I like the idea of this. Though, I feel like if you start with woodcraft, you're gonna have a +5 PV shield very early in the game which I worry is a little too strong, since the requirements for this don't seem too difficult. I might expect it to take around 10 wooden sticks for 1 improvement chance, whereas it would only take 1 log. Another possible use might be to reinforce a pickaxe, give it 10% chance less to break or something.

And just to shitpost, if I were going to improve a wooden weapon or shield, I would do so by reinforcing it with metal.

(also, man, wouldn't it be cool if all this stuff was just converted into a 'crafting' skill, like alchemy but for other items/tools like keys, pickaxes, etc).

Valid concern. But it's just needs proper balancing. Make woodcraft harder to train. Change cap to +2 if wooden sticks and hatchet or axe and logs are used. +1 if wooden sticks and axe. Increasing number of sticks required for one improval might work too but I'd rather just reduce significantly success chances for woodcraft with wooden sticks. Breaking tons of doors for wooden sticks and then just having a failure might be very annoying.

Reinforcing items with metal makes sense but that's definitely another RFE which is unlikely related to woodcraft much (but I'd likely upvote one if it existed). As well as for pickaxes but I don't see that much connection between woodcraft and pickaxes in ADOM world.
I don't think merging everything to the one skill "crafting" will ever be implemented hence I'm not suggesting this. Although this probably makes sense. Post another RFE and check how community reacts? I think similar was already suggested somewhere and not everyone liked that much.

It would make the semi-guaranteed hatchet a little more interesting.

This would really force you to consider the usefulness of the skill and the wooden sticks .
The clear advantage it would offer would redeem the woodcraft skill in the crucial phase of the game (early game).
That is worth letting it grant an arbitrarily high bonus since it doesn't make mid-late game easier with better shields easily found around.

However, I suppose that on top of improving the actual construction of a shield, you also add extra wooden protection - hence for each PV point gained, item weight should increase by, say, 25% of the base weight.
For a [+3,+1] wooden shield upped to [+7,+5], you'd be getting 80s + 4*20s = 160s.
As a result, you get a shield weighing as much as a medium crystal shield, offering similar performance in terms of protection, somewhat less for defense and still being an easily destructible item (but also expendable).
Nice trade-off in my opinion.

Otherwise, I really like this RFE.

Don't feel like it is necessary and might be trickier to implement... But why not, the skill would be great both with and without this penalty and won't be a gamebreaker anyway.

Wait, of course you like it, the idea was actually posted by you first time! ;) :D

I think this is a great idea. Woodcraft and wooden items are useless currently and a new crafting ability would be a lot of fun.

I like the idea of this as well!

Letting characters do more work with wood with the appropriate skill would make those skills a lot more interesting and help them considerably in the early game. I think it would balance itself out by the material becoming obsolete in the mid/late game. And why stop there? I'd love the ability to fashion torches, bows and other (new items) out of wooden sticks and logs.

I mostly disagree with the listed items that can be improved, as well as the tools.
How, exactly, are you supposed to improve a weapon with a wooden part? At most, you can replace the handle - which should only give minor bonuses.
Same thing with wooden shield - repair (return to normal if it was, say [+1, +1]) is OK, but it has inherent limitation on the usefulness. Metal is something that you can reforge, but with wood - you can only create something new, or completely replace broken parts.

The only items that should be able to receive substantial improvement are the arrows (completely replacing the wooden part with a new one that has improved balance) - and using carving knives, not axes or hatchets.
It would be even more logical if it was possible to only repair ammo this way - so that it doesn't disappear after firing it, but becomes damaged and unusable.

I'd love to see more uses for this skill, but it doesn't have to be equivalent to smithing.
Some suggestions:

Bonus damage or higher crit chance against plant creatures.
Synergy with Bridge Building and Fletchery (having woodcraft gives both of the other skills a higher success rate, maybe also create more missles than otherwise)
Apply to wooden and hafted weapons, with some chance of increasing to-hit chance and a chance of breaking the weapon.
With a supply of wood, repair broken wooden items.

Some of these uses might require a hatchet.

I wouldn't mind woodcraft giving a bonus check when ADOM tests to see if your arrows and quarrels break :)

The same way entire wooden weapon is destroyed by fire. A lot of things in ADOM are far from realistic however are intuitive, detailed and sometimes can are needed to balance the game.

I'm a developer rather than carpenter and can't tell how exactly wooden items can be improved. I think most players feel the same as only a few of them know much about woodcraft, weaponry and shields. Why can't you improve handle enough to get good to-hit bonus? Why not replace decayed plank in your shield with a new one?

I didn't mean to make woodcraft overpowered either way. The idea is to make it useful and make it a good alternative in the early game or the beginning of the mid-game. Make it worth investing skill points despite all the fragileness of the wood in ADOM.

This is a great idea and—contra SinsI—I think it makes perfect sense. Adding more wood to the face of a shield would logically increase the protective value.

PS, this would also apply to bracers of toughness, which (obviously) can only currently be scroll-smithed.

Honestly smithing as it works in Adom does not make sense either. You can't take made item (armor in poarticular) with lump of metal and make it better. Most likely it would need complete meltdown and remaking with no guarantees item not ending worse.

