Dressmaker Guide
Dressmaker Quality Guide
Learn what actually affects your Quality score, how Grain, Fit and Sewing Accuracy are weighted, and what to fix when your dress falls short.
How the score is split
- Grain30%
- Fit20%
- Sewing Accuracy50%
For client dresses with measurements, Sewing Accuracy has the biggest direct effect on Quality — half the score is decided at the machine.
The arithmetic
How Quality is calculated
Quality is one number built from three readings the game takes while you work. Two of those readings are printed on the game's own screens as percentages; the arithmetic that combines them is never shown to you, which is why a dress can look right and still come up short.
With client measurements
Quality = round( Grain × 0.30 + Fit × 0.20 + Sewing Accuracy × 0.50 )
- Grain30%
- Fit20%
- Sewing Accuracy50%
Fit is measured against the client, so it only exists when there is a client to measure.
Without client measurements
Quality = round( Grain × 0.40 + Sewing Accuracy × 0.60 )
- Grain40%
- Sewing Accuracy60%
Fit — not part of this branch
The Fit row is gone rather than zeroed. With nothing measured there is nothing to fit, and the remaining two readings are re-weighted to carry the whole score between them.
The three readings are on screen. The arithmetic is not.
Every input to this formula is something the game already shows you. What it never shows is how much each one is worth, so a player can watch all three readings and still not know which one is holding the dress back.
Grain Quality
Cutting Room readout
Mannequin accuracy
Mannequin readout
Sewing Complete!
Sewing minigame
Grain Quality, Mannequin accuracy and Sewing Assist are the game's own labels, quoted from its localization table.
The weighted sum is rounded to a whole number at the end, which is why the two branches can differ by a point on a dress that looks identical.
The three inputs
What affects Quality
Three readings go in. Everything else a dress is made of stays out, which is the part most players get wrong first.
Grain
How well your cut panels follow the intended grain direction.
- with measurements
- 30%
- without measurements
- 40%
The Cutting Room prints this as Grain Quality, as a percentage. A panel rotated to fit a corner is a panel paid for here.
Fit
How closely the dress matches the client's measurements.
- with measurements
- 20%
- without measurements
- not scored
The mannequin step prints this as Mannequin accuracy. It is the one reading that disappears completely rather than dropping to zero.
Sewing Accuracy
Heaviest inputHow accurately you sew the garment together.
- with measurements
- 50%
- without measurements
- 60%
The sewing step is its own minigame and its own score, and it is the heaviest input in both branches.
Estimate it yourself
What would your Quality be?
Set the three readings from your own dress and watch the sum. This estimates Quality and nothing else — it never looks at your pattern, your fabric, your accessories or the brief you are working from.
Estimated Quality
76
Largest opportunity
Sewing Accuracy is where the score is going.
Every 10 points here is worth about 5 Quality.
Taking it all the way to 100 would add about 16.5 more.
What this score would clear
- 60
- 70
- 75
- 77
- 80
- 90
- 95
This block explains Quality. If you want the whole dress read — requirements, style scores, accessories and fabric — that is the Dress Fixer's job, not this page's.
Diagnosis
Why is my Quality low?
Start from the reading that came in lowest and work down this table. Only three things can move Quality, so the answer is always one of them.
What you are looking at
Check this first
- Sewing is the lowest of the three readings
- Sewing Accuracy — it is half the with-measurements score on its own.
- Fit is the lowest of the three readings
- The client's measurements and the mannequin sizing that matches them.
- Grain is the lowest of the three readings
- Cutting and grain direction: which panels are rotated off the grain line.
- All three readings look fine, but the score is one or two short
- The readings themselves, read exactly — the weighted sum rounds at the end, so two dresses built from the same visible numbers can land a point apart.
- The fabric was expensive and Quality is still low
- Nothing — fabric price is not a Quality input. It moves cost and sale price, not this score.
- Plenty of accessories, and Quality still will not rise
- Nothing — accessories are not a Quality input either. They are read by style scores and by accessory requirements.
