Leveling the crafts in this game is allready rather tedious so I agree that making people craft more stuff to upkeep totems would be bad, but this is more because crafting is tedious, thats a different issue, there are other threads for that
. At present we craft a lot items just because we get skillups for them right?
I had this idea a while back that totems could be fueled by offering crafted items at the totem. How much upkeep the totem would recieve would be determined by the quantity of materials used and the quality of the finished item.
upkeep for Quality:
Junk= 0
poor= 0.5
low= 1
Moderate = 2
High = 4
Very high = 6
Master = 8
Upkeep for quantity
1 mat = 1
2 mat = 2
3 mat = 4
This is a very rough guestimate of what would work, I really have idea how much item 1 up keep should give you. But lets do a thought experiment ok?
Its monday and the upkeep on my totems are running out, damn... So i have to go get some items I can use for offerings so i can keep them going. So I go grab my cart and I have 2 possible ways of getting the stuff I need, I could go craft or I could down to a trade hub and barter for it. Trading would be costly and i dont have a alot to trade with so I decide I want to craft. Now again I have some choices, I could go gather stone to use for bricks or I could go gather a vider variety of materials to make cloth items or leather or tools. I have pretty good resource and masonry skills so I decide to make bricks allthough I would get more upkeep for my time out of getting cloth items because they use larger quantities of materials but my skills in cloth arent so good so the quality of the finished item would be a lot lower than the bricks.
Upkeep for 1 very high quality brick: 6+1= 7
Upkeep for 1 low quality cloth item with 3 mat: 1+4= 5
Its important for me to make absolutely clear that this system is not supposed to be another tedious job. Lets say you have to use 1-2 hours every week to make sure all your totems are fueled and this would even be a team effort for larger tribes, so some times you might not even need to worry about it.