I'm looking for some idea what the standard or typical breakdowns are for these categories. The game I a building will be very craft focused, to the point where I will need to at least reconsider some of the details (for example, is spinning yarn a weaving skill in terms of concentration? Is a bloomery forging?) At minimum I'm planning to have speed for crafting based on the item/workshop level instead of the character level (injecting a bit of fundamental capitalism into the system), but I would like to hear about how these categories interact in more typical games so I'm not going any further off the beaten path than is necessary.
Standard breakdowns are basically nonexistent. The level of detail that exists is largely "GM looks at the description of an item and goes 'I think this one fits'."
To describe the standard gameplay regarding crafting:
Crafting isn't a way to gain character wealth more than can be done with any Lore skill and Earn Income. It is possible to optimize either Crafting or Lore to the point where it is marginally, but noticeably, better than an unoptimized build of the other option. But even at the highest levels of optimization, the difference is going to be maybe a couple of percentage points of the character's total wealth.
What items you can craft has two things gating it. One is the item level. You aren't able to craft an item that is higher than your character level. The other is rarity. If the item is common, you can craft it without needing a formula (though having the formula will speed up the crafting startup time). If the item has a rarity rating, then having the formula is required to do the crafting.
How long the item takes to craft is determined at the choice of player. There are some minimums. It takes two days to craft an item if you don't have a formula for it, or one day to craft an item that you do have the formula for. You can choose to make the process take longer and in return the item will cost less to finish. It uses the Earn Income table to determine the rate at which the character earns value towards the item completion. Which is why Earn Income is an equivalent way of gaining character wealth during Downtime.
You can use the Crafting skill as a way to do Earn Income. Crafting Goods for the Market is the name for that. This is used when the character wants to use Earn Income to gain wealth (either coin or raw materials) rather than ending up with an adventuring item at the end of the process. Because it is simply a skill used with Earn Income, it is completely reasonable to use relevant Lore skills here instead. So if the character is spinning yarn (yarn isn't an adventuring item), then either Crafting or Lore(weaving) would work interchangeably.
I do have the standard rules, I wasn't asking for a recitation. I was looking for experience in play about how tools specializations and such work.
The key point here is that for this game, which is about establishing yourself in the absence of civilization, yarn is very much a necessity if you are going to make clothes and don't have a store to go to so you can buy it so you can knit a sweater.
When you have to start by sheering sheep or growing flax then it is a very different dynamic.
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The rules are not that granular, you will probably have to homebrew.
Crafting feels a bit unecessary at lower levels, but gets more important when you get higher and not every village smith is capable of transferring your runes, and settlement levels fall behind your own - unless you play in Absalom.
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I'm looking for some idea what the standard or typical breakdowns are for these categories. The game I a building will be very craft focused, to the point where I will need to at least reconsider some of the details (for example, is spinning yarn a weaving skill in terms of concentration? Is a bloomery forging?) At minimum I'm planning to have speed for crafting based on the item/workshop level instead of the character level (injecting a bit of fundamental capitalism into the system), but I would like to hear about how these categories interact in more typical games so I'm not going any further off the beaten path than is necessary.
Don't take this the wrong way, for a "crafting focused" game PF2 is probably not the right starting point, like at all, for that kind of game.
The rules for crafting have been deliberately watered down to the point where it's basically a net neutral compared to anyone using any skill to "earn an income" (if we ignore that availability of jobs).
The rules are so sparse and intended not to give characters much of an advantage compared to those who don't craft....
I just don't see this working.
I do have the standard rules, I wasn't asking for a recitation. I was looking for experience in play about how tools specializations and such work.
The key point here is that for this game, which is about establishing yourself in the absence of civilization, yarn is very much a necessity if you are going to make clothes and don't have a store to go to so you can buy it so you can knit a sweater.
When you have to start by sheering sheep or growing flax then it is a very different dynamic.
PF2 simply isn't the kind of game to support that kind of play.
PF2 only cares about the kind of crafting for the purposes of a +1/+2 bonus for crafting specialization feats. To avoid complexity, I would lump all prerequisites together. If you have a blacksmithing specialization in a game where you can't blacksmith without mining your raw materials, then that specialization applies to that mining.
PF1 broke out specializations mostly by material. Cloth crafting presumably covered everything involved in creating a cloth item end product. My advice is based on that. It did separate armor and weapons, rather than having an overly broad "metalworking".
I don't think there will be any examples people will have for you, because the rules don't involve crafting materials separately from final items.
I agree with the others. You're trying to force a square peg into a round hole. PF2 is not a universal system and doesn't claim to be. It is designed to play a specific genre of game where powerful adventurers fight monsters and get treasure.
I think this is a case of either you and your group learn to branch out into other systems or stick with PF2 and accept that certain concepts just don't work with it and you need to shelve this idea.
Eh, PF2 may not be suited to this, but any system that is will probably need a lot of buy-in. So any other system would probably need a crafting subsystem stapled on anyway.
If you have player buy-in for PF2 and a whole bunch of custom subsystems, I would still say go for it. I can understand being pretty happy with PF2 as a base for classes, spells, and an engine, but wanting some campaign-specific mechanics. Buuut I do think "keeping Crafting close to the rules" and "tracking things like production supply lines for fibers" are mutually exclusive- either keep it simple or rip out the original crafting rules for what you need.
I once ran a crafting-heavy campaign, but it followed Pathfinder 1st Edition rules. This was Iron Gods among Scientists in which the five-member party had four characters interested in crafting the alien high technology found in Numeria. But technological crafting was not available until 7th level, so they settled for mundane crafting and magic crafting for the first two modules.