Three things Quality is not
- An expensive fabric does not automatically produce a higher Quality.
- More accessories do not automatically produce a higher Quality.
- A higher Style Score does not automatically produce a higher Quality.
The reason is structural rather than a quirk: the formula has exactly three inputs, and none of them is a choice you make in the fabric or accessory menus. Everything you buy changes what the dress *is*; only cutting, fitting and sewing change how well it is made.
Two systems, one dress
Quality vs Style
Quality and Style are scored separately and they measure different things. A brief usually asks for both, which is why a dress that satisfies one can still be rejected for the other.
Quality
Style
What it measures
Construction — how well the dress was made
Aesthetic — what kind of dress it is
Decided by
Grain, Fit and Sewing Accuracy
The pattern, fabric and accessory tags you chose
Changed by
How you cut, fit and sew the panels
What you put on the dress before you sew it
How it is scored
One score, from 0 to 100
22 separate style scores, 20 of which a brief can ask for
How a brief asks for it
“Quality: 80”
A named style at a target, e.g. “Elegant: 60”
A dress can have high Quality and miss the style that was asked for — or carry exactly the right style and still be badly made. Neither score can be traded for the other.
The number that keeps coming up
How to reach Quality 80
Eighty is not a rule of thumb. It is the most common requirement written into the build, and it is the floor every gift dress is held to.
Where 80 comes from
Of the 88 commission briefs in this build, 67 ask for a Quality of exactly 80 — including all 10 gift dresses. The other rungs are far rarer, which is why so much of the game is played against one number.
The full Quality ladder
- 60: 2
- 70: 6
- 75: 9
- 77: 1
- 80: 67
- 90: 1
- 95: 1
Every Quality requirement in the build, from lowest to highest. There is no floor below 60 and no brief above 95.
Two dresses against the same floor
Clears it, with room to spare
| Reading | Value | Weight | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grain | 90 | 30% | 27 |
| Fit | 90 | 20% | 18 |
| Sewing Accuracy | 75 | 50% | 37.5 |
| Quality | 83 | ||
Grain and Fit are both strong, Sewing is merely good — and the dress still lands at 83.
Clears it, with nothing to spare
| Reading | Value | Weight | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grain | 100 | 30% | 30 |
| Fit | 100 | 20% | 20 |
| Sewing Accuracy | 60 | 50% | 30 |
| Quality | 80 | ||
Perfect cutting and a perfect fit, and the dress only just reaches 80. The second example is the one worth looking at: two readings at 100 buy a passer, not a comfortable one.
How much of the floor Sewing owns by itself
Because Sewing Accuracy is worth half the score, perfect work everywhere else still leaves the decision at the machine. Hold Grain and Fit at 100 and Sewing has to reach 59 before the dress clears 80 — a shortfall of one point there drops it below.
So the useful question is not “what do I need to score?” but “which reading is furthest from carrying its share?”. Two readings at 100 and one at 60 pass; three readings at 66 do not.
Advanced
The exact fit calculation
Fit is the only one of the three readings with a curve rather than a straight weight, and the curve is unforgiving in a way that surprises people. Open this if you are chasing a few points.
Fit, from the three measurement differences
Fit = 100 × clamp01( 1 − 200 × ( BustDiff² + WaistDiff² + HipsDiff² ) )
Differences below 0.01 are treated as zero, so a dress measured to the millimetre is not punished for floating-point dust.
The three differences are squared, summed and scaled by 200 before being subtracted from 1. Squaring is what makes the curve behave the way it does: a dress that is nearly right scores nearly full marks, and a dress that is badly wrong on a single measurement is punished as hard as one that is wrong everywhere.
What a single difference costs
One measurement off by the amount in the first column, the other two exact.
| Difference | Fit | Points lost |
|---|---|---|
| 0.01 | 98 | 2 |
| 0.02 | 92 | 8 |
| 0.03 | 82 | 18 |
| 0.04 | 68 | 32 |
| 0.05 | 50 | 50 |
The same difference on all three measurements costs three times as much, and Fit reaches zero at about 0.071 on a single measurement — beyond that, extra error is free, because there is no score left to lose.
