Repair and Decay

Hyphae is a merciless place, and it kills things as much as it kills people. Objects left outside particularly are vulnerable to the weathering of the elements, and will quickly decay. Decay, in this context, is the reduction of an item's overall quality from its maximum value. Items that are decaying function at their reduced quality rather than their theoretical maximum; damaged weapons hit less solidly and swing slower, food nourishes less, armour protects less, tools work worse, and even buildings gradually collapse in on themselves against the onslaught of the jungle.

Only items in a room decay. Anything in your inventory, or anything inside a container, is safe. Once a container lying in a room decays away, everything within it spills to the ground and also begins to decay. There is a grace band for decay -- if an item is at 80% or greater of its maximum quality, it will function as if it is full. Once an item hits zero quality, it is destroyed, gone forever. There are whispered rumors that some items will never fade away. What do I know?

Repair is a miscellaneous crafting skill that counteracts decay. Toolmakers can construct repair kits, which are used to repair anything that was crafted, including buildings and other tools. In order to use a repair kit, you must have the repair skill, the repair kit, and the base skill that was used to originally craft the thing you're trying to fix up. The maximum quality of an item is never lost, and you can repair it back to that quality. You can repair things with repair <item> or repair <item> with <kit> if you want to be specific. It takes four seconds, and you cannot be resting while doing it.

Repairing an item takes charges from a repair kit, which can be used up. Both the quality of the repair kit and your skill as a repairer affect the maximum quality you can repair an item to. The cost in charges to the kit is top heavy -- really high quality items being repaired to full take a lot of charges at the end.

Training repair requires you to repair an item to a quality high enough relative to your skill. That requires finding higher quality damaged goods and repairing them as you get better.

Repair is governed by intelligence (primary) and agility (secondary).