They ended up with three businesses established in their hometown Torch. The non-crafter skald Kirii purchased the gambling hall after its owner died and converted it into a dance and concert hall. The fighter/investigator Kheld purchased land upstream from a waterfall and build a workshop powered by a waterwheel. And the gunslinger/technologist Boffin and the bloodrager Val Baine purchased land a few miles from town and built B&B Alchemical Smelting. That smelting business secretly used a fusion reactor ripped out of an Annihilator Robot for smelting adamantine out of glaucite (also known as Numerian steel), but the main purpose of the business was to hide their small spaceship in its warehouse.
The rules for setting up a business came from the Pathfinder 1st Edition rulebook Ultimate Campaign, which can be found online at Archives of Nethys: Rules. Setting up a crafting industry would use those rules. Most of the details are in the Downtime rules, which can be adapted to Pathfinder 2nd Edition. Prices and skills are different in PF2, without a simple one-to-one conversion, so just follow real-world common sense and the balance requirements for a good game.
Neither Pathfinder 1st Edition nor 2nd Edition have rules for farming or mining. Those are too slow for an adventuring game. I recommend just establishing a farm or mine, determining the labor needed to run it, and expecting regular crops or production.
I did some skill conversion myself when I converted Val Baine to PF2 for a cameo appearance in a PF2 campaign: PF1 Bloodrager Val Baine Converted to PF2. Val Baine was a crafting assistant trained in seven crafting specialties: alchemy, armor, bow, clockwork, mechanical, tools, and weapons. Maintaining skill points across seven specialties was difficult, but since PF2 crafting has no specialties besides Specialty Crafting, Alchemical Crafting, and Magical Crafting, converting her to PF2 freed up a lot of her skill requirements. Note that a lot of her conversion difficulty is that at the time, PF2 lacked the Bloodrager class. And the relatively-new Bloodrager class archetype from PF2 War of Immortals does not fit Val Baine at all.
And one more PF2 story. I am currently running Hurricane's Howl in the Strength of Thousands adventure path. The player characters, who are students at the Magaambya Academy recently promoted to junior teachers, were sent on archaeological field work. A nearby village Kiutu had been raided by bandits and one optional project was to help rebuild the village. The only industries mentioned were fishing and boat-building.
Most buildings in Kiutu are constructed primarily of clay brick, with woven roofs made from river reeds. Its population has declined as the trade routes gradually shifted away, but it’s nevertheless still a thriving community. Fishing and boat-building are the most common professions, and Kiutu’s boats are highly regarded across the northwest Mwangi Expanse.
The village is located on the Terwa River, which flows away from the Mwangi Expanse into the Sodden Lands on the Gulf of Abendego, so they have no way of delivering boats to the Mwangi Expanse's rivers, so take the description with a grain of skepticism. I knew that my players would not only repair the burnt houses but would also work on economic recovery, so I added a third industry to Kiutu: growing flax and making linen cloth. Fast-drying linen cloth would be highly valued in the rainy Sodden lands.
The bandits had stolen the processed linen threads along with the linen cloth, so the Kiutu weavers could not make more cloth until the latest flax crop was retted (retting means rotting the flax stalks in ponds to free up the fibers). The wizard Idris realized that the spell Weave Wood could magically convert flax stalks into linen fibers. In a few days he prepared enough fibers that the weavers could return to work. I had not expected that.
I do have the standard rules, I wasn't asking for a recitation. I was looking for experience in play about how tools specializations and such work.
The key point here is that for this game, which is about establishing yourself in the absence of civilization, yarn is very much a necessity if you are going to make clothes and don't have a store to go to so you can buy it so you can knit a sweater.
When you have to start by sheering sheep or growing flax then it is a very different dynamic.
As others have pointed out, the rules are not as granular as PF 1e. However, I don’t think they need to be for your case. In a small village pretty much everyone can sew or repair clothing (e.g., Craft), but someone who knows about the properties of yarn/thread and how they interact with different types of cloth is going to have an easier time at it. In other words, the character that takes Sewing Lore will be able to do things better (read: with essentially a +2 to their checks for the easier DC) than someone who has a broader understanding of the materials/trade.
I like your idea of figuring out crafting in rural areas because it provides incentive for characters to take more than just a trained proficiency in lore skills. Some classes with auto scaling of lore skills might do better than others, but so be it.
"It is designed to play a specific genre of game where powerful adventurers fight monsters and get treasure." Just like every other system in existence.
Not actually, but pretty close.
The fact is I am not wanting to run a crafting game, or a city building game, and to a degree what I like about pathfinder for these purposes is the fact it has been watered down, so I don't have to start with a badly broken system based on video games and misunderstandings of logistics.
The game is survival and colonization of a frontier, and I'm not asking anybody to write out rules for me. I'm trying to get an idea what typical categorizations are for things like smelting being covered by mining lore versus blacksmithing, or to get into a very concrete example how someone with an artistry specialty is dealt with in terms of painting versus jewelry (I would assume these require separate tool sets at minimum).
Like I said, I can read the rules. What I can't read is how other people have played the game.
Farming and mining I have figured out- mining being the easier one (prospect, find the resource sink the shaft and wind up with a mine that has a "job level" for generating rough ore. Then smash that and extract the base ore and use crafting to refine into ingots, which can be forged into items...
farming is a bit more complicated because I am borrowing from the idea of "gardens' in treasury vault to generate perishable resources (food rots) but not quite on the same time scale... slower to produce and slower to rot.