I loved crafting in two games the most, both for different reasons :
1. SWG. The crafting and gathering was the most immersive of any MMO ive experienced. The way you had to use scanners to find the right spots to put your harvestors down is plain awesome for a scifi MMO. Also the factories and workshop you could create for yourself in your house added to the immersion. Apart from that the crafting system was also a smart one. I loved munitions and shipwright. Combined with the shop npcs you could place and the way you were found through the bazaar, made this the most complete crafting experience that Ive played.
2. Fallen Earth. Although the crafting system itself is as basic as you can get, the gathering of scraps in a post apocalyptic world is immersive imo. But the best part in this game is that you actually can create anything for your own toon. Havent played other games where its so well done that you can create usefull gear for yourself during lvling. Its too bad though that with their last changes they made it more frustrating, especially the node spawns.
EQ2 and Vanguard have nice crafting systems too, but Im not really a fan of nodehunting in general and the minigames in EQ2 were kind of meh. A good point in EQ2 crafting however, is that you craft faster the higher lvl you are. That actually makes sense when you become more experienced as crafter. As opposed to other games where refining resources and crafting becomes slower and slower for a purely arbitrary reason (just to slow you down), which I hate.
See now this is the kind of detailed and clear reply which contributes to the discussion. I am very sad that I missed out on pre CU/NGE SWG crafting. So many people have told me it was their gold standard. I agree that node hunting is something of a pain.
I agree that crafting faster on same level objects as you level makes sense. Not crafting really fast on the highest level stuff, but crap that apprentices can do should be easy for masters.
I think crafting would be much more engaging if the only way to improve your character was through crafting. As in you start out with literally nothing, and rather than looting weapons and gear, you loot materials in which to craft with. Would slow down the whole power-leveling process as well since you won't have the necessary equipment to level without the gear that you must craft for yourself.
That would put some real meaning into crafting again instead of what it's been turned into over the years. Those 50 or 60 levels would take a heck of a lot longer now wouldn't it? Especially if you can only craft items for yourself and not buy them from others.
I think crafting would be much more engaging if the only way to improve your character was through crafting. As in you start out with literally nothing, and rather than looting weapons and gear, you loot materials in which to craft with. Would slow down the whole power-leveling process as well since you won't have the necessary equipment to level without the gear that you must craft for yourself.
That would put some real meaning into crafting again instead of what it's been turned into over the years. Those 50 or 60 levels would take a heck of a lot longer now wouldn't it? Especially if you can only craft items for yourself and not buy them from others.
I am with you up until not buying from others. I think it would take away a lot of the social aspect and also force people who don't like to craft to do so. I think that monsters should drop nice mats and no items, but if you can't trade, that would leave adventurers without any chance to avoid crafting and it would force crafters in general to do adventuring to find rare mats. I am absolutely on board with no npcs, no good starting gear and no finished item loot drops though.
I love crafting. I loved Vanguards crafting system. I wish a more modern MMO would implement this
I read alot about Vanguard's system, but I've never played it. I know you can craft almost anything, including ships, but aside from the diversity of craftable items, what stood out about the actual mechanics of Vanguards system?
It was basically a mini game. You had several steps in the process of making an item. The more effort you put into each step led to a higher quality item. for instance you used planks, you had to polish it, shape it, and something else. Its been a long time since I played. You gain skill for these separate process. Add into that the quality of your tools affected the construction.
I know i'm not doing it justice, but it was very fun for us crafter types.
Don't try to talk on behalf of all "crafter types", which I most certainly consider myself to be one of. In all MMOs I play extendedly, I do a lot of crafting. And I disagree with you: for me, Vanguard's system was the worst piece of shit ever.
I apologize for my presumption. I definitely made a mistake in phrasing it like that. Its a good catch not to let me get away with something like that. You've done a good service to others in clarifying that. +1 to the correction. I will now fall on my sword to make up for my dishoner. Arrrrggghhh, its going dark. Dont go to the light, don't go to the light....
I love crafting. I loved Vanguards crafting system. I wish a more modern MMO would implement this
I read alot about Vanguard's system, but I've never played it. I know you can craft almost anything, including ships, but aside from the diversity of craftable items, what stood out about the actual mechanics of Vanguards system?
It was basically a mini game. You had several steps in the process of making an item. The more effort you put into each step led to a higher quality item. for instance you used planks, you had to polish it, shape it, and something else. Its been a long time since I played. You gain skill for these separate process. Add into that the quality of your tools affected the construction.
I know i'm not doing it justice, but it was very fun for us crafter types.
Don't try to talk on behalf of all "crafter types", which I most certainly consider myself to be one of. In all MMOs I play extendedly, I do a lot of crafting. And I disagree with you: for me, Vanguard's system was the worst piece of shit ever.
Instead of just dropping swear words, care to explain why you don't like it and/or what kind of crafting systems you prefer? What games do you play?
Imo, the best crafting system out there, is LOTRO's. EQ2's isn't that bad either. Just about all crafting systems include a sort of grind to level up your skills, but in these two games you can actually make useful stuff for your toons.
Some games have very basic crafting, ie WoW, where you just gather stuff and choose to make things, without really putting more into the crafting process. I don't like that. In such games (again, WoW is a good example), it's fairly typical that what you make is worthless junk, which is even worse.
Another system that was bloody retarded, was Warhammer's. For example, carrying around plants and waiting for timers to go down, so you could harvest them. And what you could make with them, was mostly crap that, considering that it had lvl requirements way too high, like potions you could use at ie lvl 30 which maybe healed 5-10% of your health.
Vanguard's system took like forever and more, every bloody crafting attempt. Sure, it was innovative the way that it introduced something new, with the possibility of different results, quality wise. But the grind for mats, then the eternal grind to do the crafting itself.... I said it's worst system ever. I take that back, it's second worse.
The absolutely worst crafting system, is beyond doubt FFXIV's.Everything you try to do, is a minigame which takes several minutes. What's even worse than the time requirements, is when you try go gather mats. For example, you start chopping on a tree, and expect to get wood of that kind. Well, that rarely happens. When you're staring straight at the tree, you may get messages like "you sense wood-type-x above or below you". But do you get that type of wood? You'll probably get stuff like bloodworms instead (for fishing). The crafting process itself is even more moronic. It's a minigame where you are supposed to choose among 3 options during the process. Basically it's about being careful, fast, or use standard. Everyone I've talked to about this, just keeps on hitting enter (or a pad button), without even considering other options than standard, simply because they really don't mean anything at all. And if you're unlucky, a 2 minute craft ends in a failure. Which happens very often when you're past the first tier. Not to mention, if you're gonna level professions without doing the leves (quests), you'll have to craft thousand of times at the upper lvls to reach the next. Someone at the FFXIV forums once did a guesstimate of 20 years to lvl a profession that way. Wish I had a link, was a hilarious post. The ONLY strength in this system, is that a single toon can level all the crafing professions in the game.
Most MMOs have a static list of items that players can find. The stats on these items never vary. Dynamic loot systems are ones where the stats and bonuses of a weapon are generated within certain range. AC and UO are examples of MMOs that have dynamic loot systems.
If you find a dagger in Asheron's Call, it will have stats and spells that are generated within a range dictated by the particular loot table it came from. Some of those attributes include:
Max damage
Variance
Quality
Durability
Material type
Attack bonus
Defense bonus
Speed
Value
Charges
Spells
Almost every weapon and piece of armor in the loot system (quest and special items aside) can be salved, reducing it to scraps of its base material type. For example, a copper dagger would yield copper salvage. With tinkering, salvage is collected up in bags, and full bags of salvage can be applies to weapons to enhance them or change them in a variety of ways. More on Tinkering can be found here.
So by dynamic loot you mean diablo style loot drops? Okay, I understand that. The problem is that dynamic loot inherently screws over crafting. There is just no way around that in my opinion. Even with salvage you can't play as a crafter really.
Well, here I go to make a plug for the old school version of SWG.
Pre-NGE SWG had a sort of related system. As far as loot goes, stats can vary greatly for any given item. Naturally, the high powered items were actually very rare. On an ultra rare occasion, you may get lucky and loot a very powerful item.
On top of this, crafted item stats can vary wildly, depending on the crafter's knowledge, resources used, quality of resources, crafter tool quality, etc... in short, alot of factors to drive stats in many different directions, all orchestrated by the crafter's own knowledge of the game. This was important because many players wanted their gear a certain way, especially the PvPers.
What made *everything* work out and crafters still being core members of the game was that practically everything will break for good eventually. Pretty much all items had "Condition" and once it went to zero, it was broken for good. In addition, as the condition lowers, the stats go down, too.
What this did was it ensured high powered items were kept in check. After enough wear and tear, they were gone. This also ensured a very player economy. Players needed new gear to replace worn out ones. Crafter / Merchants competed fiercely for their business. Since there was a constant need for gear, prices were fair and not far fetched. A quality blaster would cost 20-40k credits, compared to the millions items went for when SWG removed item decay.
You see, Crafters knew that it was important to provide a good balance in item quality and pricing. They gave alot of care to their reputation on their server. Players would settle on a favorite merchant to repeatedly come back to. We used to argue about who was the best weaponsmith, armorsmith, shipwright, etc. on the server. I still remember "Az" as, IMO, the best weaponsmith on Ahazi server after all these years.
Pre-NGE SWG was the last MMORPG I saw with this level of player interdependency with a healthy game economy, as well as, IMO, the best crafting system to date I've seen in an MMO. Alot of control was in the players' hands.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Most MMOs have a static list of items that players can find. The stats on these items never vary. Dynamic loot systems are ones where the stats and bonuses of a weapon are generated within certain range. AC and UO are examples of MMOs that have dynamic loot systems.
If you find a dagger in Asheron's Call, it will have stats and spells that are generated within a range dictated by the particular loot table it came from. Some of those attributes include:
Max damage
Variance
Quality
Durability
Material type
Attack bonus
Defense bonus
Speed
Value
Charges
Spells
Almost every weapon and piece of armor in the loot system (quest and special items aside) can be salved, reducing it to scraps of its base material type. For example, a copper dagger would yield copper salvage. With tinkering, salvage is collected up in bags, and full bags of salvage can be applies to weapons to enhance them or change them in a variety of ways. More on Tinkering can be found here.
So by dynamic loot you mean diablo style loot drops? Okay, I understand that. The problem is that dynamic loot inherently screws over crafting. There is just no way around that in my opinion. Even with salvage you can't play as a crafter really.
Both UO and AC had dedicated crafters. Crafted items were superior to looied items. What are you basing that opinion on?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I liked EQ2 and Vanguard's crafting system a lot. I prefer the mini games and for the process to take time. I just liked making the barding for horses, candle stick holders, plates etc. It just seemed fun to do more than just hit combine to make armor. I also felt a good crafting system shouldn't be so everyone crafts, but it also can't be so complex or time consuming no one does (although i probably still would!). If so few people use it then eventually it gets changed.
"Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better." parrotpholk
Most MMOs have a static list of items that players can find. The stats on these items never vary. Dynamic loot systems are ones where the stats and bonuses of a weapon are generated within certain range. AC and UO are examples of MMOs that have dynamic loot systems.
