Crafting-focused Angband mod under development

[Optimality]

Oops - I renamed it crafting.txt recently. It's lib/edit/crafting.txt.

You can find the kind numbers in object.txt.

I think I remember why I hadn't put any recipes in yet: kind numbers are deprecated, so I need to change those to tval/sval numbers. Also, the UI isn't up to handling very many recipes yet, so if you put in more than it can display things might go south.

[Jungle_Boy]

Unfortunately I don't have that one either but I know it works cause I made a short bow.

[Jungle_Boy]

Apologies for the wall of text and I hope you don’t think I’m trying to tell you how to run your game. I really like the possibilities available in this crafting system so I thought I would post some thoughts/ideas on the subject.

First, I think it’s good to keep the list of different types of base materials fairly small. I like the categories you have though I was thinking something slightly different. I also think that general names for the quality of materials is fine though specific metals or woods would be cool too. Perhaps keep both, i.e. Lump of iron (poor), Lump of mithril (good), where mithril is always good and iron always poor. This helps the player to know the ranking of materials in case it is not obvious.

Here are some ideas on what I would do if I knew coding and had the ambition to do it. Feel free to use or ignore any of this as you please. The categories I would use would be:

1. Metal – extracted from most weapons, hard armors, chests of the appropriate type
2. Wood – extracted from launchers, polearms, staves, chests of the appropriate type
3. Leather – extracted from soft armor, perhaps dropped by monsters

These three materials would have the basic quality rankings, something like, poor, average, good, excellent, and maybe special or unique. These would be the base for any created item. I think it would be cool to also have two more types of crafting materials.

1. Magic Dust – extracted from magic items, wands, rings, rods, etc
2. Gold (AU) – not extracted but deducted from players money

These two types of materials would be used to add quality points to a crafted item and should probably be limited based on the amount of base materials in an item. Perhaps allow each base item to “hold” 5 or 10 quality points. Or scale it based on quality. So a sword made from iron could have 5 QP but a sword made from mithril could have 15 and a sword made from 2 mithril could have 30. That way it would prevent someone from taking one lump of iron and adding a whole bunch of gold and magic dust to make it a super weapon. This would also open the way for players to craft items such as wands and rings.

Extracting
As for extracting materials I think you should be able to break down almost anything but you only get one material from breaking an item down. This would help to alleviate inventory pressure as you can break things down and stack them together. I also think that it should be possible to get different materials for some items. For instance if you break down a halberd you should have a chance to get metal (blade) or wood (shaft), you could also add leather (grip) to the extraction table for almost any item. So if you break down a halberd you would have a 45% chance of getting a piece of wood, 45% chance of getting metal and 10% chance of getting leather, but you only get one. Items like staves could give you wood or magic dust, while a wand or ring would give only magic dust.

Class and artisan bonuses
Perhaps allow each class to have a favored base material that allows them to add an extra QP to that item type. i.e. a sword made of iron by a mage has a max 5QP but a warrior gets a max 6 QP. I also like your plan for making a hard cap on items which I think is very good but make it level dependent, maybe 1.25 -1.75 times player level as this seems to fit with approximately what you are looking at for end game quality items. A possible artisan bonus would be the ability to get two materials when extracting items or raising the hard cap for crafted items. So an artisan at level 50 could create items with 85 QP but anyone else would only be able to get 75 or something like that.

Recipes
I really like the plan of making the recipes a text file in the edit folder. This would allow players to fairly easily add recipes and we could also have a recipes thread on the forum where players submit recipes they have thought up. This would alleviate some of the creative burden on you and might lead to some really cool discoveries and would allow players like me who cannot code a chance to contribute.

[Optimality]

Originally Posted by Jungle_Boy

Unfortunately I don't have that one either but I know it works cause I made a short bow.

Are you using the latest SVN version or the 0.2 release? It's not in the 0.2 release.

[Optimality]

Originally Posted by Jungle_Boy

Apologies for the wall of text and I hope you don’t think I’m trying to tell you how to run your game. I really like the possibilities available in this crafting system so I thought I would post some thoughts/ideas on the subject.

Thanks a lot for sending in your ideas! This is an excellent post, so please forgive me for replying point-by-point.

First, I think it’s good to keep the list of different types of base materials fairly small. I like the categories you have though I was thinking something slightly different. I also think that general names for the quality of materials is fine though specific metals or woods would be cool too. Perhaps keep both, i.e. Lump of iron (poor), Lump of mithril (good), where mithril is always good and iron always poor. This helps the player to know the ranking of materials in case it is not obvious.

I really like this idea, and plan to implement it. Thanks! I'll probably have to add some additional material types to keep the crafting system deep enough.

