Location Taken: Readfield, Wisconsin
Time Taken: June 2012
I’m fairly sure this is a grindstone. You know, a stone that you spin up and then place some metal onto to grind the edge sharp. It was right by the workshop on my Great-Uncle’s farm, right where you’d expect such a tool.
Well, that and it does look a lot like the grindstones I’ve seen in Skyrim and other games that have blacksmith tools on display.
It usually takes a lot of research to make a game, especially one that you actually want to have a living world. If you don’t, well, you can just take some generic archetypes, knights and castles for instance, and just plaster that on top of the gameplay and call it a day. But if you want to make a world for people to explore, well, it’s got to look right. And that includes things like grindstones.
It doesn’t help that they look rather nice, though. A large round stone, a way to spin it on an axle, all you have to do is show it spinning to really show that this is a classic tool of the trade.
Nowadays, mind you, they tend to sharpen blades with a bit more technology than this. But only a bit, and far less than you’d expect. Most places seem to still use spinning stones as the basis. They’ve just chosen stones that are very good at the job, and added attachments to keep everything in place better and all that fancy stuff. But still, at the end of the day, it’s metal on stone.
Which just feels right, somehow.