If you find a dagger in Asheron's Call, it will have stats and spells that are generated within a range dictated by the particular loot table it came from. Some of those attributes include:
Max damage
Variance
Quality
Durability
Material type
Attack bonus
Defense bonus
Speed
Value
Charges
Spells
Almost every weapon and piece of armor in the loot system (quest and special items aside) can be salved, reducing it to scraps of its base material type. For example, a copper dagger would yield copper salvage. With tinkering, salvage is collected up in bags, and full bags of salvage can be applies to weapons to enhance them or change them in a variety of ways. More on Tinkering can be found here.
So by dynamic loot you mean diablo style loot drops? Okay, I understand that. The problem is that dynamic loot inherently screws over crafting. There is just no way around that in my opinion. Even with salvage you can't play as a crafter really.
Both UO and AC had dedicated crafters. Crafted items were superior to looied items. What are you basing that opinion on?
Well I have not played UO or AC. Maybe I've played too much Diablo. My bad. I dunno, I prefer not to have finished item drops from creatures. Or gold drops really, cause inflation.
Most MMOs have a static list of items that players can find. The stats on these items never vary. Dynamic loot systems are ones where the stats and bonuses of a weapon are generated within certain range. AC and UO are examples of MMOs that have dynamic loot systems.
If you find a dagger in Asheron's Call, it will have stats and spells that are generated within a range dictated by the particular loot table it came from. Some of those attributes include:
Max damage
Variance
Quality
Durability
Material type
Attack bonus
Defense bonus
Speed
Value
Charges
Spells
Almost every weapon and piece of armor in the loot system (quest and special items aside) can be salved, reducing it to scraps of its base material type. For example, a copper dagger would yield copper salvage. With tinkering, salvage is collected up in bags, and full bags of salvage can be applies to weapons to enhance them or change them in a variety of ways. More on Tinkering can be found here.
So by dynamic loot you mean diablo style loot drops? Okay, I understand that. The problem is that dynamic loot inherently screws over crafting. There is just no way around that in my opinion. Even with salvage you can't play as a crafter really.
Well, here I go to make a plug for the old school version of SWG.
Pre-NGE SWG had a sort of related system. As far as loot goes, stats can vary greatly for any given item. Naturally, the high powered items were actually very rare. On an ultra rare occasion, you may get lucky and loot a very powerful item.
On top of this, crafted item stats can vary wildly, depending on the crafter's knowledge, resources used, quality of resources, crafter tool quality, etc... in short, alot of factors to drive stats in many different directions, all orchestrated by the crafter's own knowledge of the game. This was important because many players wanted their gear a certain way, especially the PvPers.
What made *everything* work out and crafters still being core members of the game was that practically everything will break for good eventually. Pretty much all items had "Condition" and once it went to zero, it was broken for good. In addition, as the condition lowers, the stats go down, too.
What this did was it ensured high powered items were kept in check. After enough wear and tear, they were gone. This also ensured a very player economy. Players needed new gear to replace worn out ones. Crafter / Merchants competed fiercely for their business. Since there was a constant need for gear, prices were fair and not far fetched. A quality blaster would cost 20-40k credits, compared to the millions items went for when SWG removed item decay.
You see, Crafters knew that it was important to provide a good balance in item quality and pricing. They gave alot of care to their reputation on their server. Players would settle on a favorite merchant to repeatedly come back to. We used to argue about who was the best weaponsmith, armorsmith, shipwright, etc. on the server. I still remember "Az" as, IMO, the best weaponsmith on Ahazi server after all these years.
Pre-NGE SWG was the last MMORPG I saw with this level of player interdependency with a healthy game economy, as well as, IMO, the best crafting system to date I've seen in an MMO. Alot of control was in the players' hands.
Yes, this is what I am hearing from all SWG players.
I love crafting. I loved Vanguards crafting system. I wish a more modern MMO would implement this
I read alot about Vanguard's system, but I've never played it. I know you can craft almost anything, including ships, but aside from the diversity of craftable items, what stood out about the actual mechanics of Vanguards system?
It was basically a mini game. You had several steps in the process of making an item. The more effort you put into each step led to a higher quality item. for instance you used planks, you had to polish it, shape it, and something else. Its been a long time since I played. You gain skill for these separate process. Add into that the quality of your tools affected the construction.
I know i'm not doing it justice, but it was very fun for us crafter types.
Don't try to talk on behalf of all "crafter types", which I most certainly consider myself to be one of. In all MMOs I play extendedly, I do a lot of crafting. And I disagree with you: for me, Vanguard's system was the worst piece of shit ever.
Instead of just dropping swear words, care to explain why you don't like it and/or what kind of crafting systems you prefer? What games do you play?
Imo, the best crafting system out there, is LOTRO's. EQ2's isn't that bad either. Just about all crafting systems include a sort of grind to level up your skills, but in these two games you can actually make useful stuff for your toons.
Some games have very basic crafting, ie WoW, where you just gather stuff and choose to make things, without really putting more into the crafting process. I don't like that. In such games (again, WoW is a good example), it's fairly typical that what you make is worthless junk, which is even worse.
Another system that was bloody retarded, was Warhammer's. For example, carrying around plants and waiting for timers to go down, so you could harvest them. And what you could make with them, was mostly crap that, considering that it had lvl requirements way too high, like potions you could use at ie lvl 30 which maybe healed 5-10% of your health.
Vanguard's system took like forever and more, every bloody crafting attempt. Sure, it was innovative the way that it introduced something new, with the possibility of different results, quality wise. But the grind for mats, then the eternal grind to do the crafting itself.... I said it's worst system ever. I take that back, it's second worse.
The absolutely worst crafting system, is beyond doubt FFXIV's.Everything you try to do, is a minigame which takes several minutes. What's even worse than the time requirements, is when you try go gather mats. For example, you start chopping on a tree, and expect to get wood of that kind. Well, that rarely happens. When you're staring straight at the tree, you may get messages like "you sense wood-type-x above or below you". But do you get that type of wood? You'll probably get stuff like bloodworms instead (for fishing). The crafting process itself is even more moronic. It's a minigame where you are supposed to choose among 3 options during the process. Basically it's about being careful, fast, or use standard. Everyone I've talked to about this, just keeps on hitting enter (or a pad button), without even considering other options than standard, simply because they really don't mean anything at all. And if you're unlucky, a 2 minute craft ends in a failure. Which happens very often when you're past the first tier. Not to mention, if you're gonna level professions without doing the leves (quests), you'll have to craft thousand of times at the upper lvls to reach the next. Someone at the FFXIV forums once did a guesstimate of 20 years to lvl a profession that way. Wish I had a link, was a hilarious post. The ONLY strength in this system, is that a single toon can level all the crafing professions in the game.
I do not like it to be possible for one player to craft all their items by themselves. Seems more like a time sink when you could just run loot drops for an essentially single player game. I dunno, some people like to be able to do it all themselves, which is fine for single player but takes away from social in mmo imo.
I understand that many people do not like excessive craft times. Personally it sounds like I would like Vanguard's system. It seems like you could really make differentiated items.
What is LOTRO's system like? I think I actually played it for a while, but maybe didn't play it for long enough for the crafting system to stick in my head.
I loved crafting in two games the most, both for different reasons :
1. SWG. The crafting and gathering was the most immersive of any MMO ive experienced. The way you had to use scanners to find the right spots to put your harvestors down is plain awesome for a scifi MMO. Also the factories and workshop you could create for yourself in your house added to the immersion. Apart from that the crafting system was also a smart one. I loved munitions and shipwright. Combined with the shop npcs you could place and the way you were found through the bazaar, made this the most complete crafting experience that Ive played.
See now this is the kind of detailed and clear reply which contributes to the discussion. I am very sad that I missed out on pre CU/NGE SWG crafting. So many people have told me it was their gold standard. I agree that node hunting is something of a pain.
I agree that crafting faster on same level objects as you level makes sense. Not crafting really fast on the highest level stuff, but crap that apprentices can do should be easy for masters.
Even after the NGE launched SWG had the best crafting system ever. Getting mail in game from your friends that gave you the heads up on the spawn of server best titanium aluminum was a rush. And...I loved the quest chain that allowed armorsmith's to learn the RIS armor schematic. There will never be a better crafting system that what SWG had...and even has now.
I loved crafting in two games the most, both for different reasons :
1. SWG. The crafting and gathering was the most immersive of any MMO ive experienced. The way you had to use scanners to find the right spots to put your harvestors down is plain awesome for a scifi MMO. Also the factories and workshop you could create for yourself in your house added to the immersion. Apart from that the crafting system was also a smart one. I loved munitions and shipwright. Combined with the shop npcs you could place and the way you were found through the bazaar, made this the most complete crafting experience that Ive played.
See now this is the kind of detailed and clear reply which contributes to the discussion. I am very sad that I missed out on pre CU/NGE SWG crafting. So many people have told me it was their gold standard. I agree that node hunting is something of a pain.
I agree that crafting faster on same level objects as you level makes sense. Not crafting really fast on the highest level stuff, but crap that apprentices can do should be easy for masters.
Even after the NGE launched SWG had the best crafting system ever. Getting mail in game from your friends that gave you the heads up on the spawn of server best titanium aluminum was a rush. And...I loved the quest chain that allowed armorsmith's to learn the RIS armor schematic. There will never be a better crafting system that what SWG had...and even has now.
If someone made a game with crafting similar to the original SWG crafting you would still prefer post CU/NGE SWG to trying a new game? A lot of people said that CU or NGE or both caused them to hate SWG after having experienced the original system.
A Tale in the Desert might have more ideas about how to make crafting interesting than all of the other games listed on this site combined. Yes, all of them. The problem with having crafting discussions on a site like this is that most people haven't played ATITD much, and thus don't know much of what has already been done and how well it worked.
Vanguard has one crafting puzzle, some slight variations on it, and a ton of grinding. I guess that beats just having the grinding and nothing else, but that that qualifies as better crafting than most other games is sad.
Could you give some background for ATITD? I have heard of this game in my net travels but have not played it.
I have also heard people say that Wurm Online has good crafting, and to a degree Minecraft although that is more the world building thing. Any opinions on Wurm?
The reason that is so hard to do is that there are so many different things in the game. With most games, if you know how to craft one item, then you more or less know how to do everything. Or maybe you need to know how to craft one item and how to gather one resource.
With ATITD, if you know how to craft one item, then you know how to craft one item, and that's it. You don't really know anything else about how to craft anything else. Because everything else is different. I'll give some examples.
Let's talk about gathering resources for starters. If you want to gather sand, then you stand on a spot with sand, click an icon that appears in the corner, and pick how much sand you want to gather. There are many spots with sand (it is, after all, a desert), so it's pretty trivial to gather arbitrarily large quantities.
Now suppose that you want to gather red sand instead. It's almost the same as sand (or at least was as of the third telling), except that you have to go to one particular spot to get it. That might be hours away from you. That makes red sand a valuable commodity if you don't happen to be near the spot where it is gathered.
For wood, you can go to a tree and gather wood from that tree. Different trees give different amounts of wood, and wood can only be gathered from a tree (whether by you or by someone else) once every 60 seconds. However, you can run back and forth between several trees gathering wood from each. Alternatively, you can get a hatchet that will let you gather twice as much wood, but take twice as long to respawn. Or three times, or whatever. Or more to the point, have perhaps a 70% chance of 4x wood with 4x respawn time, and 30% chance of 3x wood with 3x respawn time.
