Dye
Dye can be used to colour your armour, paint buildings, and dye various objects (including some taxidermied creatures, apparently).
A taxidermied tortoise, painted purple by Dondersteen.
It uses the Natural Substances skill, which is the subskill of Alchemy.
Colours
All dyes use RGB values to define their colour. R=255, G=255, B=255 will be pure white, whereas R=0, G=0, B=0 will be pure black.
- Black dye can be made by using water on an acorn to make tannin, then mixing the tannin with iron lump.
- Blue dye can be made by using water on woad.
- Green dye can be made by using water on a copper lump.
- Red dye can be made by using water on a cochineal.
- White dye can be made by using water on a zinc lump.
Dyes can be mixed by simply moving them into the same container once made to average their RGB values. If you have pre-mixed dye and wish to alter its colour, you can do this by adding one of the above materials to change the colour channel values.
The QL of the non-water dye component determines maximum QL for a dye. However your skill levels, and some random chance, are factored in to the QL of the resulting dye, much like making leather from hides.
Dying items
Many items can be dyed, and will use a quantity of dye that varies based on their size: a plain white cloth sleeve would require 0.036kg of dye, whereas a Caravel would require 220kg to paint the wood portion of the ship.
If you wish to remove dye from an item, generally items require a metal brush and cloth/leather requires lye. However some cloth items appear to need a metal brush to remove dye from.