Orphaned Recipes

[Erythil]

This game has items.

Lots of items.

One might even say too many items.  I'm pretty sure the recentish restrictions on who gets to mastercraft are in part because staff were constantly inundated with a whole bunch of mastercraft requests. 

A lot of these items, unfortunately, have really specific requirements.  Sure, you can make a lot out of chalton hide, but there's that one recipe that needs chalton hide, a specific rock, and 2 kinds of cord, and god help you if you don't know it, because there's no way you could intuitively figure it out without having an example of the item to work from.

So I was wondering: What if there was a coded way to bring more of the game's forgotten items back into circulation?  My mind went to 'recipe books,' but since we can't have books, what about a feature where you could pay a ton of money to an NPC, and he would tell you a random rare recipe?  It would serve double duty giving merchant types more money sinks.

[Cerelum]

I agree, if would be nice if Analyze worked both ways.

Like Analyze thing:
Thing is made outta blah, it would be easy.

or Analyze blah:
You could combine this with X and Y and make Z.

[Alesan]

I agree, if would be nice if Analyze worked both ways.

Like Analyze thing:
Thing is made outta blah, it would be easy.

or Analyze blah:
You could combine this with X and Y and make Z.

People have argued against the latter bit, because it removes the guesswork and "fun of discovery" from the crafting system. I can admire the kind of person who finds it fun to try every item with every single other item in the game, up to a combination of 5 items at once, but some people, particularly myself, do not find such a task enjoyable. I prefer to come across interesting items and discover how to make those items through analyzing. I don't have the patience to experiment with 3-or-more-items recipes... over and over and over.

[Cerelum]

I agree, if would be nice if Analyze worked both ways.

Like Analyze thing:
Thing is made outta blah, it would be easy.

or Analyze blah:
You could combine this with X and Y and make Z.

People have argued against the latter bit, because it removes the guesswork and "fun of discovery" from the crafting system. I can admire the kind of person who finds it fun to try every item with every single other item in the game, up to a combination of 5 items at once, but some people, particularly myself, do not find such a task enjoyable. I prefer to come across interesting items and discover how to make those items through analyzing. I don't have the patience to experiment with 3-or-more-items recipes... over and over and over.

It doesn't remove anything if they don't use the analyze skill on the raw material.

That's like saying, "It hurts if I poke myself in the eye!  I shouldn't be able to poke myself in the eye!"  Just don't...poke yourself in the eye.

[John]

I would love to know which items haven't been crafted in the longest time and what their individual pieces are and whether they should be as rare as they currently are, or if they're simply being overlooked due to how our system works.

I would love to see staff loading up such items into stores with "many" available so they can be analyzed and reintroduced into the playerbase.

I think staff have a long term plan on fixing how items are crafted in game. We saw dyeing change so that the same item can represent multiple items by having "a simple sandcloth shirt" become "a blue simple sandcloth shirt" and "a yellow simple sandcloth shirt". I expect we'll see further efforts in that direction. Perhaps weapons or jewelry that can have different gems set into them to allow a wider range of items. Some (perhaps even many) existing items could also be reworked to work with these systems.

However like anything that requires a lot of time and effort by both builders and coders. That said, I don't think a month goes by without the coders making a substantial change to how the game works. So while this might not happen anytime soon, I'm sure it will continue to be on the "to do" list.

[azuriolinist]

I would love to see staff loading up such items into stores with "many" available so they can be analyzed and reintroduced into the playerbase.

I'd love this. Something similar to this was once suggested a little while back. It'd make sense for different items to come up in a shopkeeper's inventory through "VNPC sales", allowing for circulation over the item database.

[Cerelum]

Would be nice too if you could analyze something without buying it.

If I go look at a store, I can touch and manipulate a piece of jewelry before I decide if I wanna buy it.

Maybe allow Analyze hairy #1.

This would also help recipes be discovered.

I don't think I've ever skilled up my analyze skill because it's just so rare that you need to use it.

[John]

I would love to see staff loading up such items into stores with "many" available so they can be analyzed and reintroduced into the playerbase.

I'd love this. Something similar to this was once suggested a little while back. It'd make sense for different items to come up in a shopkeeper's inventory through "VNPC sales", allowing for circulation over the item database.