For slate, if you stand near water and run around, occasionally an icon will appear saying that you're standing on slate. Click the icon to gather 1 slate. That makes the icon disappear, and you have to move around to make it appear again. But if run across slate and get off of it before you click the icon, it disappears and you don't get any slate.
Sound boring so far? Those are the simple resources that newbies can do. It gets more complicated.
For metal ores, you can build a mine, and what the mine digs up depends on where you place it. Except that if you place a mine at random, it is highly probable that it will be dirt, which is nearly worthless. And placing mines everywhere can get expensive. However, there is a dowsing skill that will let you check every two minutes and tell you what you would get if you placed a mine. Or at least, if your perception is high enough to see it. If you need 10 perception to see zinc and you only have 5 perception, it will report dirt--but still give zinc if you place the mine there. You can bring down the two minute timer with temporary buffs that take a fair bit of doing to set up.
Let's suppose that you use dowsing and it reports that you detect iron. If you place a mine right there, it will be an iron mine. But iron comes in long veins, so there will be a number of spots nearby where you can also place a mine and get iron ore. You can't place two mines too close to each other, however. If you can figure out which way the vein is oriented by dowsing a lot near your first mine, you might be able to place ten mines and cover the vein.
But different minerals have differently shaped veins. Veins for lead are a square. Veins for silver zigzag back and forth erratically. So even if you want to cover a vein, it might take quite a while to figure out how it is shaped. Even if you don't need 20 zinc mines yourself, they can be valuable to sell to others.
Once you actually place the mine, working it is pretty simple. You click to get some ore, and then there is a delay before you can do it again. After you click enough times, the mine collapses and you have to dig it deeper to get more ore. But each level deeper costs more than the previous, and eventually, digging deeper yet is too expensive to have much of a point and you're better off getting a new mine elsewhere.
And then there is marble. There are a bunch of types of marble in the game, and you can attune yourself to any particular type. Let's suppose that you attune yourself to oyster shell marble, for example. When you attune yourself, it tells you a distance. Let's say 100 feet, though the distance it will give you changes periodically. You'll have an option to break slate to see if marble is there, standing wherever you please. If there is no oyster shell marble vein within 100 feet of you, you'll break one slate. If there is oyster shell within 100 feet, you'll break two slate. It doesn't tell you the direction, but only whether you're within 100 feet or not. If you're standing right on top of an oyster shell marble vein, it will break five slate, and tell you that if you build a quarry in that exact spot, it will give you oyster shell marble.
The idea is that you run around breaking slate or not, and trying to find exact border points on the circle of radius 100 feet. Once you've found a few such points, you can deduce the center of the circle. Except that if there are several oyster shell marble quarries in the area, when you cross the line to be out of range of one, you might be in range of another. A smaller radius makes it easier to avoid this, but also makes it harder to find anything at all.
Once you have your marble quarry up, you get four people (including you) to come operate it. In each round, it will give everyone four options. Each person picks one option. Everyone sees the same options, but they're sorted differently for different people. If each option is picked by exactly one person, then you make progress toward extracting a piece of marble. If two people choose the same option, you lose progress. You try to communicate with each other as to who picks what, but typing it out every single time is tedious. One common method is to say, this person takes the first option alphabetically, this one takes the second alphabetically, and so forth.
Next up is mushrooms. Last I checked, there were 28 types of mushrooms in the game. Each has certain spawn times and spawn areas. Mostly, mushrooms spawn between 2 and 5 am game time. One game day is about 9 real-life hours, so the mushroom times won't be the same real-life time every day. Each type of mushroom has a different starting and ending time for when it spawns. Some mushrooms spawn in many places, and others in few. Some come in groups of dozens or hundreds when they spawn, while others spawn only one or two at a time. Some mushrooms spawn in the same area indefinitely, while some move a little in a particular direction each game day. Some will spawn repeatedly in one area for weeks, then suddenly move somewhere else. If you find a mushroom, you can pick it up, but finding them is the trick. Or rather, finding a lot of them, and finding the valuable ones.
And then there are herbs. I don't know what makes herbs spawn, but they're not linked to time of day. I'd assume that it is a variety of different rules for different herbs. There are two hundred or so types of herbs in the game, and each has a different graphic. If you find an herb and click on it, it gives you a dozen or so options of how to harvest it. If you pick the right one, then it will tell you which herb you got, and give you the herb. If you pick the wrong one, then it destroys it. For a given herb, the same option will be the right one every single time, but it won't tell you what the herb is until you harvest it successfully.
Now, that's just gathering. Actually crafting things is more complicated. Well, sometimes.
Let's start with charcoal, which has a mini-game. There are bars for wood, water, oxygen, heat, progress, and danger. You can add wood or water directly, which makes their corresponding bars go up. Both wood and water levels go down on their own as time passes. There is also a vent that you can open, close, or leave halfway open. An open vent makes oxygen go up, and a closed vent makes it go down. Heat naturally decays with time, and decays faster with water, but goes up with wood, so if there is a lot of wood and no water in the hearth, heat will on net go up. Heat also tends to lead to more heat, so if the hearth is pretty hot, a given level of wood and water may make it hotter, while if the hearth were cooler, the same levels of wood and water would make it go down. More oxygen leads to wood burning faster, and hence more heat.
The danger bar is computed from heat and oxygen. If you get too much heat and oxygen, then the charcoal goes up in flames and you get nothing. The progress bar increases as time passes based on the heat level. If you keep the heat level high, the progress bar increases much faster than with a low heat level. But if you get heat too high, then you fill up the danger bar and get nothing. If you run out of oxygen, the fire goes out and you get back the 50 wood that it took to start, but no charcoal. You want to keep oxygen low but not empty so that heat can go higher and make progress faster. But you don't want to get heat too high and burn up everything. Furthermore, if you add less wood in a successful run, getting the same charcoal at the end ends up costing you less wood in total.
The end result is that either you got the charcoal you wanted, you got back the initial wood but no charcoal (and lost whatever wood you added along the way), or you got back nothing. Making charcoal faster and while using up less wood is "better".
But there's no rule that you can only run one charcoal hearth at a time. Once you get the hang of what is going on, maybe you can run two at once. Or four. Or six. If you can run six at once, then you can make charcoal six times as fast as if you were only operating one. Unless you try to run six at once and they all fail because it's hard to keep track of.
There are also different charcoal buildings. A charcoal oven takes twice as much wood to start as a hearth, but gives you twice as much at the end. It takes longer than a hearth, but not twice as long. It's also a lot more expensive to build. In the first telling, there were charcoal braziers, which were very expensive to build, but could do more charcoal yet in a single run.
Or you can get charcoal from bonfires. You put some wood in a bonfire, light it on fire, and eventually it burns up and gives you some charcoal. That doesn't take much tending, but takes a lot more wood per charcoal.
Now, that's how you craft charcoal in the game. But that's just one good. Crafting different goods is totally different.
Let's talk about glazier's benches, which can craft glass jars, rods, and sheets. This is another mini-game. You get some lime, potash, and sand, and you can melt it into glass. Lime and potash are valuable, but sand is pretty trivial to get in large quantities--at least if you're smart enough to build your glazier's bench on the sand. If you build it far away from sand, then getting sand for glass may be a major pain for you.
When you want to run a glazier's bench, you can add 2, 6, or 12 charcoal at a time. You can also start producing any of several types of glass goods, if you have enough melted glass available. If you add 2 charcoal to a glazier's bench, then the temperature increases once every ten seconds by a total of perhaps 50 degrees over the course of the next 7 ticks. Except that the number of degrees and number of ticks varies from one glazier's bench to the next. It's determined at random when you create the bench.
But that's for each 2 charcoal that you add. If you add 2 charcoal once, and then add 2 charcoal again 30 seconds later, both of them cause their temperature increases separately. Furthermore, when the charcoal from the first time you added it is done, if there is any other charcoal burning, the temperature spikes up by hundreds of degrees. If there isn't any charcoal still burning in the glazier's bench, then the temperature drops by perhaps 100 degrees every 10 seconds. This 100 figure also varies from one bench to the next. If you add 6 charcoal, then the temperature rise is tripled, and for 12 charcoal, it is sextupled.
If the glazier's bench temperature is between 1600 and 2400 degrees, you can start making a glass item. If it goes out of that temperature range, then the glass breaks and you get nothing, but the melted glass that you used to try to craft it is still consumed. If it stays in the proper temperature range for 60-120 seconds (depending on what you're crafting), you successfully craft the item. Ideally, what you want to do is to make a bunch of glass at once, and keep the glazier's bench between 1600 and 2400 degrees for an extended period of time.
The game doesn't tell you whether you've added charcoal or when. You have to keep track of that yourself. So if you're not sure if you added charcoal 60 seconds ago, and think you did, but you didn't, then maybe you accidentally let the glass get too cool and it breaks. If you think you didn't, but you did, then maybe the heat flares up and the glass item melts and is again unsuccessful.
Now, making glass products on only one glazier's bench will take a long time. So what you do is to build several, and run them all at once. And try to keep track of which ones you added charcoal to and when.
Let's move on to blacksmithing. Remember the hatchet that I talked about earlier? It's also made by players. You put some iron into the anvil and start with a flat piece. The game shows you a picture of an "ideal" hatchet, and you can switch back and forth between them. You can move the iron by hitting it with several tools of various shapes. You can also adjust how hard you swing the tool. One tool hits a very narrow area, so it will make a deep but narrow dent in the metal if you swing that tool hard. Another tool his a broad area, so it is good for moving large masses of metal around, but useless for fine detail work.
Metal is neither created your destroyed by hitting it in blacksmithing, but is only moved around. You click on the metal that you're working on where you want to hit it, and the spot you hit goes down, while some other nearby spots go up. You get 200 swings to get as close to the ideal hatchet as you can. The swing limit depends on which type of metal you use, and more expensive metals can get you more swings. There isn't a time limit, so you could stop one day and come back a week later and pick up right where you left off. After that, you remove the hatchet and it tells you the quality, based on how close you got. The higher the quality of hatchet, the more wood you can gather from trees with it at once, but also the longer the respawn timer.
Blacksmithing isn't just used for hatchets, but also for shovels, carpentry blades, and I think some other things. I wasn't that good at blacksmithing anything, but I could make a functional shovel or carpentry blade. I couldn't make a decent hatchet to save my life, though, and had to buy my hatchet from someone else.
And then there is glassblowing, which lets you make a variety of implements. Let's take wine glasses as an example. As with blacksmithing, the game gives you a template of what an ideal wine glass ought to look like, and you can go back and forth between that and the one you're working on. You insert a glass rod or pipe or whatever, pick what you want to make, and start working the glory hole.
Your options are to move the glass rod further in or pull it out, to rotate it in either direction, and to blow into it. There is a narrow area that will heat the glass rod. If you stick the rod into the glory hole partway and let it sit there, then a narrow part of the rod in the heated area will get very hot, but the rest will stay cool. Each segment of glass cools as time passes, if it isn't being heated.
