Help me build an item

My players own a greek wineyard on the island of Samos and one of the players wants to build a magical basket for the covenfolk.
The item in question is a basket (Herbam) which the farmers use to gather the rapes be almost weightless (or the contents) so that it will be easier for the covenfolk to harvest the grapes.

Lesser Invested Device:
Material and Shape multiplers:
Material: Wines/Straw: Is straw equal to cloth (Base Points 1) or wood (Base points 2)
Size: Medium or Large: Those baskets are pretty big, so more than a skull but less than a shield. We are thinking of x3

So what spell guidelines should we use. In Covenants there is a chest that makes the books inside weightless (page 100) and it has a base of 4, but i have not found any Perdo Animal guidelines anywhere that gives a hint of this.

This item should be an effect usable 1 or 2 times per day with sun duration.

My thought:

Rego Herbam
Base 3: manipulate items made from plant products (Covenants page 51)
Range: Touch (+1)
Duration: Sun (+2)
Target: Circle (+0) Circle is the form of the basket.
Frequency: (+1) 2 times per day (Just in case)

Total Level: 11 Total Vis: 2 (rego, Herbam or Vim)

What do you think about it? Or how will you do this item?

The base 4 is based off the equivalent Perdo Terram guideline.

which book is that in?

All I can see is that base 5 Perdo Terram in HoH:Soc (page 37) has it as base level 5.

I would give it a second thought, basically because this item opens the door to portable Circle spells in your saga. Nothing wrong with that, but I know some people find portable circle spells unsavoury. We use them, but then all our grogs have historically (playing a hedgie saga now) carried round shields enchanted with at least 4 wards (metal, animal, wood, fire) with circle/ring durations and all our covenant is lighted with Ring duration CrIg torches.

If you decide not to go for Circle target, you can always go for Group and it would be perfectly fine. The current incantation would require the covenfolk to draw the circle with their fingers to activate the effect when the basket is full.

Cheers,
Xavi

I'm one of those people that do not like portable circles, but luckily, since you seem to want to make an item, you don't need it!

Nor for that matter do you need to mess with using PeTe guidelines to affect Herbam.
Infact, you're already on the right track!
Just use ReHe to have the basket carry itself and all it contains!

The idea it to enchant the basket with a 'lifting' effect. To basically levitate to the height the covenfolk lifts it to.
Since this affects the basket itself, you can even use R: Personal with the T: Individual.
Since an Individual of Herbam is a cubic yard, "less than a shield" would probably just be a single individual - or you could take a +1 magnitude for Size, thus allowing it to levitate up to the mass of 10 cubic yards of wood. That's a lot of grapes, and much closer to your original calculation.

Yup, that works as well. make the item maintain concentration, so covenfolk only need to concentrate for a few moments to change the direction of the movement (or to stop it).

Exactly

If instead of making the grapes weightless you made the basket magically move around and carry the weight, you could reduce the range to personal. This avoids the question of mobile circle spells as you would use target individual to target the basket.

I don't see how you could use Vim vis for the enchantment, I would think you would need Re or He vis.

...as explained above

That would be as an Invested Device I suppose, rather than a Lesser Device

Lesser or Invested you still need Technique or Form specific vis to create the enchantment. Vim vis is only good for Preparing an item for Enchantment as an Invested Device. Or, of course, enchanting a Vim effect.

It seems to me that carrying the grapes is the least amount of labor that can be saved in the process of making wine. Even a fairly large basket of grapes won't weigh enough to truly slow a covenfolk down, though I'm sure it would be appreciated! A single basket won't do it all, though - who gets to use the magic basket? Do fights break out over it?

Consider alternative approaches to the problem. If the goal is labor savings, what's the most labor intensive part of being a vinter? Certainly not the harvest (a few days) or the pressing of grapes. Maintenance of the vines and the management of the fermentation is probably the best place to address any potential labor savings. Perhaps a PeHe weed killer? A ReAn ward against parasites? A ReHe ward against mold? A CrHe crop improver?

Also consider broader applications for the same magic. Why make a magic basket when you could make a magic cart that carries many baskets? Or anything else you might want to carry?

ReHe3 (control an amount of wood), +0M Personal, +2M Sun, +1M Size (small cart, man-pulled rather than ox-cart) = ReHe10, +1 for 2 uses/day = ReHe12

Now you have a cart that moves itself upon command, or at the very least assists whomever is pulling it by moving the weight of the cart by itself, meaning the person pulling it isn't burdened by the weight of the cart - a huge mechanical advantage. It's useful year-round to move just about anything. Add some magnitudes to get a bigger cart (+Size).

How about a device which moves a certain amount of the grapes into the specified location? Move a thousand grapes at once, or ten thousand. You can do your harvest in minutes.

The problem with this is that in a large basket the grapes at the bottom would be crushed...

Technically that would be in a deep basket - you could make a huge, flat, basket without this problem.

Less pedantically though, if this is an invested device anyway, I'd be tempted to add an effect to ward the contents from being crushed by Herbam phenomenae.
Would probably cost a few magnitudes for complexity though

it depends on the climate, if you only have a few days to harvest before the crop is destroyed by hail, speeding up the process is invaluable. A niche concern i know, but it might be valid in certain circumstances.

Bob

The reason why people in the saga wants to build these baskets is that the grogs who has the vinyard are getting old and they are not that strong anymore. But they are still stubborn that they want to do a "whole days labor" every day. So the Magi are trying to aid them as much as possible with lesser enchanted devices so that they can produce the wine they love to make.

So thank you. I got the answers i needed.

Heh. You need my verditius. He's considered building a conveyor-belt using rego magics. Simply drop the stuff onto the belt, let it be carried inside.

Well now, that's different. MuCo magic can make them (temporarily) young and strong again! And since they're old already, a bit of Warping won't have enough time to really affect them (and may not be required enough to actually cause Warping at all).

Yes, but we players wants to build them items, that aids them, we do not want to use muto corpus effects to enhance our covenfolk.