The Leather Tanner turns hides into workable stock. It is the ranger’s station, it is genuinely slow, and it is the only thing in the colony that wants a torn hide.
Where hides come from
Off huntables — deer and wolf — and off farm animals. A kill can give you a clean animal hide, or a scrap hide: one you did not cut cleanly, full of holes.
Both are useful here. Nothing else in the game is interested in either.
The two recipes
| Recipe | Ingredients | Level | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Animal hide | 5 scrap hide + 5 water + 1 dung | 0 | 30 minutes |
| Prepared hide | 1 animal hide + 5 water + 1 dung | 0 | 30 minutes |
So a clean hide is one step from being useful and a torn one is two — five scrap hide, thirty minutes to make an animal hide, then another thirty to prepare it. Every prepared hide is an hour of tanner time.
Yes, dung. It loosens the skin and fur, which is genuinely how tanning works. Worth knowing that the compost bin wants the same dung, so if somebody is making fertiliser you are both reaching into the same pile.
Ranger or not
Both recipes are level 0, so anyone can use the tanner from day one. Only a ranger earns crafting experience and keeps the recipe in their book — everyone else has to enter the ingredients by hand every time.
Set it and walk away
Thirty minutes for one item is a long stand. Do not stand there.
Load up everything you have and leave it. This is a station you visit twice: once to set it going, once to collect. Set a big batch before you log off and it will be waiting.
What comes next
Prepared hide is not the end of the line. It goes to the leather rack, where a ranger of level 1 or above turns it into leather and parchment — and that one is a mini-game, and it is closed to everyone else entirely.
Parchment matters more than it sounds: it is what the Engineering Bench needs to copy a loom pattern. A seamstress cannot weave patterned cloth without a ranger somewhere behind them.