Crafting-focused Angband mod under development

[Optimality]

Sounds like a fun idea, I'll see if I can't work it in.

[Optimality]

Progress report: I have added a crafting menu with two options, "refine" and "craft." Refine renders an item into its lesser components, and craft combines lesser components to build an item.

Right now I only have one testing recipe. Next step is to expand the recipe library a bit and test more interesting cases.

[ekolis]

Sweet

I would suggest that "refine" is probably not the best term for deconstructing something into its component materials... not sure what would be better though! "Distill" would work for potions, "deconstruct" or "dismantle" would work for armor, weapons, and magical devices... can't really think of a general purpose term though!

Also, are the recipes going to be the same every time you play, or will they be randomized, like with item flavors? Or somewhere in between (e.g. randomized but with some nonsensical combinations removed, like "potion of cure medium wounds + essence of life = scroll of *Destruction*")?

edit: oh, one other thing! Presumably dismantling and/or crafting will have a chance of destroying some of the components accidentally? Otherwise you could go around making the "uber item" which does everything given enough time to collect materials! I suppose "Crafting" might also be a skill on the char sheet, as well, determined by your stats (perhaps INT and DEX, plus WIS for magical items and STR for mundane items... ooh, and how about CHA for artifacts? Finally, CHA can be useful! ), and also the type of item being crafted compared with your class (e.g. warriors get large bonuses with melee weapons and armor; rangers get large bonuses with bows and ammo, crafters get moderate bonuses with everything)?

[Atarlost]

Making uberitems is only a problem if you can customize. If all you can do is select a base-ego combination or select a base item and call the randart generator on it you won't be making ToME Alchemist style munchkinware.

[Optimality]

Yeah, I don't like the term "refine," but I couldn't come up with anything better yet . Easy enough to change it when I do.

Recipes are going to be static - I'm trying to make it make as much sense as possible, and recipes determine what you extract from an, not just what goes into it. It'll be much easier to balance this way. Eventually I plan to stick the recipe database into an edit file, but that's way down the road.

I'd like for a refine to always generate at least one component - for now, I'm sticking with exactly one component.

There will be lots of gates to prevent people from making uber-items too early. Uber-items are going to require rare materials that are hard to refine, for example.

I'm also planning on incorporating a "crafting skill" into the crafting process. Ideally it will be subdivided into types - warriors better at crafting weapons, mages better at crafting magic items. I hadn't thought about incorporating stats into it; I may do that as well.

Right now, I think when you craft an item you're going to get "quality points" that you can use to purchase different bonuses (to-hit, slays, brands, resses). The number of points you get will be based on crafting skill, maybe stats, probably the quality of the materials.

Not sure about this next part, but *maybe* certain bonuses are only available if you add extra ingredients (similar to Jungle_Boy's suggestion). Like, to-hit and to-dam are always available for purchase, but to get the *Slay Orc* flag you have to add a Potion of Heroism or something (or the skull of an Orc - not likely that I'd do that, but it'd be cool! ).

[Optimality]

Atarlost: I'm planning on having customization. I'm hoping to prevent munchkinware with the quality points system and probably capping the total number of possible points.

[Optimality]

Okay, I think I've got enough in to justify a 0.1 version. There's a crafting menu, some basic mats, and some very basic recipes. I'm just trying to give you an idea of what the basics of the variant will be like. Hit "O" to open the crafting menu.

This is my first time doing a release of anything, and I cross-compiled the Windows version from my Mac, so please let me know about any problems with those. The Linux release is just the source.

Please let me know what you think! There's a lot more to come!

http://craftband.googlecode.com

[Nick]

Originally Posted by Optimality

The Linux release is just the source.

My compiler (gcc 4.3) takes exception as follows:

crafting.c: In function ‘lookup_recipe_target’:            
crafting.c:72: error: ‘for’ loop initial declaration used outside C99 mode

to this bit of code:

/* Find the first recipe with this target.*/
const recipe_type * lookup_recipe_target(int kind)
{
	for (int i = 0; i < N_ELEMENTS(recipes); ++i)
	{
		if (recipes[i].target.kind == kind)
			return &recipes[i];
	}

	return NULL;
}

Not an error I've seen before. Hope this is helpful.

[Optimality]

Oh yeah - I had to crank the compiler settings way down on the windows release too. Basically it's being way too pedantic . I'll have a new package up in a second.

[Optimality]

Okay - v 0.1.1 should fix that problem.