Splee!
I knew this already, I was just wondering if there was anything similar to PaperCraft or Gemcutting. for leather/silk

I gave this a shot and it seems that each spider I moved would cause one silk to show up in the village I moved the spider to. Of course I could only move one at a time, and the quest to do so seemed to be on a 5-10 min timer. So moving them back and forth to generate silk seemed like way more trouble than it was worth.

I compare this to say gem production and it is not even remotely on the same level.

I assume the towns passively generate silk based on the number of spiders in them? Does anyone know how much it is per spider or how long it takes?

Not all commodities are equal in this regard. Villages seem to have "tics" when they tithe to whatever commune/city controls them, and when this occurs the amount of stock of a given commodity in that village will rise. However, this will be affected by the village's own ability to produce that commodity. If you take, say, 20 silk spinnerets to Delport and hand them all in to the general store, they will immediately go up for an inflated price, and on the next "tic" there's a chance that Delport will tithe a small amount of silk. Since Delport can't produce any silk on its own, however, it won't continue to tithe more silk unless it receives more from an outside source.

Now, with gems, there is a huge source of outside support you can call on (rockeaters). There are at most 20 rockeaters in the mountains at once, and even more in the undervault. However, no village produces much gems on its own. Only the mountain villages do, and they do it very minimally. A mountain village that never has rockeaters taken to it will produce gems very, very slowly, so most gem production comes from rockeaters being taken to a village. Additionally, the more rockeaters are taken in, the more greatly inflated the village's tithe of gems will be on the next "tic".

Now, silk is different. It is a rarer commodity. You will see a lower immediate output in the village by your actions since there is less around to be brought in suddenly and all at once. However, if you bring in a resource that is renewable ((IE, instead of just taking in a spinneret, you bring in a living spider)), this will cause the village to produce and shelve more of that commodity per "tic", and also to tithe more to their commune/city per "tic".

I can't tell you the extend to which moving a single spider impacts everything for a few reasons:

1. Serenwilde hasn't been in control of Dairuchi since I've been playing and I haven't had the opportunity to track all of these things (and Angkrag isn't really an option).
2. You need to account for people other than yourself attempting to influence tithing and village supplies. Someone might buy out all of the commodity, causing a temporary stifling of tithing and a hike in price. Someone else might be moving around resources without you knowing it. So there's always a little bit of guess work involved.

But to give you an idea of the impact, here are some numbers regarding the furrikin farmers that can be kidnapped from Estelbar and rescued:

If all the furrikin farmers of Estelbar are in the village, and they are all working steadily on the grain fields, single tithes from the village to the Serenwilde can by as high as 70-100 grain.

If grain field farmers have been kidnapped and there's only 2-3 left, Serenwilde will probably only be receiving 8-23 grain per tithe.

If no grain field farmers are left, no grain will be tithed to the Serenwilde nor produced to be added to Estelbar's General Store stock.

There are a lot more variables than that, but it gives you a basic idea of what sort of impact you can have economically. The big reward generally is not in what you immediately see in a village's general store, but in how it affects tithes from that village to whoever has it in their sphere of control.

This is why miner raids are often a big deal - struggling to maintain a hold of those who can produce sufficient amounts of rare metals that you otherwise will not get any of if your mountain village has no miners (though this in particular seems to be a bit broken now, everything with tithes has gotten a bit screwy since the reported tithe abnormalities over the last several announce posts or so).

If you want to find out more, I recommend you get involved with your city/commune and try to learn more about how it works on your own. I had very little to go on myself originally, but I found researching this and drawing one's own conclusions from tithing activity and stimulating village production to be a lot of fun.

Thanks for the replies! But I still can't seem to figure out how to get any iron...

Sometimes you can find it in the mines, or so someone told me a long time ago. Don't know if it's true, I don't do comm quests much other than wood.

The only way I know for SURE how to get iron is to kill an iron miner. But this will get you enemied to the village, and the org controlling it. So every guard you meet on the way out will plashctib the out of you faster than you can WTFPWND!