Craft {item}

[JRB]

When you use this:

Craft {item}
You could make x.
You could make y.
You could make z.

Is the item on the bottom the hardest to make?  Or relative to each other is there a constant difference in difficulty/success?

[spawnloser]

Placement, as far as I understand, in the list there has nothing to do with difficulty.  Use common sense and judgement to figure out which is harder...or experiment.  Whichever your character sucks the worst at making, that just might be the most difficult.

[Sanvean]

There's currently no ordering of the list,  but that's a cool idea.  I'll enter it into the database.

[proxie]

Hooray! I love that idea!  So many times my crafters have gotten confused about what item is hardest to make in the list.


Is it feasible for analyze to give a hint as to what crafting skill made the item?
Or high level crafters have it give a hint?


Proxie

[spawnloser]

I thought analyze checked to see if you had the skill to make it, both having the skill on your list as well as being good enough at that skill, to make the item being analyzed.  If you don't, no info.

I mean, this doesn't tell you what skill, necessarily...and while it'd be nice to be able to know, sometimes your character doesn't really know what coded skill he is using.  Tool making or stonecarving to make that stone tool head?  Well...yes, it's one of them.  Does your character know the difference between two named skills, really?

[Sanvean]

I thought analyze checked to see if you had the skill to make it, both having the skill on your list as well as being good enough at that skill, to make the item being analyzed. If you don't, no info.

That is indeed how it works.  What would be the advantage of having it say which skill it depends on as well?  (Not being sarcastic, just trying to get info in order to evaluate the idea better.)

[jhunter]

Knowing for certain which tools will help most with the making of it?

Dunno, that's just a suggestion. *shrug*

[Larrath]

I think it's a good idea to have Analyze reveal what skill is used.

The downside is that it can lead to people taking a piece of bone and crafting one Jewelrymaking and one Stonecarving recipe every five minutes, but this can already be done using more obvious recipes.
The upside is that it will help us players crack down on recipes that need the wrong skill, and it also just makes more sense and helps roleplay the crafting process more appropriately.

[Only He Stands There]

Not entirely related, but...

Something I've been pondering about. I think it would be very, very helpful to make an addition to the "craft <item"> output.

Example:

You are carrying:
a toolshaft
a red stone shovel-head

>Craft toolshaft shovel-head
You could make a red stone shovel from that.

>Craft toolshaft
With the addition of a red stone shovel-head, you could make a red stone shovel from that.
With the addition of a black stone shovel-head, you could make a black stone shovel from that.
With the addition of a long flint axe-blade, you could make a lumber axe from that.


Etc etc etc. So, it could tell you what you could make with additional materials. I find it extremely annoying to have 40 different items and be able to make 100 recipes from them, but only figuring out 10 different recipes because of all the trial and error involved in "craft rock stone gem," "craft stone gem," "craft rock stone," "craft rock stone board," ad infinitum.

Perhaps some recipes should be "secret," yes, but many times it's hard to figure out just what I need to combine to make something.

[Cale_Knight]

>Craft toolshaft
With the addition of a red stone shovel-head, you could make a red stone shovel from that.
With the addition of a black stone shovel-head, you could make a black stone shovel from that.
With the addition of a long flint axe-blade, you could make a lumber axe from that.

God yes.

Just give something like a 50% penalty on your crafting skill when it comes to checking, so you only get the automatic recipes for things that you can easily make.

[Many Faces]

On the topic of the 'craft output' idea:

I would like this idea a good amount more if, per se, there were 'secret' recipes that literally needed to be taught by another character or NPC so you are then 'flagged' as able to see what the ingredients could become.

Say you want to learn how to make a portable plasma thrower.  A small rock (our GDB friend) is part of the equation.

craft rock
With the addition of a steel barrel, a plasma coil, a carved ivory handle, and tek's left nut, you could make a portable plasma thrower.
With the addition of a bit of obsidian, you could make an obsidian handled, bone nosepicker.

Now the nosepicker is common place.  Everyone needs a good nosepicker.

The plasma thrower?  Not so common.  So you think "I wanna make something really cool" and then you hear that JoSalarr knows how to make portable plasma throwers.

