Hi everyone,
I'm having trouble with my shaping lately. Haven't tried to make bows in a while, but everything I try to make lately comes out of "outstanding" quality, even though I have all of the bow-making techs and ~500 in engineering. Even relatively easy longbows made out of maple are coming out outstanding. My tools are in good repair and the materials are fine (though I have the tech to compensate for that too), so I'm at a loss what's going on. Anyone have any ideas of what I should try to debug? I can post more details as needed, please help! :)

Thanks,
Reithir

Yes, didn't miss any calls to rasp the bow, followed all the steps as usual; only consumables involved in longbows are the string and stain at the end, I believe both are still storebought and that's the only way to go right?

Yep, using all my tools (and crafted some of these anomalous bows outside the crafting hall to be sure) and they're all in good repair. I used to be able to make any number of mastercrafted bows out of maple not that long ago, I am totally at a loss what's going on now

I have done it both, in addition to running the script and carefully watching what it does at each step, and it always does what I would do (does things in the correct order, rasps when it needs to, etc). Is there something to running the script that I'm missing? But I have done it manually all the way and it has the same problem. I've also tried it with the storebought maple (well-crafted) and my own harvested lumber.

Thanks, appreciate it. Try it out with the battle longbow, that should be a good one to test. It really should be pretty easy to make out of maple with 500 engineering and all the bow techs, right? But it comes out as outstanding for me. And I HAVE made it perfectly before, just a few weeks ago.

Here's my message for studying the pattern:
"You scan the battle longbow instructions with a glance and completely understand all facets of the design.
You now feel ready to begin the crafting process.
Roundtime: 6 sec."

It's true though, a battle longbow is an 8 (complicated), which the rough guide on epedia says takes ~500 ranks with the relevant weapon making tech, which I have, and I also have the other shaping techs (bonus to tools, material, etc), so it shouldn't be too hard. And I KNOW I've made these bows before, and again, just using maple, which is pretty easy to work, it's not like I'm using bloodwood. :)

Hmm I didn't consider the weather, does that really impact crafting? Glad to check it out later though, thanks!

Wounds and burden can affect it.

What you will have to do is analyze the bow after EACH AND EVERY step to see which step makes it go from master to outstanding.

Most likely it is going to be the first step where a draw knife is used, but it might be happening at any step. You can at least narrow it down by analyzing after each step though.

Totally didnt get a chance to check last night. Sorry. But glad you figured it out. Usually any degrade in quality comes from tools :(