one for twice the capacity) and fire it in a pit kiln.<br />2. Smith a spile from a single ingot of any tool metal.<br />3. Find a resin-bearing tree &mdash; one with a natural leak (leaking or already harvested) somewhere on the trunk. In the base game that's pines and acacias; with Wildcraft: Trees and Shrubs installed, its resin conifers count too. Only these trees take a spile; planted trees never leak and can't be tapped.<br />4. Right-click the side of a standing trunk with the spile while carrying the fired pot. Both are consumed and the cup mounts on the bark. Any resin showing on the trunk pops off intact for you to keep.<br />5. Come back and collect with an empty hand. The pot's fill level is readable at a distance &mdash; empty, low, high, full.<br />6. Optionally add a second spile by right-clicking the cup, to speed up a tree or offset a worn face.</p> <p>Breaking a tap &mdash; or felling the tree under it &mdash; returns the spiles and pot intact, and any resin waiting in the pot drops with them, so nothing is ever wasted. Dropped resin still counts against the tree's lifetime, so teardown never cheats the exhaustion. The scar and the tree's wear are permanent &mdash; moving the hardware never resets a tree.</p> <p>Everything is tunable in ModConfig/hertycups.json: per-metal rates, pot capacities, wear thresholds, spiles per tap, dry-tree recovery, and which species are tappable. The file keeps itself current &mdash; your values survive updates, new options appear with their defaults, and obsolete keys are migrated automatically. In-game handbook pages cover the whole system.</p> <p><strong>Compatibility</strong></p> <p>- Wildcraft: Trees and Shrubs: supported. Its seven true resin-bearing species &mdash; spruce, cedar, fir, Douglas fir, thuja (arborvitae), dalbergia and tamanu &mdash; tap exactly like vanilla pines, wear and all. Its sap, latex and salt trees (eucalyptus, ghost gum, spurge tree, mangrove) yield other fluids and can't take a Herty cup. Inert without Wildcraft installed.<br />- Eco Machina: fully supported. Tapped sections stay part of EM's tapered trunks instead of reverting to full-size cubes, and the spile and pot hug the rendered bark at every taper step &mdash; on angled branches the chute reaches in to meet the wood. No config needed; it just works when both mods are installed (and the integration is completely inert without EM).<br />- A Culinary Artillery: coexists &mdash; and converts. ACA's spile-over-a-container sap system runs alongside Herty tapping, with one shared rule: one tap per log section, whoever got there first. A log carrying an ACA spile refuses a Herty spile, and a Herty-tapped log (tapping scars included) refuses an ACA spile, each with a clear message. Their cast spiles can also be re-forged for this system: craft 3 ACA spiles of one metal into 1 Herty spile (brass becomes tin bronze, titanium becomes steel) &mdash; 3:1 because ACA casts three spiles per ingot where a Herty spile is smithed from a whole one. Entirely inert without ACA installed.<br />- Floral Zones (East Asiatic Region): its Japanese red pine works out of the box &mdash; those trees are built from vanilla pine logs, natural leaks included.<br />- Deciduous Trees: compatible out of the box &mdash; it only touches leaves, which Herty Cups never reads.<br />- Other tree mods: since v1.6.0 any tree mod with vanilla-style resin-bearing logs can wire itself in &mdash; one config entry plus one small patch file, no update from me required. The full recipe and a worked example are in the README on GitHub. Tree-mod authors welcome.<br />- Verified on Vintage Story 1.22.0&ndash;1.22.6.</p> <p>For server admins: the mod is server-side hosted (clients get it automatically on join), and /hertycups restore cleanly returns an entire map to vanilla before uninstalling &mdash; taps pop off as their components and every scarred log reverts to the block it replaced, including resin-bearing sections and modded woods.</p> <p><strong>What's new</strong></p> <p>v1.6.0 &mdash; Wildcraft: Trees and Shrubs support (seven resin conifers tap like pines) &middot; open integration point so any tree mod can wire in its own resin species via config + patch &middot; config file now keeps itself current across updates &middot; Floral Zones' Japanese red pine confirmed working out of the box.</p> <p>v1.4.5 &mdash; breaking a tap or felling the tree now drops the pot's accrued resin (nothing wasted, exhaustion still honest)