Crafting

Racer1

Although we don't know for certain, there is at least an indication that there will be "crafting" in SN. Obviously, Minecraft crafting comes to mind. However, there are many other types of crafting and I'm wondering what people think about the direction this should take.

My personal opinion is that you should not have to have a wiki window open to try to figure out how to craft something, nor should it require placing certain resources in certain spots on a grid. Those kind of things make the game tedious, and take away from the immersion that I so hope SN is striving. I have no problem with needing to learn how to craft -- but this should be an in-game process; and once you do know how to make an item, it should be fairly easy to repeat (provided you have the resources to do it).

shriike

I agree with you, but how do you learn how to craft new things? Experimentation? An in game manual? A tutorial? Or how about minecraft achievements?

Vetinari

In Terraria you have a guide who'd tell you what you can craft out of a certain material you acquired. He knows literally every single recipe. Once you have all the necessary materials, you just stand next to the workshop you want to craft with and select the item to craft out of a list. It doesn't get any easier than this.

DrBacon

I think you should have a list of items to craft, but just the ones you have discovered. This will help with the exploration side of the game, people will need explore to find new items.

Racer1

I like those simplified approaches. As extensions of these, I'd like to see:
- a tooltip when hovering over the recipes, to give more details, including what resources it will use (and how many I currently have).
- Highlighting (in red) which known recipes/resources I cannot use (due to not having enough resources)
- Allow me to craft many items of a specific type, without having to click/wait each time
- Make old recipes that I don't often use be hidden or show at the bottom (I dislike scrolling through useless items)

In some games, crafting has a random chance of failing, succeeding, or producing a unique item. Rather than this, I'd prefer that upgrading your tools increases your ability to make better (or more) items. I have no problem with random drops during exploration...but having to craft 100 times before I get the item I want is tedious.

P.S. If you do want certain crafts to take time, let me queue them up and then leave to go exploring. If I want to wait on progress bars, I can download big files off the internet