Keep in mind doing it manually would be a considerable amount of work. And doing it automatically would require a considerable amount of work to get the code right. So it's not me saying "this is easy! Staff should just do X" but simply throwing out the idea in case a staff member thinks it might be worth doing every now and then.

[Brokkr]

I don't think I've ever skilled up my analyze skill because it's just so rare that you need to use it.

You've never skilled up your analyze skill because it never fails.

[Cerelum]

I don't think I've ever skilled up my analyze skill because it's just so rare that you need to use it.

You've never skilled up your analyze skill because it never fails.

Well, that would explain it!

Lol.

[gotdamnmiracle]

I don't think I've ever skilled up my analyze skill because it's just so rare that you need to use it.

You've never skilled up your analyze skill because it never fails.

Well, that would explain it!

Lol.

You know, making a no-fail npc would make it reasonable to reduce the 100% quality of analyze and let it be able fail, thus training it like the value skill. I feel like this is an acceptably balanced option.

[Alesan]

I don't think I've ever skilled up my analyze skill because it's just so rare that you need to use it.

You've never skilled up your analyze skill because it never fails.

Well, that would explain it!

Lol.

You know, making a no-fail npc would make it reasonable to reduce the 100% quality of analyze and let it be able fail, thus training it like the value skill. I feel like this is an acceptably balanced option.

I'd rather just remove the skill level from analyze and let it be like accents. Analyze is already regulated by how good you are at crafting whatever items you can craft.


Anyway, I would love to see hints toward multi-item crafts when you try to "craft" a piece of material, or something. It would make playing a crafter so much more interesting and exciting if you don't have the arduous task of "try x and x and x and x and x together" a billion times until something sticks, unless you are fortunate enough to have items available to you to analyze. I'm sure that finding items and analyzing them will always be the more encouraged option, but it would be nice to have something, anything else that might make a crafter's life a little more fun and a little less frustratingly tedious.

[gotdamnmiracle]

Also the ability to:
Analyze Amos's boots

This would go a long way because there are zillions of things that NPCs have that I'd like to know how to make, but the only way to learn is to kill them, peel their boots off their cooling corpse, analyze them, and, more often than not, toss them over your shoulder when you find out the black-scaled, calf-high boots don't actually have a recipe and were designed for that NPC without a thought to the items enduring realism in the game world.

[Erythil]

A crafting feature I liked on Shadows of Isildur was the chance to learn a new recipe whenever you succeeded at a related craft.  This made it so succeeding didn't always paradoxically feel like failure, when you were trying to skill up.  It's always been a little weird when you successful make your item and go 'shit!'

However, I don't know if we could feasibly make a 'recipe list' for players in the game as it stands, what with there being so many, and the system working the way it does.

[Harmless]

I dunno which I want more, a little added feature like recipe hints on success or broadening the analyze skill, or a crafting system overhaul, but I would be happy with both.

Seeing the coding work going in game lately I trust that eventually this will improve eventually. Ideally, with a realistic-feeling system that reduces staff workload too!

[Brokkr]

One problem with analyzing raw materials for recipes is something like "a piece of bone" has over 300 recipes.  In some of those, the items is  a main ingredient.  In some it is a minor ingredient. The crafting system does not differentiate.

[Erythil]

Perhaps there might be a way that a player of a sufficiently long-lived merchant/artisan could choose to 'specialize' in a particular craft among the many, and be awarded some ability to browse a recipe list for within his specialized craft.  This would help reduce the 'I can do everything' Leonardo da Vinci ultra-flexibility homogeneity of main guild merchants by allowing them to flavor themselves around the one thing they know a lot about.

[Riev]

Perhaps there might be a way that a player of a sufficiently long-lived merchant/artisan could choose to 'specialize' in a particular craft among the many, and be awarded some ability to browse a recipe list for within his specialized craft.  This would help reduce the 'I can do everything' Leonardo da Vinci ultra-flexibility homogeneity of main guild merchants by allowing them to flavor themselves around the one thing they know a lot about.

This is the better system, in my head, but it does increase the workload on staff to determine what the acceptable level is, and what the 'new' recipe may be.

Otherwise, someone would have to code a completely OOC tool (that I've wanted to do for years and at no point ever have) that would give you the "piece of bone" as a component, and return a list of all crafts that utilize that item. A massive undertaking to say the least.