Quality

Quality is a bedrock system in Rhizome, and drives a lot of the gameplay loop as well as has knock on effects to other systems. Everything in Rhizome that is harvested, crafted, or built has a relative quality, ranging from 1 all the way up to 100. This quality has numerous effects on the item's performance and characteristics, including but not limited to:

How much the item sells for.
How much weight a container can hold.
How much easier it is to carry weight stored in a worn container.
How much damage a weapon does per hit.
How fast a weapon swings.
How much a piece of armor protects the body part it's worn on.
How much damage a shield can soak.
How much a crafting tool improves crafting results.
How much a harvesting tool improves harvesting results.
How much nutrition you receive from food.
How much hydration you receive from liquid.
The severity of a crafted venom's effects.
The potency of a crafted curative.
How long any item takes to fully break.
The sturdiness of vehicles.

Quality is immediately apparent by looking at an item, or seeing its short description. A short description is appended with a quality diamond (◆) which is colored by that item's quality, and the look description of the item has the plain text 'It appears to be of <x> quality'.

Different raw materials have different maximum qualities they can reach, with rarer and more valuable materials having higher maximum quality. Higher quality input materials, higher quality tools, and higher skills for both harvesting and crafting combine to drive quality in finished goods higher. Therefore, the quality of an item is how good it really is. A junk longsword and a perfect longsword have the exact same recipe -- all that changes is the nature of the materials, the tools, and the crafter that made them.

Quality ranges from worst to best:

◆ Colour     Quality         ◆ Colour   Quality
Gray         terrible        Green      good
White        bad             Pink       very good
Sky Blue     poor            Red        great
Deep Blue    below average   Lilac      excellent
Pale Green   average         Purple     exceptional
                             Orange     perfect

It is typically not possible to exceed perfect. Or so I've been told. But what do I know?