Do you recall the first time you encountered a pond full of tule, or a patch of brown sedge grass? Maybe you thought to yourself, as I did, "Now what special thing can I do with this?".  A little experimentation and a quick perusal of the wiki soon informed you that there was nothing special at all about these plants.  They were just eye candy and no more useful than the bog standard tallgrass you find everywhere.  Tule is actually a bit less useful, since you can't feed thatch to animals, nor can you light fires with it or make torches with it.

I cried for days.

Well, no.  Not really.  But I was a wee bit disappointed, and after a little time to think I had a little idea, which I present here in the form of this little mod.

This mod makes the following changes:

Hay was never used for thatch in real life, as it is not stiff enough, contains too much moisture, and is unsuitable in other ways. Hay is what farm animals eat, as opposed to straw, which is the stiffer inedible plant stems.  Thatch can be made from straw, which is usually obtained from the dried stalks of harvested grain, or from dried water reeds like tule or sedge or even cattails in a pinch.

The "bad news" is,

--Thatch roofing can no longer be crafted from hay bales. This mod removes those recipes, including the versions added by the Better Ruins mod.

But on the bright side,

--Thatch roofing recipes now require half as much thatch as they used to.

So now that you can no longer use tallgrass to make roofing, where are you going to find enough thatch?
I'm so glad you asked.

--Tule now drops 3 thatch when harvested, because it is actually a *giant* species of sedge.
--Brown Sedge now drops 2 thatch when harvested. It no longer drops dry grass.
--Because thatch can absolutely be made from the cut and dried stems of domesticated grains, mature rice, spelt, rye, and flax now drop 1 thatch each (in addition to their other drops) but only if harvested with a knife or scythe -- not if harvested by hand.

Additionally,

--Cattail tops and papyrus tops can also be used as roofing material, albeit with more wastage.  To reflect this they can now be crafted into thatch in the crafting grid at a ratio of 4 tops to 1 thatch. Be warned; once you craft them into thatch you can't change them back!

Using this mod, putting a gable-end thatch roof on a small cabin with a 5x5 interior (7x7 overall footprint), will require at least 49 roofing pieces.  Constructing those roof pieces will require about 105 pieces of thatch, which can be harvested from approximately 35 tule plants, or 53 brown sedge, or 105 mature grain (or, if you're desperate, 420 cattail/papyrus tops), or any combination thereof.  Constructing a similar roof in the vanilla game would require a player to harvest 210 tallgrass/tule/sedge.  Think of all the time you can save if only you can find the right resource.

Now there's a reason to get (at least a little) excited about finding a pond full of tule or a hillside covered in brown sedge.

(This mod pairs very well with my other mod, Zippy's Re-seeding Reeds.)