So you kidnap him, lock him in a room, until he uses some instructionary command to let you know how to make those durn things.

Did I make sense?

[Many Faces]

*glances up at Cale-Knight's post and wonders why ~me can't think simply*

[Twilight]

Lets say you type craft bone, and get twenty different things the bone can be crafted into.  In general, the output will be grouped by crafting skill, although its not always the case.  As for the ordering, my perception based on a couple of instances is that it probably has to do with the order in the file which controls crafting recipes, and as such probably has something to do with how new something is (ie probably a tendancy to put new things at the top of the file).

I think it should sort by crafting skill, then how hard something is to do.  If you have an output of twenty different items, its nice to see what knives you can make of something, rather than have the knives, swords and tools all mixed up.

The only reason I could see to add the skill to the analyze output would be in being able to give an estimate of how hard making something would be when you haven't before.  Maybe you have been working with red stone all your life, and are a master of your craft.  Suddenly someone gives you a piece of black stone and asks for something to be made out of it.  You don't have prior experience to go off of, but you probably know stone inside and out, so really should be able to give an idea if something will be relatively harder or easier to make.

[OHST unlogged]

My reasoning for my idea is to shift the idea of crafting further from OOC knowledge and further into IC. If I have a merchant PC (or subguild crafter) once and I learn a recipe, I know how to make the same thing OOCly with my next crafter. However trivial something may be to make to my crafter, I won't know, even though he would.

I think using a 50% or even 75% modifier would be a good idea, too. Also, if I'm not mistaken, some crafts are race- or even clan-restricted--I.E., some jewelry is only craftable by Kadians, some armor by Salarri, etc.  If it was spammy, it could be paginated. Are there any reasons NOT to do this?

[Only He Stands There]

<bump> Any chance I could get some staff input on my idea, or anyone else's input for that matter? I think it would be very, very helpful and see no negatives to it whatsoever, other than the time spent coding it.

[Larrath]

<bump> Any chance I could get some staff input on my idea, or anyone else's input for that matter? I think it would be very, very helpful and see no negatives to it whatsoever, other than the time spent coding it.

If your idea is the one saying what raw materials could be used for a crafting recipe with one finished good, I see a lot of negatives.  Well, I see one big negative - all crafters will be the same.  Everyone will know exactly how to make every item and exactly where their skill level is at, and your crafter will no longer be able to have one or two secret crafting recipes that only he knows about.  This would cause a lot of damage over-all to PC crafters who, for some reason, don't work to the very best of their abilities.  It would also tell the entire playerbase, over the course of two RL years, exactly what items are needed for every single crafting recipe in the game.
It's pretty similar to what would happen if EVERYTHING about magick was revealed to everyone.  Every shoddy little magicker (or crafter, in our case) would turn into a complete powerhouse.  And that's not even mentioning Merchant PCs that can, eventually, use just about any crafting skill in the game.

[JRB]

I'm opposed to being able to get more recipe from single items, however, wouldn't it be cool if you could analyze items sold at NPC shops?

[Angela Christine]

You can analyze them, you just have to buy them first.


On that topic, I think it would be nifty if a staff member or two loaded a few lesser known craft items each week, and sold them to random NPC shops.  Then alert crafter PCs could snag the items and analyze them to learn to make less common items.

[JRB]

Yeah but if you ever went into a shop and bought a gun, or any shop in the world, they will hand you the item and let you look at it.  I don't consider analyze doing any damage to the material.  I still say should be able to analyze items in shops without buying them.

[Angela Christine]

I'm just glad analyze doesn't codedly destroy or salvage the item.  Codedly all you are doing is finding out what the ingredients are, but that isn't really all your character is doing.  Your character is seeing what it is made of and how it is put together, in many cases this would involve partially or fully disassembling the item.  Just looking at it or handling it for a few moments shouldn't be enough.


I think it is fair that you have to actually buy the item to analyze it.  However, it would be good if you could tell whether or not it was a craftable item without buying it.  Possibly even what craft is needed to make it.  That way you wouldn't "waste" money buying items that aren't craftable, and could zero in on the items that are.