This is the whole of the Fit reading. Nothing about the fabric, the pattern or the accessories feeds it.
Before you deliver
Improve Quality: the checklist
Six checks in the order the game applies them. Each one is a page that explains how to do it.
- 1Check the client's measurementsMeasuring Clients
- 2Size the mannequin correctlyMannequin Sizing
- 3Check panel grain directionCutting & Grain
- 4Recut badly placed panels if necessaryRecut a panel
- 5Sew carefully — it is half the scoreSewing
- 6Check Quality before you hand the dress overOpen the Dress Fixer
Still short after all six?
Quality is one number on a brief that also asks about style, colour, fabric and accessories. If the dress passes here and the commission still fails, the problem is on the requirement side.
Questions
Quality FAQ
What affects Quality in Dressmaker?
Exactly three readings: Grain, Fit and Sewing Accuracy. No other choice you make feeds the score, which is why changing the fabric or adding accessories never rescues a dress that was cut or sewn badly.
Which of the three matters most?
Sewing Accuracy, in both branches — 50% of the score when the dress has client measurements, and 60% when it does not. Grain is second, and Fit is third and only measured when there is a client to measure against.
Does expensive fabric increase Quality?
Not directly. Fabric price feeds the dress's cost and its sale price, and fabric tags feed Style scores — but no fabric property is an input to the Quality formula.
Do accessories increase Quality?
Not directly either. Accessories are read by style scores, by accessory-count and variety requirements, and by the sale price. They add no Quality.
Does Style Score affect Quality?
No. They are two independent systems: Style measures what kind of dress you made, Quality measures how well you made it. A brief can ask for both, and passing one does not help you pass the other.
Why is Fit missing from my Quality calculation?
Because the dress has no client measurements, so the game scores it on the other branch: 40% Grain and 60% Sewing Accuracy, with Fit left out entirely rather than counted as zero.
How do I get Quality 80?
By getting the weighted sum to 80 — not by getting all three readings to 80. Grain 100 with Fit 100 and Sewing 60 passes; three readings at 65 do not. Work out which reading is furthest from carrying its share and fix that one.
Can I fix a low Quality score after the dress is finished?
Only by going back to what produced it. Grain comes from how the panels were laid, Fit from the measurements and the mannequin, and Sewing from the minigame — so a low score is a recut, a re-size or a re-sew, never a change to the bill of materials.
The chain that feeds this score
Where each reading comes from
Quality takes its inputs from four earlier stages of the workflow. Each of these pages explains the stage that produces one of them.
Measuring Clients
The measurements that decide whether the Fit row exists at all, and what the client's numbers actually are.
Mannequin Sizing
How the mannequin is sized against those measurements — the stage the game prints as Mannequin accuracy.
Cutting & Grain
Grain direction, rotated panels and recutting: the stage that produces the reading the Cutting Room prints as Grain Quality.
Sewing
The sewing minigame and how its accuracy is scored — the single heaviest input to Quality.
Notes
Read from build 25482629: the three-reading quality block this page calculates with, and the 88 commission briefs in the same snapshot — 67 of which ask for a Quality of exactly 80.
The three weights, both branches, the fit curve and the 0.01 threshold on this page are the recovered quality block that the site's sale-price engine already calculates with — the same functions, not a second copy of the arithmetic. Every figure in the tables is computed from that block at build time, so the worked examples and the estimate above cannot drift from the formula.
The requirement counts come from the commission snapshot: 88 briefs read, 67 of them asking for a Quality of exactly 80, and the ladder running from 60 to 95.
Build
- Game data: 25482629
- Current public build: 25508059
- Last patch check: 2026-09-27
The quality block and the requirement counts come from the extracted snapshot, not from the live game, so a balance patch can move the public build before it moves these numbers.
One thing this page does not publish: the rate at which the game turns panels and accessories into labour. It is not in the export, so nothing here derives it.
Read this on its own, or follow the whole Dressmaker guide through the steps around it.