*Heat Treating*
Heat treating lithics is a way to change the properties of certain knappable lithics, to improve the ease at which a piece can be knapped, as well as to improve the edge on cutting or piercing tools. Heat treating creates a more brittle stone which is smoother and glossier, and tends to fracture conchoidally more easily. This also creates a more brittle tool, with a lowered durability. Heat-treated stone would result in a very poor hammer surface.
The process to heat treat can either be done by firing it in a kiln, provided the kiln is entirely full of lithics, or by digging a shallow pit in sand, burying your lithics (spaced out so that they're all surrounded by sand) in sand up to 6 inches deep, and then building a campfire over it, and allowing it to burn down. Real Life "cooking time" is several days, requiring you to build fires multipe times, but that seems unnecessary for a game. Having a cook time of a bell would probably suffice.
Heat treating would be only available with a specific Knapping ability, or with sufficiently high skill (whichever Rias thinks is better?).
*More lithics*
It'd be nice to have different varieties of lithics to knap, with varying difficulties. Either a difficult material can't be knapped at all with insufficient bushcraft (or even a specialized ability, returing a message of "You aren't sure you can work with this rock"), or pieces produced with lithics outside of your skill range are always the lowest quality possible, and have a lower durability. I'm also going to tag which lithics are/should be heat treated. Heat treating can also change the color of rocks, but I couldn't find an easy source of these changes, and it doesn't seem to be a totally uniform phenomenon.
- Agate (fairly easy, heat treatable)
- Basalt (Difficult to knap)
- Chalcedony, including: carnelian, bloodstone, and sardonyx (medium difficulty, heat treatable)
- Chert (easy to knap, heat treatable)
- Flint (easy to knap, heat treatable)
- Jasper (medium, heat treatable)
- Obsidian (easy to knap)
- Onyx (difficult)
- Opal (difficult)
- Quartz (easy)
- Agatized/Silicified Coral (must be heat-treated to knap)
*Tools For Knapping*
Being able to use a bone or antler as a knapping tool would be great. The durability on bones/antlers should be pretty low, however.
*Skinning/Butchering*
Being able to harvest fat from animals, to be used for making lamp oil. I'm still researching the process to actually MAKE oil, so I'll elaborate on that when I've figured out the best means for Cogg.