Meanwhile, glass also droops down. Hot areas droop very quickly, while cooler areas droop slowly. You'll need to rotate the glass to try to make the various drooping mostly cancel itself out. If you blow on the glass, then hot areas expand a lot, while cool areas expand very little. For a wine glass, you want to keep the base part that holds up the glass pretty cool, as it is supposed to be a narrow column. The top part that holds wine needs to get hotter, so that when you blow, it will expand a lot more.
When you're done, you can complete the wine glass, and the game will rate the quality of it based on how close you got to the ideal template, on a scale of 1 (terrible) to 9999 (perfect). Higher quality wine glasses work better for drinking wine, for complex reasons.
Glassblowing is largely a rhythm thing. You work out, I'm going to press a key every 1/4 of a second, and try this particular ordering and see how well it works. You look at the completed product and say, this part expanded too much and that part not enough, adjust your sequence, and try again. You end up wasting quite a few glass rods trying to get the hang of it.
Sounds macro-friendly, doesn't it? And if the server never lagged (which isn't true) and your ping time were completely steady, it might be. But if your ping time is bouncing back and forth between 50 ms and 100 ms, that will throw off the macro. If you're pressing buttons manually, you can see that it's drooping this way or that and adjust, but a macro can't do that.
In the four buildings that I talked about, there are a lot of complex details that I didn't get into. But it's not too hard to see that they're all very different from each other. And there are dozens of things to craft in the game, which are all different from each other. No one gets good at everything, because there is simply too much there, and it takes too long to learn any particular thing.
One other peculiarity of ATITD is that none of this is officially documented. Rather, it's, okay, now this building is accessible to you. It's up to you to figure out how to use it. Stuff does get documented by players, and ATITD had a wiki before game wikis became widespread. But as with any wiki, sometimes players assert things that are wrong. With a lot of complex nuances, trying to figure out on your own exactly how one particular building works can take days or weeks. And that's if you're clever. If you're not so bright, you'll never figure out all of the details for some buildings. Actually, even if you are very bright, some buildings have details that you probably still won't figure out, as they're meant to appear random to players--and I'm convinced that some of them involve hash functions.
Now, that's just a few examples. Some goods vary by time of (game) day. Some vary by the location where they're built. Some have constants that vary from one player to the next, so if you have a recipe that makes a particular color of paint for you, and someone else tries exactly the same recipe, it will likely make a different color of paint for him. Some goods have multiple productions methods that are very different--and sometimes players will disagree on which production method is more efficient.
One other note is that there is no rule that you can only operate one building, or even one type of building, at a time. Often it's more efficient to be running several types of buildings at once. Some buildings only need to be tended every few minutes--or even every few hours or days.
The bottom half of that page is about cooking, which is just how one particular building works. That's not all of the details, but it should be enough to give you some idea of the complexity. I'm not aware of any crafting process in any other game that has that sort of complexity.
A Tale in the Desert might have more ideas about how to make crafting interesting than all of the other games listed on this site combined. Yes, all of them. The problem with having crafting discussions on a site like this is that most people haven't played ATITD much, and thus don't know much of what has already been done and how well it worked.
Vanguard has one crafting puzzle, some slight variations on it, and a ton of grinding. I guess that beats just having the grinding and nothing else, but that that qualifies as better crafting than most other games is sad.
Could you give some background for ATITD? I have heard of this game in my net travels but have not played it.
I have also heard people say that Wurm Online has good crafting, and to a degree Minecraft although that is more the world building thing. Any opinions on Wurm?
The reason that is so hard to do is that there are so many different things in the game. With most games, if you know how to craft one item, then you more or less know how to do everything. Or maybe you need to know how to craft one item and how to gather one resource.
With ATITD, if you know how to craft one item, then you know how to craft one item, and that's it. You don't really know anything else about how to craft anything else. Because everything else is different. I'll give some examples.
Let's talk about gathering resources for starters. If you want to gather sand, then you stand on a spot with sand, click an icon that appears in the corner, and pick how much sand you want to gather. There are many spots with sand (it is, after all, a desert), so it's pretty trivial to gather arbitrarily large quantities.
Now suppose that you want to gather red sand instead. It's almost the same as sand (or at least was as of the third telling), except that you have to go to one particular spot to get it. That might be hours away from you. That makes red sand a valuable commodity if you don't happen to be near the spot where it is gathered.
For wood, you can go to a tree and gather wood from that tree. Different trees give different amounts of wood, and wood can only be gathered from a tree (whether by you or by someone else) once every 60 seconds. However, you can run back and forth between several trees gathering wood from each. Alternatively, you can get a hatchet that will let you gather twice as much wood, but take twice as long to respawn. Or three times, or whatever. Or more to the point, have perhaps a 70% chance of 4x wood with 4x respawn time, and 30% chance of 3x wood with 3x respawn time.
For slate, if you stand near water and run around, occasionally an icon will appear saying that you're standing on slate. Click the icon to gather 1 slate. That makes the icon disappear, and you have to move around to make it appear again. But if run across slate and get off of it before you click the icon, it disappears and you don't get any slate.
Sound boring so far? Those are the simple resources that newbies can do. It gets more complicated.
For metal ores, you can build a mine, and what the mine digs up depends on where you place it. Except that if you place a mine at random, it is highly probable that it will be dirt, which is nearly worthless. And placing mines everywhere can get expensive. However, there is a dowsing skill that will let you check every two minutes and tell you what you would get if you placed a mine. Or at least, if your perception is high enough to see it. If you need 10 perception to see zinc and you only have 5 perception, it will report dirt--but still give zinc if you place the mine there. You can bring down the two minute timer with temporary buffs that take a fair bit of doing to set up.
Let's suppose that you use dowsing and it reports that you detect iron. If you place a mine right there, it will be an iron mine. But iron comes in long veins, so there will be a number of spots nearby where you can also place a mine and get iron ore. You can't place two mines too close to each other, however. If you can figure out which way the vein is oriented by dowsing a lot near your first mine, you might be able to place ten mines and cover the vein.
But different minerals have differently shaped veins. Veins for lead are a square. Veins for silver zigzag back and forth erratically. So even if you want to cover a vein, it might take quite a while to figure out how it is shaped. Even if you don't need 20 zinc mines yourself, they can be valuable to sell to others.
Once you actually place the mine, working it is pretty simple. You click to get some ore, and then there is a delay before you can do it again. After you click enough times, the mine collapses and you have to dig it deeper to get more ore. But each level deeper costs more than the previous, and eventually, digging deeper yet is too expensive to have much of a point and you're better off getting a new mine elsewhere.
And then there is marble. There are a bunch of types of marble in the game, and you can attune yourself to any particular type. Let's suppose that you attune yourself to oyster shell marble, for example. When you attune yourself, it tells you a distance. Let's say 100 feet, though the distance it will give you changes periodically. You'll have an option to break slate to see if marble is there, standing wherever you please. If there is no oyster shell marble vein within 100 feet of you, you'll break one slate. If there is oyster shell within 100 feet, you'll break two slate. It doesn't tell you the direction, but only whether you're within 100 feet or not. If you're standing right on top of an oyster shell marble vein, it will break five slate, and tell you that if you build a quarry in that exact spot, it will give you oyster shell marble.
The idea is that you run around breaking slate or not, and trying to find exact border points on the circle of radius 100 feet. Once you've found a few such points, you can deduce the center of the circle. Except that if there are several oyster shell marble quarries in the area, when you cross the line to be out of range of one, you might be in range of another. A smaller radius makes it easier to avoid this, but also makes it harder to find anything at all.
Once you have your marble quarry up, you get four people (including you) to come operate it. In each round, it will give everyone four options. Each person picks one option. Everyone sees the same options, but they're sorted differently for different people. If each option is picked by exactly one person, then you make progress toward extracting a piece of marble. If two people choose the same option, you lose progress. You try to communicate with each other as to who picks what, but typing it out every single time is tedious. One common method is to say, this person takes the first option alphabetically, this one takes the second alphabetically, and so forth.
Next up is mushrooms. Last I checked, there were 28 types of mushrooms in the game. Each has certain spawn times and spawn areas. Mostly, mushrooms spawn between 2 and 5 am game time. One game day is about 9 real-life hours, so the mushroom times won't be the same real-life time every day. Each type of mushroom has a different starting and ending time for when it spawns. Some mushrooms spawn in many places, and others in few. Some come in groups of dozens or hundreds when they spawn, while others spawn only one or two at a time. Some mushrooms spawn in the same area indefinitely, while some move a little in a particular direction each game day. Some will spawn repeatedly in one area for weeks, then suddenly move somewhere else. If you find a mushroom, you can pick it up, but finding them is the trick. Or rather, finding a lot of them, and finding the valuable ones.
And then there are herbs. I don't know what makes herbs spawn, but they're not linked to time of day. I'd assume that it is a variety of different rules for different herbs. There are two hundred or so types of herbs in the game, and each has a different graphic. If you find an herb and click on it, it gives you a dozen or so options of how to harvest it. If you pick the right one, then it will tell you which herb you got, and give you the herb. If you pick the wrong one, then it destroys it. For a given herb, the same option will be the right one every single time, but it won't tell you what the herb is until you harvest it successfully.
Now, that's just gathering. Actually crafting things is more complicated. Well, sometimes.
Let's start with charcoal, which has a mini-game. There are bars for wood, water, oxygen, heat, progress, and danger. You can add wood or water directly, which makes their corresponding bars go up. Both wood and water levels go down on their own as time passes. There is also a vent that you can open, close, or leave halfway open. An open vent makes oxygen go up, and a closed vent makes it go down. Heat naturally decays with time, and decays faster with water, but goes up with wood, so if there is a lot of wood and no water in the hearth, heat will on net go up. Heat also tends to lead to more heat, so if the hearth is pretty hot, a given level of wood and water may make it hotter, while if the hearth were cooler, the same levels of wood and water would make it go down. More oxygen leads to wood burning faster, and hence more heat.
The danger bar is computed from heat and oxygen. If you get too much heat and oxygen, then the charcoal goes up in flames and you get nothing. The progress bar increases as time passes based on the heat level. If you keep the heat level high, the progress bar increases much faster than with a low heat level. But if you get heat too high, then you fill up the danger bar and get nothing. If you run out of oxygen, the fire goes out and you get back the 50 wood that it took to start, but no charcoal. You want to keep oxygen low but not empty so that heat can go higher and make progress faster. But you don't want to get heat too high and burn up everything. Furthermore, if you add less wood in a successful run, getting the same charcoal at the end ends up costing you less wood in total.
The end result is that either you got the charcoal you wanted, you got back the initial wood but no charcoal (and lost whatever wood you added along the way), or you got back nothing. Making charcoal faster and while using up less wood is "better".
But there's no rule that you can only run one charcoal hearth at a time. Once you get the hang of what is going on, maybe you can run two at once. Or four. Or six. If you can run six at once, then you can make charcoal six times as fast as if you were only operating one. Unless you try to run six at once and they all fail because it's hard to keep track of.
There are also different charcoal buildings. A charcoal oven takes twice as much wood to start as a hearth, but gives you twice as much at the end. It takes longer than a hearth, but not twice as long. It's also a lot more expensive to build. In the first telling, there were charcoal braziers, which were very expensive to build, but could do more charcoal yet in a single run.
