Wood treatment is performed in a wood treatment tank, using small amounts of various chemicals to treat up to 500 boards for various attributes.
During the treating process, the boards are measured on 8 scales: Flexibility, Cuttability, Flammability, Water Resistance, Insect Toxicity, Human Toxicity, Darkness and Glossiness. They can be adjusted by treating with any or all of Ash, Beeswax?, Lead?, Lime?, Oil, Petroleum?, Potash?, Saltpeter?, Sulfur? or Water?. Each chemical has an 'ideal' set of values for the attributes, and will attract the boards' attributes toward the ideals. The attraction behaves like a magnet; a strong effect when the attribute is already close, and much weaker when the attribute is far from the ideal.
The final outcome will be a set of boards with named properties where the attributes were particularly high or low:
If a set of boards has no named properties, they can be removed unchanged as normal boards. Boards with named properties cannot be loaded into the treater.
Every 10 seconds of treatment consumes 1 of the material. Boards with extra properties will be accepted by the construction site. "Rigid Hard Blonde" satisfies the "Rigid Hard" requirements of an autoloom.
A link to a wood treatment simulator: http://atitd.jayseven.com/woodtreatment/default.asp
Link to the post of Tamutnefret explaining the basics behind wood treatment: http://www.atitd.net/forum_archive/viewtopic.php?t=12937&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30
Some of that data seems to be lost in the code formatting of the old forum -- here is an attempt to recover some of it in the wiki.
The numbers given for the properties represent pixels of the blue bar on the screen.
Untreated Boards | Ash | Beeswax? | Lead? | Lime? | Oil | Petrol? | Potash? | Saltpeter? | Sulfur? | Water? | |
Flexibility | 33 | 66 | 45 | 5 | 0 | 53 | 37 | 21 | 61 | 13 | 29 |
Cuttability | 33 | 53 | 37 | 5 | 21 | 29 | 13 | 61 | 66 | 0 | 45 |
Flammability | 33 | 0 | 37 | 21 | 5 | 45 | 66 | 13 | 53 | 61 | 29 |
Water Resist | 26 | 21 | 66 | 29 | 45 | 53 | 61 | 5 | 13 | 31 | 0 |
Insect Tox | 22 | 37 | 21 | 66 | 5 | 13 | 61 | 29 | 53 | 45 | 0 |
Human Tox | 15 | 45 | 37 | 61 | 13 | 29 | 53 | 21 | 5 | 66 | 0 |
Darkness | 33 | 45 | 37 | 66 | 0 | 53 | 61 | 5 | 13 | 21 | 29 |
Glossiness | 4 | 0 | 66 | 29 | 13 | 61 | 53 | 5 | 45 | 21 | 37 |