Alrighty and this months patreon lore doodle is fun and is more or less like the prior one!
A series of doodles on drektech! Seems popular on the polls these days which fair, I won't complain as its fun to elaborate on these things so
lets
Talk about
Chitin and chitin shaping!
so bugs
They are a common part of maaaany drek and orm diets. They come in giant sizes and less giant sizes! And while they are all pleasantly edible they also come with the chitins of the dragonscapes! Which in real life are a natural sugar based polymer! and in the Dragonscape are a natural sugar based polymer that is a bit more pragmatic on account of usually being very thick and mana heavy
Namely it has to be far more dense and solid to support most insects, but this is also just a general trend across the reach on this reality breach. Granted not every bug is gonna be good chitin for general stuff but many bugs are!
Particularly the larger bugs out there are generally good, your paígir in logáu for example are renowned for their good chitin
Now of course first to mention is chitin is often useful as is!
Often chitin, without any sort of alchemical manipulation or processing, is itself a fine material and is used for many purposes. Particularly for making points, awls, butchering blades, daggers, etc. Just saw out the shape and grind it to form and edge.
Chitin also has a tendency to be shaped by heat
Much like some types of plastic, warming up chitin in many species will oft make it a bit more flexible, allowing it to be shaped simply with a bit of heat and some elbow grease! This alone has allowed it to become a very popular material for making wares like bowls and plates, and even with a bit of extra work things like water bottles. Its common to take some of the hardier chitins of some bugs, particularly those with more armored plates, to use for things such as longer slicing blades and armor. in fact while armor is rare, chitins tendency to come already as plates that are easily shaped and reasonably effective would result in many of the few societies that developed armor in the early days making it out of chitin!
turns out when you eat a lot of bugs you get a lot of chitin
And moreover one can exercise even more precise shaping and coloring of chitin
As its something of a pseudoplastic, which means it can very much be broken down and reformed with all sorts of colors, traits, or ingredients added to improve it! Which the drawings focus on how to make a common material that I would like to dub

Chitic... ahem names in progress look it will take a few rounds.

Chitic is a reasonably tough, hard and hyper moldable alchemical material that develops pretty early on in many societies, being known in the Logáu plane well before the awakening and spreading across the Americas during the mid to late awakening as plastics within ruins become exhausted. Its a suitable replacement for the plastics dug from the ground
chitic starts with the bugs you kill! Varies regionally of course!
That chitin, be it from big bug or small bug is then carefully ground into as fine a powder as possible. This typically requires some degree of scraping off the meat, baking the chitin to help get the water inside of it out, making it more brittle. And then using some sort of quern or pestle and mortar to slowly and carefully powder out the chitin, the finer the better!
Next comes the mixture! The most common dry mixture and the necessary ingredients tend to be things like
Resin from a variety of tree sources will work. Birch or Pine sap, Copal sap, etc. the resin will vary regionally but most resins that can melt into a liquid and cool hard are favorable
Chitin of course
Charcoal Helps keep the mix from becoming too hard and brittle, its the same logic as a tar, the charcoal keeps it solid and hard but not as prone to snapping or to be as brittle.
Wood ash is also very important to help give everything some extra material to bind onto and to keep the chitin from sticking into the mold.
These are then mixed together, often with other ingredients and mana and/or different sorts of mana as desired to impart specific effects. It is often mixed in with some amount of oil or fat to help make it easier to mix into a homogenous mixture
And lastly it needs to be real high temperature melted and pressed together into a conglomerate bar (or whatever shape your mold is) of Chitic!
Chitic tends to have some pretty favorable properties that are very comparable to PVC with some added benefits with the exception of flexbility and springiness. Chitic is not as flexible as chitin since its really a mixture more than anything. But becomes incredibly soft and easy to form under heat and pretty tough and rigid when cool which is very fucking handy. Moreover it can be "welded" together under heat with other pieces of Chitic simply by heating the parts together and essentially carefully squishing them together. Thanks to its generally water resilient properties it has an immense range of uses... think about plastic and the sheer amount of things we use it for
everything from wares and jewelry to small doorlocks, lids, handles for tools, bases for rafts and canoes, doors, uh bottles, flasks, cooking utensils. Bricks and poles for building structures,
honestly the uses are about endless. Its an immensely versatile material even moreso than its base chitin thanks to the ease of taking a lot of small pieces of chitin and making massive sheets that can be easily formed as desired
and of course as prior discussed, Alchemically treated organics apply!
As other materials can be mixed into natural chitin or different sorts of chitic to add more versatility!
Really most of the low stress springs that come to be in the dragonscape are really flat springs made of alchemically treated chitin that was impregnanted with alchemical rubber (that thing we discussed earlier!) Its a very common way to make a simple spring. But people do things from making chitin that is comparable in hardness to many flints and, later on bronze, to even make things like chitics that can shrink under heat to make effective bindings.
Different sorts of chitic based textiles come about eventually! Like polyester... without the horrid pollution!
but I have already rambled about Alchemically treated organics so I will keep this brief
So chitin is important!
Most societies come to appreciate the chitin found in the bugs about them. For most it starts off simply as using the chitin itself. Which does continue on in paralell with the beginnings of chitic and elaboration in chitin manipulation and chitic recipes.
Chitin comes as is which is nice
But there does come to be societies that base their industries heavily off of chitin as a replacement for metals, particularly as time goes on with groups like the Cheux in the Central Isles, the Golet in Logáu, and other groups across the planar that have just concluded that chitin is easier than metal
and thing is those groups wouldn't be too rough for it, thanks to chitins versatility.
Even when it doesn't dominate an industry it does often find niches. Chitin is particularly important amongst the Caminantes for making fogmask lenses (as it can be made transparant) and for the bodies of their filters!
thanks to its ability to be dyed, its also popular amongst the Anichos for their maaany neck rings
So yeah!
Bug stuff! Its pretty useful!

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