True. Except when repairing the item you'd have to heat it until its malleable not melted, and there'd be no need for an ingot in that case, unless you have to make a weld. Improving weapons otoh is possible though, but it'd need to be tempered again and it can't be improved a lot.

There is an easy solution: add some flavor text to the skill description to clarify that woodcraft and smithing are both semi-magical skills, like alchemy.

Almost all the stuff in ADOM is magical in that way :)

Replace the handle of an axe with one longer by ~20% and you get a further reach. That translates into more damage (higher swinging arc, greater leverage).
Replace poor quality wood that soaked monsters' blood and thus got heavy, with a new sturdy handle, impregnated against organic liquids, made of lighter, more durable wood. That translates to better handling and lower weight - hence chance to hit is improved. There's a great deal of user feedback in the backstory of adom features that goes even more in-depth to explain certain surprising or illogical modes of behavior. Just look at the ridiculous ideas people have about how monsters are able to see through invisibility. The same method I used moments ago to justify how perfectly logical this RFE is, when you really think about it.

You can adjust shape to better deflect blows, increasing DV. Woodcraft knowledge entails that you also understand how wood can be joined together, using wedges and natural tree resin. You add reinforcements to shields, increasing their PV.

Actually, that's the least logical thing to do of all, in the context of woodcraft discussion.
The arrows' shafts are of secondary importance, since wood has a fairly consistent, homogeneous structure and spread of mass, when you consider such a small piece of it as that used to construct an arrow shaft.
The thing that really matters is how you install the arrowhead and how you manage the geometry of fletchings.
Adding modifiers to missiles for some micro-gains in balance, which would be of zero relevance for the gameplay, is a very poor idea, with the already messed up way of stacking missiles at the moment.
Instead of having 20 stacks of 2-5 arrows each, you could use woodcraft to have 30 stacks of 1-3 arrows instead. Good job.

That's the least logical of all your suggestions.
Have you ever used a bow in real life? I have.
Do you know what happens to every 1 wooden arrow in 10, when it embeds into a dense target, such as a professional archery range mat? It literally shatters, due to internal stresses.
That's a catastrophic failure, after which no amount of skill will allow you to recover the arrow and use it again, other than to pick your teeth with the shards.
The other arrows are reusable but with each subsequent hit, they too absorb more and more blunt concussive damage and micro-fractures are formed, that eventually lead to them shattering as well.
Plus, I wasn't using the cheapest wood, it was specifically selected to be devoid of weak points suck as knots.
I started using aluminum arrows and they are much more durable, but this just shows that adom's destruction rate of projectiles is actually reasonable from the realistic point of view.
Aside from a classic, composite bow, I also have a compound one which is vastly more powerful. At ten meters, the sheer impact can bend even the aluminum tube from which arrows are made.



Finally there's this: woodcraft could be the way to go when you want to unify the various disparate missiles in inventory, so they stack.
That way two things are achieved:
a) woodcraft becomes useful
b) a method is devised to easily manage multiple missiles with different modifiers, that would not otherwise stack

Slightly off topic but not completely:

Another real life archer here, though with slightly more modern equipment; my much loved recurve bow and carbon, steel tipped arrows. While I've shot with wooden bows, I've never shot a wooden arrow before. I've seen through thousands of shots fired at regular competition target mats that even carbon arrows get bent, and need maintenance and even replacement eventually.

I can't imagine a wooden arrow being shot with a wooden short or even long bow at any hard structure without going into splinters. In that regard I think ADOM is actually lenient in that you can recover some ammo after firing it at a golem or moloch or any kind of dragon scale. (not that its particularily fun from a gameplay perspective to lose ammo this way). I imagine sturdier iron/steel quarrels even would be completely unuseable after being fired once against such targets.

Another very reasonable explanation for not recovering ammo; have you ever shot at a target, missed it or had it bounce off the surface (this happens occationally during 'track competions on animal targets (not the living type)' (also horrible translation into english, sorry) and had the arrow fly into the woods behind it? Good freaking luck finding that arrow again without spending 2 hours searching. Edit: And that's with a black coloured carbon arrow with bright coloured 'stability wings' (my english is horrid today, apologies!) that stands out from the ground/shrubberies and such, imagine trying to spot a wood arrow among branches and bushes!

There was a point to make somewhere.. Oh yes, I think we should be happy adom isn't trying to be 100% realistic. While it can be debated back and forth how realistic it would be to use woodcraft to perform maintenance/sharpening/improving wood based items, it sure would be an improvement gameplay wise to allow woodcraft to be used in more areas. Such as upgrading/repairing/crafting wood based gear. :)

Does it damage and/or destroy the feathers and the tip? Because that's the parts that matter if you are replacing the whole shaft with a fresh wooden stick.

And you are not firing into a professional archery mat that is designed to withstand the impact and to stop the arrow extremely fast, subjecting it to far greater damage than normal -
you are firing into the soft tender tissues of an animal or monster, so arrows last just fine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VCYlg9w7dE
- as you can see, in many cases the only damage is that the arrow has just bent a little - even if it is stone-tipped. Steel tips would obviously last much, much longer.

That also makes it much more unwieldy, translating into a big to-hit loss and much higher energy cost for the attack.

Random miscellaneous uses for woodcraft:
-Create torches from sticks.
-Refill tinderboxes from sticks.
-Repair pickaxes (which are wood, you know)