Add powered sewing machines (which would need battery compartment mods/vehicle rigs) as an uncommon loot and manual treadle sewing machines as rare loot.
Realistic tailoring times:
Current tailoring craft tasks are reasonable for someone making clothes against a pattern, starting from bolts of cloth, and using a powered sewing machine to do the stitching.
Patchwork clothes require many more seams, and should take 2x to 4x as long.
Hand-stitching is slow, and should take 4x to 8x as long as machine stitching.
These modifiers should be multiplicative. Sheets should count as "bolts of cloth".
WARNING: huge feature
Add multiple different cloth materials.
Create a new "clothing template" that specifies just coverage and some other stats, along with a whitelist of material types that can be used to craft it.
Add support for items based on "clothing templates" that calculate their stats based on the template data plus the material used to craft it.
Add a "bolt of cloth" item.
Replace use of rags in clothing crafting recipes with "bolt of cloth".
Use Case (negative)
Player can craft a full, nearly optimal outfit from materials found in starting shelter in a short timespan with low tailoring levels.
Example:
Craft a hoodie and cargo pants with a wooden needle and long string from curtain rags at tailoring level 3 in about 1.5 hours.
Define an alternate coverage specification format for clothing that has a more granular specification of coverage. Suggestions for the format include:
limb:coverage% pairs so large articles can provide different coverage for different body parts.
Positive or negative coverage value to specify that "this percentage of body part, from most to least (or reversed) vulnerable is covered.
List of spans designating specific sub-locations that are covered.
Enumerated values corresponding with specific sub-locations (hands, eyes, ears, knees, etc).
If the underlying representation of coverage is sufficiently detailed, several of these specification methods can coexist.
Pair coverage information with separate armor blocks so that a single article can have multiple layers (see MBR vest, center of chest gets ballistic plate, rest gets kevlar).