Or you can get charcoal from bonfires. You put some wood in a bonfire, light it on fire, and eventually it burns up and gives you some charcoal. That doesn't take much tending, but takes a lot more wood per charcoal.
Now, that's how you craft charcoal in the game. But that's just one good. Crafting different goods is totally different.
Let's talk about glazier's benches, which can craft glass jars, rods, and sheets. This is another mini-game. You get some lime, potash, and sand, and you can melt it into glass. Lime and potash are valuable, but sand is pretty trivial to get in large quantities--at least if you're smart enough to build your glazier's bench on the sand. If you build it far away from sand, then getting sand for glass may be a major pain for you.
When you want to run a glazier's bench, you can add 2, 6, or 12 charcoal at a time. You can also start producing any of several types of glass goods, if you have enough melted glass available. If you add 2 charcoal to a glazier's bench, then the temperature increases once every ten seconds by a total of perhaps 50 degrees over the course of the next 7 ticks. Except that the number of degrees and number of ticks varies from one glazier's bench to the next. It's determined at random when you create the bench.
But that's for each 2 charcoal that you add. If you add 2 charcoal once, and then add 2 charcoal again 30 seconds later, both of them cause their temperature increases separately. Furthermore, when the charcoal from the first time you added it is done, if there is any other charcoal burning, the temperature spikes up by hundreds of degrees. If there isn't any charcoal still burning in the glazier's bench, then the temperature drops by perhaps 100 degrees every 10 seconds. This 100 figure also varies from one bench to the next. If you add 6 charcoal, then the temperature rise is tripled, and for 12 charcoal, it is sextupled.
If the glazier's bench temperature is between 1600 and 2400 degrees, you can start making a glass item. If it goes out of that temperature range, then the glass breaks and you get nothing, but the melted glass that you used to try to craft it is still consumed. If it stays in the proper temperature range for 60-120 seconds (depending on what you're crafting), you successfully craft the item. Ideally, what you want to do is to make a bunch of glass at once, and keep the glazier's bench between 1600 and 2400 degrees for an extended period of time.
The game doesn't tell you whether you've added charcoal or when. You have to keep track of that yourself. So if you're not sure if you added charcoal 60 seconds ago, and think you did, but you didn't, then maybe you accidentally let the glass get too cool and it breaks. If you think you didn't, but you did, then maybe the heat flares up and the glass item melts and is again unsuccessful.
Now, making glass products on only one glazier's bench will take a long time. So what you do is to build several, and run them all at once. And try to keep track of which ones you added charcoal to and when.
Let's move on to blacksmithing. Remember the hatchet that I talked about earlier? It's also made by players. You put some iron into the anvil and start with a flat piece. The game shows you a picture of an "ideal" hatchet, and you can switch back and forth between them. You can move the iron by hitting it with several tools of various shapes. You can also adjust how hard you swing the tool. One tool hits a very narrow area, so it will make a deep but narrow dent in the metal if you swing that tool hard. Another tool his a broad area, so it is good for moving large masses of metal around, but useless for fine detail work.
Metal is neither created your destroyed by hitting it in blacksmithing, but is only moved around. You click on the metal that you're working on where you want to hit it, and the spot you hit goes down, while some other nearby spots go up. You get 200 swings to get as close to the ideal hatchet as you can. The swing limit depends on which type of metal you use, and more expensive metals can get you more swings. There isn't a time limit, so you could stop one day and come back a week later and pick up right where you left off. After that, you remove the hatchet and it tells you the quality, based on how close you got. The higher the quality of hatchet, the more wood you can gather from trees with it at once, but also the longer the respawn timer.
Blacksmithing isn't just used for hatchets, but also for shovels, carpentry blades, and I think some other things. I wasn't that good at blacksmithing anything, but I could make a functional shovel or carpentry blade. I couldn't make a decent hatchet to save my life, though, and had to buy my hatchet from someone else.
And then there is glassblowing, which lets you make a variety of implements. Let's take wine glasses as an example. As with blacksmithing, the game gives you a template of what an ideal wine glass ought to look like, and you can go back and forth between that and the one you're working on. You insert a glass rod or pipe or whatever, pick what you want to make, and start working the glory hole.
Your options are to move the glass rod further in or pull it out, to rotate it in either direction, and to blow into it. There is a narrow area that will heat the glass rod. If you stick the rod into the glory hole partway and let it sit there, then a narrow part of the rod in the heated area will get very hot, but the rest will stay cool. Each segment of glass cools as time passes, if it isn't being heated.
Meanwhile, glass also droops down. Hot areas droop very quickly, while cooler areas droop slowly. You'll need to rotate the glass to try to make the various drooping mostly cancel itself out. If you blow on the glass, then hot areas expand a lot, while cool areas expand very little. For a wine glass, you want to keep the base part that holds up the glass pretty cool, as it is supposed to be a narrow column. The top part that holds wine needs to get hotter, so that when you blow, it will expand a lot more.
When you're done, you can complete the wine glass, and the game will rate the quality of it based on how close you got to the ideal template, on a scale of 1 (terrible) to 9999 (perfect). Higher quality wine glasses work better for drinking wine, for complex reasons.
Glassblowing is largely a rhythm thing. You work out, I'm going to press a key every 1/4 of a second, and try this particular ordering and see how well it works. You look at the completed product and say, this part expanded too much and that part not enough, adjust your sequence, and try again. You end up wasting quite a few glass rods trying to get the hang of it.
Sounds macro-friendly, doesn't it? And if the server never lagged (which isn't true) and your ping time were completely steady, it might be. But if your ping time is bouncing back and forth between 50 ms and 100 ms, that will throw off the macro. If you're pressing buttons manually, you can see that it's drooping this way or that and adjust, but a macro can't do that.
In the four buildings that I talked about, there are a lot of complex details that I didn't get into. But it's not too hard to see that they're all very different from each other. And there are dozens of things to craft in the game, which are all different from each other. No one gets good at everything, because there is simply too much there, and it takes too long to learn any particular thing.
One other peculiarity of ATITD is that none of this is officially documented. Rather, it's, okay, now this building is accessible to you. It's up to you to figure out how to use it. Stuff does get documented by players, and ATITD had a wiki before game wikis became widespread. But as with any wiki, sometimes players assert things that are wrong. With a lot of complex nuances, trying to figure out on your own exactly how one particular building works can take days or weeks. And that's if you're clever. If you're not so bright, you'll never figure out all of the details for some buildings. Actually, even if you are very bright, some buildings have details that you probably still won't figure out, as they're meant to appear random to players--and I'm convinced that some of them involve hash functions.
Now, that's just a few examples. Some goods vary by time of (game) day. Some vary by the location where they're built. Some have constants that vary from one player to the next, so if you have a recipe that makes a particular color of paint for you, and someone else tries exactly the same recipe, it will likely make a different color of paint for him. Some goods have multiple productions methods that are very different--and sometimes players will disagree on which production method is more efficient.
One other note is that there is no rule that you can only operate one building, or even one type of building, at a time. Often it's more efficient to be running several types of buildings at once. Some buildings only need to be tended every few minutes--or even every few hours or days.
The bottom half of that page is about cooking, which is just how one particular building works. That's not all of the details, but it should be enough to give you some idea of the complexity. I'm not aware of any crafting process in any other game that has that sort of complexity.
I am not really interested in complex minigames, although I am not super opposed to them. I do approve of multiple levels of processing to get an item. That system certainly sounds unique and interesting though. If I ever have a boat load of free time I may try it out. The mining is also quit interesting.
I don't mind progress bars,because you need some way to measure success or to show your skill is improving.
Most games however have so little realism in it's crafting.Example if i have harvested that same node 500 times, why am i still failing the same amount of times?
I also do not beleive in levels for crafting,i beleive in skill.Example if i make the same item 500x i shoudln't be gaining skill anymore,it shouldn't be some level that determines it.
I also do not like seeing nodes spawn as fast as they do,i prefer crafting to be taken seriously in a game.Those who spend the time are rewarded,this means hunting down rare nodes as well.I would like to see for example that node depending what type it is might take a full week to come back maybe 2 or 3.Then of course you keep the realism in your crafts,example you don't cut down a whole tree and get 2 pieces of wood out of it lol.Or you don't harvest a basket of apples and get only one apple pie out of it.
Yes i would like to see gardens for example,however your garden crop will only be once or twice a year,so plant wisely.I like to see a realistic NPC system where for example you are the first one to sell them an item,they might give you a lot of gold for it ,but the more times a player sells to them they offer less.The same goes for selling from the npc,the more they have on stock the cheaper they sell them for.
I also do not want to see anything in a game unless it was crafted,if a NPC is selling it,it had to be sold to that npc by a player first.This would be a realsitic crafting game operating with a realistic economy.
i like the idea of having to make all your parts as long as the design is as i like it.This would mean alot of work but your craft would be rare and sell for a lot of gold.A slow deterioration system is needed as well to keep it realistic.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I don't mind progress bars,because you need some way to measure success or to show your skill is improving.
Most games however have so little realism in it's crafting.Example if i have harvested that same node 500 times, why am i still failing the same amount of times?
I also do not beleive in levels for crafting,i beleive in skill.Example if i make the same item 500x i shoudln't be gaining skill anymore,it shouldn't be some level that determines it.
I also do not like seeing nodes spawn as fast as they do,i prefer crafting to be taken seriously in a game.Those who spend the time are rewarded,this means hunting down rare nodes as well.I would like to see for example that node depending what type it is might take a full week to come back maybe 2 or 3.Then of course you keep the realism in your crafts,example you don't cut down a whole tree and get 2 pieces of wood out of it lol.Or you don't harvest a basket of apples and get only one apple pie out of it.
Yes i would like to see gardens for example,however your garden crop will only be once or twice a year,so plant wisely.I like to see a realistic NPC system where for example you are the first one to sell them an item,they might give you a lot of gold for it ,but the more times a player sells to them they offer less.The same goes for selling from the npc,the more they have on stock the cheaper they sell them for.
I also do not want to see anything in a game unless it was crafted,if a NPC is selling it,it had to be sold to that npc by a player first.This would be a realsitic crafting game operating with a realistic economy.
i like the idea of having to make all your parts as long as the design is as i like it.This would mean alot of work but your craft would be rare and sell for a lot of gold.A slow deterioration system is needed as well to keep it realistic.
I would love to see player mines and gardens, I don't really like nodes in a WoW style implementation, just a random respawning outcropping that is tiny as hell, thats ridiculous. I think ATITD has better node styles, where minerals come in veins and you have to use one up, then dig deeper and so forth. I do like SWGs variable resource spawns also.
What do you mean skill? What system would you put in place instead of levels? Do you want levels in different types of items? Like for metal work making many swords makes you better at swords? But doesn't improve shields?
I loved crafting in two games the most, both for different reasons :
1. SWG. The crafting and gathering was the most immersive of any MMO ive experienced. The way you had to use scanners to find the right spots to put your harvestors down is plain awesome for a scifi MMO. Also the factories and workshop you could create for yourself in your house added to the immersion. Apart from that the crafting system was also a smart one. I loved munitions and shipwright. Combined with the shop npcs you could place and the way you were found through the bazaar, made this the most complete crafting experience that Ive played.
See now this is the kind of detailed and clear reply which contributes to the discussion. I am very sad that I missed out on pre CU/NGE SWG crafting. So many people have told me it was their gold standard. I agree that node hunting is something of a pain.
