Rather than straight-up getting leather from dead animals, they should drop “fur” or “pelts”. To make leather (which we can use for armour, clothes, makeshift bodyarmour, or ropes) they need a tanning rack. These can be made from sticks.
To use the tanning rack, you place the animal pelt on, (F) and press F again to have the leather. Leather’s properties would be different depending on the animal you got it from (if it’s a cow or goat/sheep it will be more bendy and useful for clothing/ropes, and if it is a bear, moose, wolf etc it will be stronger for armour).
Mutated animals may have harder/stronger leather as well, which can make better armour when combined with metal plate. Belts, bags, and cargo sling packs/bandoliers for ammo could also be made from leather.
If we’re going to simplify tanneries into only a single crafting station, I’d rather it be the vats, because you could fill those with different chemicals to treat different products, but the tanning racks wouldn’t have much use aside from working with hides.
Just have a curing system. Hide salt and water, let it hang for 30 seconds or so, boom you got leather. Curing is just the first step in IRL leather making but still.
If you can get water (doesn’t even have to be potable) and plant matter (acorns and specific types of bark are best, but even twigs and leaves have some tannic acid) and put them together (it’s faster while boiling, but not completely necessary) then you can produce a solution to tan hides. Just because I said it’s chemical doesn’t mean it’s high tier. The way I would imagine it implemented into Unturned II, there would be a crafting recipe something like this: 2×sticks + water => tannic acid
acorns + water => tannic acid + edible acorns
and the crafting times could be shortened by having a heat source nearby.
At a vat you could make:
tannic acid + hide => leather
chemicals + cloth => gun cotton
recipes for treating lumber, treating metal, cleaning weapons, dyeing cloth, and more might be possible at a chemical vat, but I don’t want to stray too far off-topic, with the whole list.
Anyone here ever play Haven & Hearth? It had the coolest and most simple drying/tanning hide system imo.
Take any raw, bloody hide and set it on a drying rack. It then turns to a dried hide after 8-16 real life hours, depending on the hide. (For UII could be more like 20 minutes - 1 hour.) Dried hides can be used to make waterskins and such.
To make leather, take any dried hide and set it in a tanning tub with water and bark. (Tannin. Could also use strictly Oak bark since it has a high tannin content.) After another 8-14 hours again depending on the hide, (Again could be more like 30-60 minutes here.) it becomes leather, usable for basic armor and clothing.
Doesn’t make the most sense realistically, but i’ve always thought that game had an awesome way of processing animal skins.