Create dyes in primary colours

[Attenia 232]

I'm not sure why it's literally impossible to make dyes in primary colours, but I think this needs to be changed. It's fine if creating primary colours is hard, and takes a lot of time, skill and materials, but it seems silly to make it completely undoable. As things currently stand, there are two factors that prevent us making primary colours. The first is that there is a limit to how high the RGH values go. I think I heard somewhere it was just above 200? Since for any primary colour you need either red, green or blue to be 255, 200 makes it impossible. The second factor is that for some reason, all of the different coloured ingredients don't contribute only their own colour. For example, a cochineal is for red, but if you make red dye with a cochineal, the dye still has green and blue values. Either we should remove this, or make it possible to strip certain colour values from a dye, as you're not going to get primary colours without two of the RGB values being 0.

I wouldn't even mind if the whole system was made harder to make up for these changes, but I'd really like to be able to make primary colours. We'll also need woad planters, as mentioned in another post, as woads are the only materials that are practically not available even to people with high skills.

[kochinac 1,395]

Totally agree on  allowing to strip color values somehow, although i don't know what would be best for it (maybe using vinegar or some sort of bleach to lower all colors value evenly untill you get desired base...) and also for woad planters, woad was the first thing i was hoping to be able to produce with them

Big +1 from me

[Attenia 232]

That's a good idea re the vinegar, but it would probably have to work in conjunction with ingredients not contributing other colours, or being able to strip colours individually. Otherwise, say for blue dye, you'd lower all the values until only a blue value remained, add more woads to get a higher blue value, then have to lower all the values again to strip any new red and green. The blue value would gradually increase if you did this multiple times, but what happens when you finally get the blue to 255 and it still has red and green values? You could lower red and green to zero again, but to get the final blue back up to 255 and red and green 0, the last time you added a woad it would have to contribute no red or green, or you'll never get there, you'd just have to keep decreasing values and adding again, but you'd never reach 255, 0, 0.

Maybe there could be different things to strip different colours? Like vinegar strips red, bleach strips green, etc. Though it may just be easier only to have ingredients contribute their own colours.

[Retrograde 12,013]

255 of any colour is 100ql, so you find the cap is actually 254, and ql reflects the starting rgb. The higher ql of the colour, the less impurities (the other two colours) there are.

 

Using 50ql cochineal will get you 205 red, 50  green, 50 blue, to represent the impurity.

 

The system does work, you just need to spend some time identifying how each thing affects the other, it took me a while (much like terraforming) but ultimately high quality products is the way to go, then simply lowering or raising the individual colours.

[Attenia 232]

That makes sense re the high quality products, but if 100ql products are the only way to make primary colours, it makes primary colours excessively difficult to make. Perhaps we could consider either lowering the quality required to give 255, 0, 0, or making 100ql materials easier to get. It's easy enough with high mining to get high quality metals, but a 100ql cochineal, acorn or woad would prove much more elusive...