I agree that crafting faster on same level objects as you level makes sense. Not crafting really fast on the highest level stuff, but crap that apprentices can do should be easy for masters.
Even after the NGE launched SWG had the best crafting system ever. Getting mail in game from your friends that gave you the heads up on the spawn of server best titanium aluminum was a rush. And...I loved the quest chain that allowed armorsmith's to learn the RIS armor schematic. There will never be a better crafting system that what SWG had...and even has now.
If someone made a game with crafting similar to the original SWG crafting you would still prefer post CU/NGE SWG to trying a new game?
What?
I was just stating how good it was and still is. I craft in all games that I play. Crafting and gathering is 75% of my mmo enjoyment.
Ah, but would you prefer a game with the original system vs the current system? That is what I was asking. Did the changes not bother you?
I hated some of the nerfs, so I would go with the old system over the current. However, SOE re-introduced a lot of the nerfed items like the food additives.
Originally posted by CuathonI think ATITD has better node styles, where minerals come in veins and you have to use one up, then dig deeper and so forth.
Actually that part was taken outin Tale 5 . Mines are now permament and the mining is done through a mini game whose difficulty goes up the rare the metal is you are trying to mine.
An interesting part of ATITD is that when you reach high tech levels, you can do automation. You can build a brick machine that makes thousands of bricks for you once you provide it with mats or setup an automatic loom that will make linen for you. These things are expensive to build but turn 'crafting' into 'industry' on a limited level.
One aspect I found fascinating is the ability of players to create their own hybrids of plants. The basic flax seeds are not very eficient and will not produce much flax for the effort required. However, once crossbreeding is researched players can start breeding their own variants that can quadruple production. Similarly players can breed their own grave vines to produce specific types of wine grapes.
Originally posted by CuathonI think ATITD has better node styles, where minerals come in veins and you have to use one up, then dig deeper and so forth.
Actually that part was taken outin Tale 5 . Mines are now permament and the mining is done through a mini game whose difficulty goes up the rare the metal is you are trying to mine.
An interesting part of ATITD is that when you reach high tech levels, you can do automation. You can build a brick machine that makes thousands of bricks for you once you provide it with mats or setup an automatic loom that will make linen for you. These things are expensive to build but turn 'crafting' into 'industry' on a limited level.
One aspect I found fascinating is the ability of players to create their own hybrids of plants. The basic flax seeds are not very eficient and will not produce much flax for the effort required. However, once crossbreeding is researched players can start breeding their own variants that can quadruple production. Similarly players can breed their own grave vines to produce specific types of wine grapes.
I am very interested in games which combine tbs/rts/4x industry elements with sandbox mmo games. I like gardens/farms, mines, factorys of various kinds and so forth. It seems like it would allow interesting things in player economies. It does somewhat create a problem with item flooding though.
I really like crossbreeding plants, making new alloys, breeding animals and so forth. Also some sort of magic creation system, and possibly enchanting system. Of course many people despise the complexity that I love, sad times.
The cool thing about ATITD's crafting system is that it does a zillion different things. Even if you hate some of the things it does but like others, you can do the things you like, and trade for what you don't. For example, in the third telling, I hated smelting, and someone else in my guild hated charcoal. So he'd gather wood, I'd make charcoal from it, and then he'd use the charcoal to smelt ores into metal.
Some people insisted on doing everything on their own. Teppy (the game's programmer) tried very hard to discourage this in a few places. In the first telling, you needed a medium stone early on to build pottery wheels. One way to get a medium stone was to wander around for hours and hours until you randomly stumble upon one in the wild. But once you have mines, you end up with far more medium stones than you have any use for. New players who came later could ask nearly any veteran player and be given a medium stone for free, or at most a nominal charge. (E.g., go spend 5 seconds gathering slate and trade it for a medium stone--and the slate was probably worth more.) But those who insisted on doing absolutely everything on their own had it much harder.
Or for another example, clay domes were either easy or very hard to make, depending on whether you insisted on doing everything yourself. You needed a vault kiln, which took maybe 10 hours worth of creating firebricks. But once you had the vault kiln, you could dry a wet clay dome every hour, and that was just a fire and forget process, so you start it and an hour later it's done, with no further interaction. If you borrow someone else's vault kiln, or even pay a fair price to rent it, the cost is pretty trivial to you. If you insist on building your own vault kiln so that you can use it once, then it was a huge pain.
I love crafting. I loved Vanguards crafting system. I wish a more modern MMO would implement this
I read alot about Vanguard's system, but I've never played it. I know you can craft almost anything, including ships, but aside from the diversity of craftable items, what stood out about the actual mechanics of Vanguards system?
It was basically a mini game. You had several steps in the process of making an item. The more effort you put into each step led to a higher quality item. for instance you used planks, you had to polish it, shape it, and something else. Its been a long time since I played. You gain skill for these separate process. Add into that the quality of your tools affected the construction.
I know i'm not doing it justice, but it was very fun for us crafter types.
Don't try to talk on behalf of all "crafter types", which I most certainly consider myself to be one of. In all MMOs I play extendedly, I do a lot of crafting. And I disagree with you: for me, Vanguard's system was the worst piece of shit ever.
then what crafting system would you think ( that you have played) is the best in your opinion?
The cool thing about ATITD's crafting system is that it does a zillion different things. Even if you hate some of the things it does but like others, you can do the things you like, and trade for what you don't. For example, in the third telling, I hated smelting, and someone else in my guild hated charcoal. So he'd gather wood, I'd make charcoal from it, and then he'd use the charcoal to smelt ores into metal.
Some people insisted on doing everything on their own. Teppy (the game's programmer) tried very hard to discourage this in a few places. In the first telling, you needed a medium stone early on to build pottery wheels. One way to get a medium stone was to wander around for hours and hours until you randomly stumble upon one in the wild. But once you have mines, you end up with far more medium stones than you have any use for. New players who came later could ask nearly any veteran player and be given a medium stone for free, or at most a nominal charge. (E.g., go spend 5 seconds gathering slate and trade it for a medium stone--and the slate was probably worth more.) But those who insisted on doing absolutely everything on their own had it much harder.
Or for another example, clay domes were either easy or very hard to make, depending on whether you insisted on doing everything yourself. You needed a vault kiln, which took maybe 10 hours worth of creating firebricks. But once you had the vault kiln, you could dry a wet clay dome every hour, and that was just a fire and forget process, so you start it and an hour later it's done, with no further interaction. If you borrow someone else's vault kiln, or even pay a fair price to rent it, the cost is pretty trivial to you. If you insist on building your own vault kiln so that you can use it once, then it was a huge pain.
I dislike lots of the non-crafting elements in ATITD, otherwise it would probably be such a fun game. Ah well, someday someone will make a game with awesome crafting and an economy and combat and goal system I like more. I can wait.
Comments
See now this is the kind of detailed and clear reply which contributes to the discussion. I am very sad that I missed out on pre CU/NGE SWG crafting. So many people have told me it was their gold standard. I agree that node hunting is something of a pain.
I agree that crafting faster on same level objects as you level makes sense. Not crafting really fast on the highest level stuff, but crap that apprentices can do should be easy for masters.
I think crafting would be much more engaging if the only way to improve your character was through crafting. As in you start out with literally nothing, and rather than looting weapons and gear, you loot materials in which to craft with. Would slow down the whole power-leveling process as well since you won't have the necessary equipment to level without the gear that you must craft for yourself.
That would put some real meaning into crafting again instead of what it's been turned into over the years. Those 50 or 60 levels would take a heck of a lot longer now wouldn't it? Especially if you can only craft items for yourself and not buy them from others.
I am with you up until not buying from others. I think it would take away a lot of the social aspect and also force people who don't like to craft to do so. I think that monsters should drop nice mats and no items, but if you can't trade, that would leave adventurers without any chance to avoid crafting and it would force crafters in general to do adventuring to find rare mats. I am absolutely on board with no npcs, no good starting gear and no finished item loot drops though.
LOL...Well said....
Imo, the best crafting system out there, is LOTRO's. EQ2's isn't that bad either. Just about all crafting systems include a sort of grind to level up your skills, but in these two games you can actually make useful stuff for your toons.
Some games have very basic crafting, ie WoW, where you just gather stuff and choose to make things, without really putting more into the crafting process. I don't like that. In such games (again, WoW is a good example), it's fairly typical that what you make is worthless junk, which is even worse.
Another system that was bloody retarded, was Warhammer's. For example, carrying around plants and waiting for timers to go down, so you could harvest them. And what you could make with them, was mostly crap that, considering that it had lvl requirements way too high, like potions you could use at ie lvl 30 which maybe healed 5-10% of your health.
Vanguard's system took like forever and more, every bloody crafting attempt. Sure, it was innovative the way that it introduced something new, with the possibility of different results, quality wise. But the grind for mats, then the eternal grind to do the crafting itself.... I said it's worst system ever. I take that back, it's second worse.
The absolutely worst crafting system, is beyond doubt FFXIV's.Everything you try to do, is a minigame which takes several minutes. What's even worse than the time requirements, is when you try go gather mats. For example, you start chopping on a tree, and expect to get wood of that kind. Well, that rarely happens. When you're staring straight at the tree, you may get messages like "you sense wood-type-x above or below you". But do you get that type of wood? You'll probably get stuff like bloodworms instead (for fishing). The crafting process itself is even more moronic. It's a minigame where you are supposed to choose among 3 options during the process. Basically it's about being careful, fast, or use standard. Everyone I've talked to about this, just keeps on hitting enter (or a pad button), without even considering other options than standard, simply because they really don't mean anything at all. And if you're unlucky, a 2 minute craft ends in a failure. Which happens very often when you're past the first tier. Not to mention, if you're gonna level professions without doing the leves (quests), you'll have to craft thousand of times at the upper lvls to reach the next. Someone at the FFXIV forums once did a guesstimate of 20 years to lvl a profession that way. Wish I had a link, was a hilarious post. The ONLY strength in this system, is that a single toon can level all the crafing professions in the game.
Well, here I go to make a plug for the old school version of SWG.
Pre-NGE SWG had a sort of related system. As far as loot goes, stats can vary greatly for any given item. Naturally, the high powered items were actually very rare. On an ultra rare occasion, you may get lucky and loot a very powerful item.
On top of this, crafted item stats can vary wildly, depending on the crafter's knowledge, resources used, quality of resources, crafter tool quality, etc... in short, alot of factors to drive stats in many different directions, all orchestrated by the crafter's own knowledge of the game. This was important because many players wanted their gear a certain way, especially the PvPers.
What made *everything* work out and crafters still being core members of the game was that practically everything will break for good eventually. Pretty much all items had "Condition" and once it went to zero, it was broken for good. In addition, as the condition lowers, the stats go down, too.
What this did was it ensured high powered items were kept in check. After enough wear and tear, they were gone. This also ensured a very player economy. Players needed new gear to replace worn out ones. Crafter / Merchants competed fiercely for their business. Since there was a constant need for gear, prices were fair and not far fetched. A quality blaster would cost 20-40k credits, compared to the millions items went for when SWG removed item decay.
