Success!

After a lot of work last night, I finally made some colored handmade backpacks.  I was really happy by the end of the evening.

I started by spending more than an hour searching for more evergreen leaf ground spawn.  Eventually I took the advice found on the ZAM web page and turned off grass/ground shading effects, which made the things easier to see.  I wound up with about 25 leaves so I was satisfied at that point.  Then I spent some time slaughtering bears and wolves to get more HQ skins -- I got 7 more HQ wolf skins, and a few more bear (I already had a lot of bear).  This gave me 18 HQ bear and 19 HQ wolf, enough for a good run at making the backpacks.  And I made some cash from the rare drops from the named wolf and bear and named snake too.

The process of getting to the backpack making stage was more involved than I expected.  I needed to turn my drops (charcoal, permafrost crystals, evergreen leaves, jack-o-lantern fungus, etc) into extracts.  This was basic alchemy but required resin which was expensive -- 104 plat for a stack of 20, and to get light blue or gray I needed 3 resin per extract.  Then I needed to turn my extracts into dyes, which meant combining them in a medium jar, which meant I needed to make a medium container on a pottery wheel and then fire it in a kiln, which meant I needed to do the four newbie pottery quests to skill up to 54 in pottery first.  And each medium jar combine sacrifices the jar itself so I needed 1 jar per dye.

I still haven't finished turning all of my extracts into dyes, but once I had a stack of more than 10 red dye and more than 10 green, plus some orange, light yellow (for white bags), and light blue and light gray (for purple bags) I was ready to rock.

And this is the result.  Sadly, two of my for attempts at purple bags failed.  I need more charcoal and permafrost crystals.  I haven't even attempted yellow or blue or dark blue bags, or black, or brown (I'm curious what the brown looks like, normal bags are already brown.)  I also need a lot more HQ wolf and bear skins, as I want to make quite a few more colored backpacks!