Considering Vintage Story is heavily inspired by natural processes of the real world, I'd say this kinda mechanism would fit in quite well with the intended direction of the game.

You can't please everyone, because If there are people who love it, there will be people who hate it. which is why this is really just a case of: Will we need a mod to add the feature? Or will we need a mod to remove the feature?

Also Ruyeex, yes there are people who want to have to maintain everything, especially on multiplayer servers where people want to band together into a community (you know the kind where people aren't just all doing every type of taks on their own but instead come together to form towns and each takeup their own respective roles)

CKitt It would be annoying to the average player since games are build on abstraction point which is it can favor realism but not reality. Unless it's on simulations which is reasonable, but nobody wants to maintain everything specially on multiplayer servers. It can be solved with brakes, even with maintenance on brakes it still can a nuance.

It should be as a mod like on Factorio some people despise spoilage or even certain mechanics of the game.

Excited for this sort of mod content! Game needs more features like this. Hopeful you can update this to 1.20 once a stable release comes out!

Shinji170981 I'm not particularly knowledgeable on this topic but from what I've gathered so far it seem that for the kind of wooden peg gears we have in this game waxing is actually far more important (especially when it comes to increasing lifespan outside) then lubrication. So I'll probably look into adding waxing rather then lubrication. (This will also make beewax more usefull, hooray)

I absolutely adore this idea! It's such an obvious good idea I'm left thinking "why isn't this already in the base game?"

Well done!

DanaCraluminum Thanks for pointing that out, now those are also supported.

TheInsanityGod My Vanilla Variants mod also adds windmill rotor anmd helve hammer from wildcrafttree wood types, but under another domain, you may want to include those too

Maybe the gears could wear out, because the teeth on them grind down over time and this could be done with like using fat or oil to lubricate the gears and that way they would stay in good condition. Obviously it should have some durability modifier, so people can adjust it to their liking. Especially when you have underground mechanics, itwould be very annoying to open up holes all over the place, just to find the faulty part.