You see, Crafters knew that it was important to provide a good balance in item quality and pricing. They gave alot of care to their reputation on their server. Players would settle on a favorite merchant to repeatedly come back to. We used to argue about who was the best weaponsmith, armorsmith, shipwright, etc. on the server. I still remember "Az" as, IMO, the best weaponsmith on Ahazi server after all these years.
Pre-NGE SWG was the last MMORPG I saw with this level of player interdependency with a healthy game economy, as well as, IMO, the best crafting system to date I've seen in an MMO. Alot of control was in the players' hands.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Both UO and AC had dedicated crafters. Crafted items were superior to looied items. What are you basing that opinion on?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I liked EQ2 and Vanguard's crafting system a lot. I prefer the mini games and for the process to take time. I just liked making the barding for horses, candle stick holders, plates etc. It just seemed fun to do more than just hit combine to make armor. I also felt a good crafting system shouldn't be so everyone crafts, but it also can't be so complex or time consuming no one does (although i probably still would!). If so few people use it then eventually it gets changed.
"Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better." parrotpholk
Well I have not played UO or AC. Maybe I've played too much Diablo. My bad. I dunno, I prefer not to have finished item drops from creatures. Or gold drops really, cause inflation.
Yes, this is what I am hearing from all SWG players.
I do not like it to be possible for one player to craft all their items by themselves. Seems more like a time sink when you could just run loot drops for an essentially single player game. I dunno, some people like to be able to do it all themselves, which is fine for single player but takes away from social in mmo imo.
I understand that many people do not like excessive craft times. Personally it sounds like I would like Vanguard's system. It seems like you could really make differentiated items.
What is LOTRO's system like? I think I actually played it for a while, but maybe didn't play it for long enough for the crafting system to stick in my head.
Even after the NGE launched SWG had the best crafting system ever. Getting mail in game from your friends that gave you the heads up on the spawn of server best titanium aluminum was a rush. And...I loved the quest chain that allowed armorsmith's to learn the RIS armor schematic. There will never be a better crafting system that what SWG had...and even has now.
If someone made a game with crafting similar to the original SWG crafting you would still prefer post CU/NGE SWG to trying a new game? A lot of people said that CU or NGE or both caused them to hate SWG after having experienced the original system.
The reason that is so hard to do is that there are so many different things in the game. With most games, if you know how to craft one item, then you more or less know how to do everything. Or maybe you need to know how to craft one item and how to gather one resource.
With ATITD, if you know how to craft one item, then you know how to craft one item, and that's it. You don't really know anything else about how to craft anything else. Because everything else is different. I'll give some examples.
Let's talk about gathering resources for starters. If you want to gather sand, then you stand on a spot with sand, click an icon that appears in the corner, and pick how much sand you want to gather. There are many spots with sand (it is, after all, a desert), so it's pretty trivial to gather arbitrarily large quantities.
Now suppose that you want to gather red sand instead. It's almost the same as sand (or at least was as of the third telling), except that you have to go to one particular spot to get it. That might be hours away from you. That makes red sand a valuable commodity if you don't happen to be near the spot where it is gathered.
For wood, you can go to a tree and gather wood from that tree. Different trees give different amounts of wood, and wood can only be gathered from a tree (whether by you or by someone else) once every 60 seconds. However, you can run back and forth between several trees gathering wood from each. Alternatively, you can get a hatchet that will let you gather twice as much wood, but take twice as long to respawn. Or three times, or whatever. Or more to the point, have perhaps a 70% chance of 4x wood with 4x respawn time, and 30% chance of 3x wood with 3x respawn time.
For slate, if you stand near water and run around, occasionally an icon will appear saying that you're standing on slate. Click the icon to gather 1 slate. That makes the icon disappear, and you have to move around to make it appear again. But if run across slate and get off of it before you click the icon, it disappears and you don't get any slate.
Sound boring so far? Those are the simple resources that newbies can do. It gets more complicated.
For metal ores, you can build a mine, and what the mine digs up depends on where you place it. Except that if you place a mine at random, it is highly probable that it will be dirt, which is nearly worthless. And placing mines everywhere can get expensive. However, there is a dowsing skill that will let you check every two minutes and tell you what you would get if you placed a mine. Or at least, if your perception is high enough to see it. If you need 10 perception to see zinc and you only have 5 perception, it will report dirt--but still give zinc if you place the mine there. You can bring down the two minute timer with temporary buffs that take a fair bit of doing to set up.
Let's suppose that you use dowsing and it reports that you detect iron. If you place a mine right there, it will be an iron mine. But iron comes in long veins, so there will be a number of spots nearby where you can also place a mine and get iron ore. You can't place two mines too close to each other, however. If you can figure out which way the vein is oriented by dowsing a lot near your first mine, you might be able to place ten mines and cover the vein.
But different minerals have differently shaped veins. Veins for lead are a square. Veins for silver zigzag back and forth erratically. So even if you want to cover a vein, it might take quite a while to figure out how it is shaped. Even if you don't need 20 zinc mines yourself, they can be valuable to sell to others.
Once you actually place the mine, working it is pretty simple. You click to get some ore, and then there is a delay before you can do it again. After you click enough times, the mine collapses and you have to dig it deeper to get more ore. But each level deeper costs more than the previous, and eventually, digging deeper yet is too expensive to have much of a point and you're better off getting a new mine elsewhere.
And then there is marble. There are a bunch of types of marble in the game, and you can attune yourself to any particular type. Let's suppose that you attune yourself to oyster shell marble, for example. When you attune yourself, it tells you a distance. Let's say 100 feet, though the distance it will give you changes periodically. You'll have an option to break slate to see if marble is there, standing wherever you please. If there is no oyster shell marble vein within 100 feet of you, you'll break one slate. If there is oyster shell within 100 feet, you'll break two slate. It doesn't tell you the direction, but only whether you're within 100 feet or not. If you're standing right on top of an oyster shell marble vein, it will break five slate, and tell you that if you build a quarry in that exact spot, it will give you oyster shell marble.
The idea is that you run around breaking slate or not, and trying to find exact border points on the circle of radius 100 feet. Once you've found a few such points, you can deduce the center of the circle. Except that if there are several oyster shell marble quarries in the area, when you cross the line to be out of range of one, you might be in range of another. A smaller radius makes it easier to avoid this, but also makes it harder to find anything at all.
Once you have your marble quarry up, you get four people (including you) to come operate it. In each round, it will give everyone four options. Each person picks one option. Everyone sees the same options, but they're sorted differently for different people. If each option is picked by exactly one person, then you make progress toward extracting a piece of marble. If two people choose the same option, you lose progress. You try to communicate with each other as to who picks what, but typing it out every single time is tedious. One common method is to say, this person takes the first option alphabetically, this one takes the second alphabetically, and so forth.
Next up is mushrooms. Last I checked, there were 28 types of mushrooms in the game. Each has certain spawn times and spawn areas. Mostly, mushrooms spawn between 2 and 5 am game time. One game day is about 9 real-life hours, so the mushroom times won't be the same real-life time every day. Each type of mushroom has a different starting and ending time for when it spawns. Some mushrooms spawn in many places, and others in few. Some come in groups of dozens or hundreds when they spawn, while others spawn only one or two at a time. Some mushrooms spawn in the same area indefinitely, while some move a little in a particular direction each game day. Some will spawn repeatedly in one area for weeks, then suddenly move somewhere else. If you find a mushroom, you can pick it up, but finding them is the trick. Or rather, finding a lot of them, and finding the valuable ones.
And then there are herbs. I don't know what makes herbs spawn, but they're not linked to time of day. I'd assume that it is a variety of different rules for different herbs. There are two hundred or so types of herbs in the game, and each has a different graphic. If you find an herb and click on it, it gives you a dozen or so options of how to harvest it. If you pick the right one, then it will tell you which herb you got, and give you the herb. If you pick the wrong one, then it destroys it. For a given herb, the same option will be the right one every single time, but it won't tell you what the herb is until you harvest it successfully.
Now, that's just gathering. Actually crafting things is more complicated. Well, sometimes.
Let's start with charcoal, which has a mini-game. There are bars for wood, water, oxygen, heat, progress, and danger. You can add wood or water directly, which makes their corresponding bars go up. Both wood and water levels go down on their own as time passes. There is also a vent that you can open, close, or leave halfway open. An open vent makes oxygen go up, and a closed vent makes it go down. Heat naturally decays with time, and decays faster with water, but goes up with wood, so if there is a lot of wood and no water in the hearth, heat will on net go up. Heat also tends to lead to more heat, so if the hearth is pretty hot, a given level of wood and water may make it hotter, while if the hearth were cooler, the same levels of wood and water would make it go down. More oxygen leads to wood burning faster, and hence more heat.
The danger bar is computed from heat and oxygen. If you get too much heat and oxygen, then the charcoal goes up in flames and you get nothing. The progress bar increases as time passes based on the heat level. If you keep the heat level high, the progress bar increases much faster than with a low heat level. But if you get heat too high, then you fill up the danger bar and get nothing. If you run out of oxygen, the fire goes out and you get back the 50 wood that it took to start, but no charcoal. You want to keep oxygen low but not empty so that heat can go higher and make progress faster. But you don't want to get heat too high and burn up everything. Furthermore, if you add less wood in a successful run, getting the same charcoal at the end ends up costing you less wood in total.
The end result is that either you got the charcoal you wanted, you got back the initial wood but no charcoal (and lost whatever wood you added along the way), or you got back nothing. Making charcoal faster and while using up less wood is "better".
But there's no rule that you can only run one charcoal hearth at a time. Once you get the hang of what is going on, maybe you can run two at once. Or four. Or six. If you can run six at once, then you can make charcoal six times as fast as if you were only operating one. Unless you try to run six at once and they all fail because it's hard to keep track of.
There are also different charcoal buildings. A charcoal oven takes twice as much wood to start as a hearth, but gives you twice as much at the end. It takes longer than a hearth, but not twice as long. It's also a lot more expensive to build. In the first telling, there were charcoal braziers, which were very expensive to build, but could do more charcoal yet in a single run.
Or you can get charcoal from bonfires. You put some wood in a bonfire, light it on fire, and eventually it burns up and gives you some charcoal. That doesn't take much tending, but takes a lot more wood per charcoal.
Now, that's how you craft charcoal in the game. But that's just one good. Crafting different goods is totally different.
Let's talk about glazier's benches, which can craft glass jars, rods, and sheets. This is another mini-game. You get some lime, potash, and sand, and you can melt it into glass. Lime and potash are valuable, but sand is pretty trivial to get in large quantities--at least if you're smart enough to build your glazier's bench on the sand. If you build it far away from sand, then getting sand for glass may be a major pain for you.
When you want to run a glazier's bench, you can add 2, 6, or 12 charcoal at a time. You can also start producing any of several types of glass goods, if you have enough melted glass available. If you add 2 charcoal to a glazier's bench, then the temperature increases once every ten seconds by a total of perhaps 50 degrees over the course of the next 7 ticks. Except that the number of degrees and number of ticks varies from one glazier's bench to the next. It's determined at random when you create the bench.
