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Grass is plenty, bark is plenty, dirt is plenty.

those 3 materials can be converted into a self insulating biodegradable sturdy but flexible material which is 60% pure protein by calories, 100 grams of mushrooms having around 22 kilocalories of which 13.2 are proteins, but they can be dried and turned to slabs, bars, loafs or bricks to reduce the volume occupied by water just like dried meat, biscuits or tofu.

Mushrooms do not defecate on your land, they don't spread disease, but actually can be used as healing and prevention. Corona virus came from poultry not mushrooms , Brain eating prions come from cows meat not mushrooms, there's even the famous example of a woman who ate raw pork for 10 years and became a living suit of worms inside human skin, she is more worms than actual person, the worst one can get from eating raw mushrooms is ingesting digestible fly larvae which many cultures eat anyway, and the worst thing is that pork crap contaminates the land with worms ready to infect anything they touch. Mushrooms can grow in 3 dimensions and do not require massive lands to be farmed, it is technically possible to fill one bedroom with mushrooms, on the contrary it's not possible to grow wheat to fill a room, but it needs a forest cut down in order to free farm land. which means you can grow mushrooms in a tower but not wheat, thus saving land.

Ants where the first animals to discover farming on this planet, and they farm fungi, so I guess it is possible for pre industrial societies to farm mushrooms.

But, can mushrooms be converted into bricks, clothing, beams,ropes, tools and armors with pre-industrial technology? I know some people are already building clothing and houses made of mushrooms but would it be possible without modern technology?

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    $\begingroup$ At first I genuinely thought this was spam from the Mushroom Marketing sector, but now I'm in. Do the bricks (et al.) need to be rot-resistant? $\endgroup$
    – Escaped dental patient.
    Jun 27, 2021 at 8:36
  • $\begingroup$ @ARogueAnt. modern mushroom bricks seem to rot only when covered in dirt but they rot really fast, no idea how it works, but if it keeps maggots away from your ceiling, that's a bonus. $\endgroup$
    – user85816
    Jun 27, 2021 at 8:39
  • $\begingroup$ Im guessing that if you lacquered a brick of nearly anything dry that would halt decomposition for quite a long time. $\endgroup$
    – Hippeus_Lancer
    Jun 27, 2021 at 9:21
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    $\begingroup$ "Mushrooms do not defecate on your land," You say this as if manure returning nutrient to the soil is a bad thing? $\endgroup$
    – PcMan
    Jun 27, 2021 at 9:33
  • $\begingroup$ Mushrooms can absolutely spread disease. especially if humans start eating them on a large scale. and you need even MORE farmland for mushrooms because you have to feed mushrooms. $\endgroup$
    – John
    Jun 27, 2021 at 12:15

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NO

An adult human needs to eat about 8700Kj of food per day.

If they tried to derive this from just mushrooms, they would need to eat some 10.2Kg of mushrooms each day. Cultivating those mushrooms require 23 Kg of compost and 120liter of water.

Mushroom cultivation is a very inefficient way to source food energy.
Mushrooms do make a nice supplement to diet, providing a nice range of taste and containing a good mix of minerals that few other foods match.
But not as a primary food source.

Fungi can be used as feedstock for manufacturing structural materials, as the fungi cell walls are chitin, which can be processed into a variety of plastic-like substances. But this process is a long, chemical processing chain. There are other sources more suitable. Like the cellulose that you used to make the mushroom's compost from in the first place.

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    $\begingroup$ Producing enough compost would basically require them farming something else to turn into compost, If they are going through all that trouble just farm a cereal crop and get an order of magnitude more food. $\endgroup$
    – John
    Jun 27, 2021 at 12:06
  • $\begingroup$ Dried shiitake are 3300 kcal per kg. $\endgroup$
    – Vashu
    Jun 29, 2021 at 9:22
  • $\begingroup$ making bricks and strings out of mushrooms requires no chemical processing...well it requires a furnace, but you make it seem way more complicated than it actually is. $\endgroup$
    – Green
    Jul 5, 2021 at 15:07

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