But that's for each 2 charcoal that you add. If you add 2 charcoal once, and then add 2 charcoal again 30 seconds later, both of them cause their temperature increases separately. Furthermore, when the charcoal from the first time you added it is done, if there is any other charcoal burning, the temperature spikes up by hundreds of degrees. If there isn't any charcoal still burning in the glazier's bench, then the temperature drops by perhaps 100 degrees every 10 seconds. This 100 figure also varies from one bench to the next. If you add 6 charcoal, then the temperature rise is tripled, and for 12 charcoal, it is sextupled.
If the glazier's bench temperature is between 1600 and 2400 degrees, you can start making a glass item. If it goes out of that temperature range, then the glass breaks and you get nothing, but the melted glass that you used to try to craft it is still consumed. If it stays in the proper temperature range for 60-120 seconds (depending on what you're crafting), you successfully craft the item. Ideally, what you want to do is to make a bunch of glass at once, and keep the glazier's bench between 1600 and 2400 degrees for an extended period of time.
The game doesn't tell you whether you've added charcoal or when. You have to keep track of that yourself. So if you're not sure if you added charcoal 60 seconds ago, and think you did, but you didn't, then maybe you accidentally let the glass get too cool and it breaks. If you think you didn't, but you did, then maybe the heat flares up and the glass item melts and is again unsuccessful.
Now, making glass products on only one glazier's bench will take a long time. So what you do is to build several, and run them all at once. And try to keep track of which ones you added charcoal to and when.
Let's move on to blacksmithing. Remember the hatchet that I talked about earlier? It's also made by players. You put some iron into the anvil and start with a flat piece. The game shows you a picture of an "ideal" hatchet, and you can switch back and forth between them. You can move the iron by hitting it with several tools of various shapes. You can also adjust how hard you swing the tool. One tool hits a very narrow area, so it will make a deep but narrow dent in the metal if you swing that tool hard. Another tool his a broad area, so it is good for moving large masses of metal around, but useless for fine detail work.
Metal is neither created your destroyed by hitting it in blacksmithing, but is only moved around. You click on the metal that you're working on where you want to hit it, and the spot you hit goes down, while some other nearby spots go up. You get 200 swings to get as close to the ideal hatchet as you can. The swing limit depends on which type of metal you use, and more expensive metals can get you more swings. There isn't a time limit, so you could stop one day and come back a week later and pick up right where you left off. After that, you remove the hatchet and it tells you the quality, based on how close you got. The higher the quality of hatchet, the more wood you can gather from trees with it at once, but also the longer the respawn timer.
Blacksmithing isn't just used for hatchets, but also for shovels, carpentry blades, and I think some other things. I wasn't that good at blacksmithing anything, but I could make a functional shovel or carpentry blade. I couldn't make a decent hatchet to save my life, though, and had to buy my hatchet from someone else.
And then there is glassblowing, which lets you make a variety of implements. Let's take wine glasses as an example. As with blacksmithing, the game gives you a template of what an ideal wine glass ought to look like, and you can go back and forth between that and the one you're working on. You insert a glass rod or pipe or whatever, pick what you want to make, and start working the glory hole.
Your options are to move the glass rod further in or pull it out, to rotate it in either direction, and to blow into it. There is a narrow area that will heat the glass rod. If you stick the rod into the glory hole partway and let it sit there, then a narrow part of the rod in the heated area will get very hot, but the rest will stay cool. Each segment of glass cools as time passes, if it isn't being heated.
Meanwhile, glass also droops down. Hot areas droop very quickly, while cooler areas droop slowly. You'll need to rotate the glass to try to make the various drooping mostly cancel itself out. If you blow on the glass, then hot areas expand a lot, while cool areas expand very little. For a wine glass, you want to keep the base part that holds up the glass pretty cool, as it is supposed to be a narrow column. The top part that holds wine needs to get hotter, so that when you blow, it will expand a lot more.
When you're done, you can complete the wine glass, and the game will rate the quality of it based on how close you got to the ideal template, on a scale of 1 (terrible) to 9999 (perfect). Higher quality wine glasses work better for drinking wine, for complex reasons.
Glassblowing is largely a rhythm thing. You work out, I'm going to press a key every 1/4 of a second, and try this particular ordering and see how well it works. You look at the completed product and say, this part expanded too much and that part not enough, adjust your sequence, and try again. You end up wasting quite a few glass rods trying to get the hang of it.
Sounds macro-friendly, doesn't it? And if the server never lagged (which isn't true) and your ping time were completely steady, it might be. But if your ping time is bouncing back and forth between 50 ms and 100 ms, that will throw off the macro. If you're pressing buttons manually, you can see that it's drooping this way or that and adjust, but a macro can't do that.
In the four buildings that I talked about, there are a lot of complex details that I didn't get into. But it's not too hard to see that they're all very different from each other. And there are dozens of things to craft in the game, which are all different from each other. No one gets good at everything, because there is simply too much there, and it takes too long to learn any particular thing.
One other peculiarity of ATITD is that none of this is officially documented. Rather, it's, okay, now this building is accessible to you. It's up to you to figure out how to use it. Stuff does get documented by players, and ATITD had a wiki before game wikis became widespread. But as with any wiki, sometimes players assert things that are wrong. With a lot of complex nuances, trying to figure out on your own exactly how one particular building works can take days or weeks. And that's if you're clever. If you're not so bright, you'll never figure out all of the details for some buildings. Actually, even if you are very bright, some buildings have details that you probably still won't figure out, as they're meant to appear random to players--and I'm convinced that some of them involve hash functions.
Now, that's just a few examples. Some goods vary by time of (game) day. Some vary by the location where they're built. Some have constants that vary from one player to the next, so if you have a recipe that makes a particular color of paint for you, and someone else tries exactly the same recipe, it will likely make a different color of paint for him. Some goods have multiple productions methods that are very different--and sometimes players will disagree on which production method is more efficient.
One other note is that there is no rule that you can only operate one building, or even one type of building, at a time. Often it's more efficient to be running several types of buildings at once. Some buildings only need to be tended every few minutes--or even every few hours or days.
If you want more on the game, then check here:
http://www.guildwiki.org/User_talk:127,0,0,1
The bottom half of that page is about cooking, which is just how one particular building works. That's not all of the details, but it should be enough to give you some idea of the complexity. I'm not aware of any crafting process in any other game that has that sort of complexity.
I am not really interested in complex minigames, although I am not super opposed to them. I do approve of multiple levels of processing to get an item. That system certainly sounds unique and interesting though. If I ever have a boat load of free time I may try it out. The mining is also quit interesting.
I don't mind progress bars,because you need some way to measure success or to show your skill is improving.
Most games however have so little realism in it's crafting.Example if i have harvested that same node 500 times, why am i still failing the same amount of times?
I also do not beleive in levels for crafting,i beleive in skill.Example if i make the same item 500x i shoudln't be gaining skill anymore,it shouldn't be some level that determines it.
I also do not like seeing nodes spawn as fast as they do,i prefer crafting to be taken seriously in a game.Those who spend the time are rewarded,this means hunting down rare nodes as well.I would like to see for example that node depending what type it is might take a full week to come back maybe 2 or 3.Then of course you keep the realism in your crafts,example you don't cut down a whole tree and get 2 pieces of wood out of it lol.Or you don't harvest a basket of apples and get only one apple pie out of it.
Yes i would like to see gardens for example,however your garden crop will only be once or twice a year,so plant wisely.I like to see a realistic NPC system where for example you are the first one to sell them an item,they might give you a lot of gold for it ,but the more times a player sells to them they offer less.The same goes for selling from the npc,the more they have on stock the cheaper they sell them for.
I also do not want to see anything in a game unless it was crafted,if a NPC is selling it,it had to be sold to that npc by a player first.This would be a realsitic crafting game operating with a realistic economy.
i like the idea of having to make all your parts as long as the design is as i like it.This would mean alot of work but your craft would be rare and sell for a lot of gold.A slow deterioration system is needed as well to keep it realistic.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I would love to see player mines and gardens, I don't really like nodes in a WoW style implementation, just a random respawning outcropping that is tiny as hell, thats ridiculous. I think ATITD has better node styles, where minerals come in veins and you have to use one up, then dig deeper and so forth. I do like SWGs variable resource spawns also.
What do you mean skill? What system would you put in place instead of levels? Do you want levels in different types of items? Like for metal work making many swords makes you better at swords? But doesn't improve shields?
What?
I was just stating how good it was and still is. I craft in all games that I play. Crafting and gathering is 75% of my mmo enjoyment.
Ah, but would you prefer a game with the original system vs the current system? That is what I was asking. Did the changes not bother you?
I hated some of the nerfs, so I would go with the old system over the current. However, SOE re-introduced a lot of the nerfed items like the food additives.
Actually that part was taken outin Tale 5
. Mines are now permament and the mining is done through a mini game whose difficulty goes up the rare the metal is you are trying to mine.
An interesting part of ATITD is that when you reach high tech levels, you can do automation. You can build a brick machine that makes thousands of bricks for you once you provide it with mats or setup an automatic loom that will make linen for you. These things are expensive to build but turn 'crafting' into 'industry' on a limited level.
One aspect I found fascinating is the ability of players to create their own hybrids of plants. The basic flax seeds are not very eficient and will not produce much flax for the effort required. However, once crossbreeding is researched players can start breeding their own variants that can quadruple production. Similarly players can breed their own grave vines to produce specific types of wine grapes.
I am very interested in games which combine tbs/rts/4x industry elements with sandbox mmo games. I like gardens/farms, mines, factorys of various kinds and so forth. It seems like it would allow interesting things in player economies. It does somewhat create a problem with item flooding though.
I really like crossbreeding plants, making new alloys, breeding animals and so forth. Also some sort of magic creation system, and possibly enchanting system. Of course many people despise the complexity that I love, sad times.
The cool thing about ATITD's crafting system is that it does a zillion different things. Even if you hate some of the things it does but like others, you can do the things you like, and trade for what you don't. For example, in the third telling, I hated smelting, and someone else in my guild hated charcoal. So he'd gather wood, I'd make charcoal from it, and then he'd use the charcoal to smelt ores into metal.
Some people insisted on doing everything on their own. Teppy (the game's programmer) tried very hard to discourage this in a few places. In the first telling, you needed a medium stone early on to build pottery wheels. One way to get a medium stone was to wander around for hours and hours until you randomly stumble upon one in the wild. But once you have mines, you end up with far more medium stones than you have any use for. New players who came later could ask nearly any veteran player and be given a medium stone for free, or at most a nominal charge. (E.g., go spend 5 seconds gathering slate and trade it for a medium stone--and the slate was probably worth more.) But those who insisted on doing absolutely everything on their own had it much harder.
Or for another example, clay domes were either easy or very hard to make, depending on whether you insisted on doing everything yourself. You needed a vault kiln, which took maybe 10 hours worth of creating firebricks. But once you had the vault kiln, you could dry a wet clay dome every hour, and that was just a fire and forget process, so you start it and an hour later it's done, with no further interaction. If you borrow someone else's vault kiln, or even pay a fair price to rent it, the cost is pretty trivial to you. If you insist on building your own vault kiln so that you can use it once, then it was a huge pain.
then what crafting system would you think ( that you have played) is the best in your opinion?
I dislike lots of the non-crafting elements in ATITD, otherwise it would probably be such a fun game. Ah well, someday someone will make a game with awesome crafting and an economy and combat and goal system I like more. I can wait.