My one concern is that, for flavor reasons, "iron spikes" should always give iron (which is easy, since iron spikes won't ever be magical) - but if I make mithril armor always give mithril, it would make those items OP. And if I have some magic Iron Shots, they shouldn't give the lowest quality of metal - but if I refine a lump of mithril from a bunch of iron shots... I guess it's kinda believable (maybe the mithril was embedded inside?) but still seems to break the metaphor a bit.

1. Metal – extracted from most weapons, hard armors, chests of the appropriate type
2. Wood – extracted from launchers, polearms, staves, chests of the appropriate type
3. Leather – extracted from soft armor, perhaps dropped by monsters

These three materials would have the basic quality rankings, something like, poor, average, good, excellent, and maybe special or unique. These would be the base for any created item.

This is exactly what's currently implemented.

I think it would be cool to also have two more types of crafting materials.

1. Magic Dust – extracted from magic items, wands, rings, rods, etc
2. Gold (AU) – not extracted but deducted from players money

These two types of materials would be used to add quality points to a crafted item and should probably be limited based on the amount of base materials in an item.

I haven't spent much time thinking about how to craft staves, rods, rings, etc. yet. I'm not sure the magic dust idea is quite what I want, though, for those kinds of items. I'd like them to get their powers from the same quality point system, which means I could just base it off their base material level.

I'm not sure I want players to be able to add gold to their recipes. First, it breaks the metaphor. Second, the monetary system in the game is fairly broken, and I don't think I want to tie myself to it at this point - money is only important in the early game. Late game, you have practically infinite money. I don't see the benefit in tying somebody's crafting ability to the money curve.

Basically, allowing players to put in a variable amount of material into an item seems really hard to balance.

As far as base materials for magic items, I'm thinking I'll introduce jewels for those - a stave could be 2 pieces of wood and 2 jewels or something.

Extracting
As for extracting materials I think you should be able to break down almost anything but you only get one material from breaking an item down. This would help to alleviate inventory pressure as you can break things down and stack them together. I also think that it should be possible to get different materials for some items. For instance if you break down a halberd you should have a chance to get metal (blade) or wood (shaft), you could also add leather (grip) to the extraction table for almost any item. So if you break down a halberd you would have a 45% chance of getting a piece of wood, 45% chance of getting metal and 10% chance of getting leather, but you only get one.

This is exactly what's currently implemented.

Class and artisan bonuses
Perhaps allow each class to have a favored base material that allows them to add an extra QP to that item type. i.e. a sword made of iron by a mage has a max 5QP but a warrior gets a max 6 QP. I also like your plan for making a hard cap on items which I think is very good but make it level dependent, maybe 1.25 -1.75 times player level as this seems to fit with approximately what you are looking at for end game quality items. A possible artisan bonus would be the ability to get two materials when extracting items or raising the hard cap for crafted items. So an artisan at level 50 could create items with 85 QP but anyone else would only be able to get 75 or something like that.

This is pretty similar to the current plan - each class will get bonus quality points to some class-appropriate set of recipes. Warriors get bonuses to weapons/armor, paladins get slightly smaller bonuses, etc. The idea would be that players get additional bonus QP as they level - I haven't worked out the exact curve yet; that will be a major balancing issue. Artisans, of course, get bigger QP bonuses across the board than the other classes, but suffer from lower abilities elsewhere.

Recipes
I really like the plan of making the recipes a text file in the edit folder. This would allow players to fairly easily add recipes and we could also have a recipes thread on the forum where players submit recipes they have thought up. This would alleviate some of the creative burden on you and might lead to some really cool discoveries and would allow players like me who cannot code a chance to contribute.

This is currently implemented in the SVN version.

Thanks again for your excellent post!

[Jungle_Boy]

I do have 0.2 not the SVN so that explains that. I'll have to delve into it more but it seems like you are a step ahead of me on most of this.

My one concern is that, for flavor reasons, "iron spikes" should always give iron (which is easy, since iron spikes won't ever be magical) - but if I make mithril armor always give mithril, it would make those items OP. And if I have some magic Iron Shots, they shouldn't give the lowest quality of metal - but if I refine a lump of mithril from a bunch of iron shots... I guess it's kinda believable (maybe the mithril was embedded inside?) but still seems to break the metaphor a bit.

Mithril Armor is not made of pure mithril nor are magic iron shots pure iron. The higher the mithril content in the armor (or shot) the better the armor and the more likely you are to get a lump of mithril from refining it. That's my explanation anyway.

Basically, allowing players to put in a variable amount of material into an item seems really hard to balance.

As far as base materials for magic items, I'm thinking I'll introduce jewels for those - a stave could be 2 pieces of wood and 2 jewels or something.

I was thinking to balance for the most you can add of the variable items and then if the player does not have that many of them he can make an item that's not as good as it could be but better than the pieces in his pack. For example he can make a dagger (+2,+2) with iron and 3 magic dust but iron and 5 magic dust lets him make it (+3,+3) or something like that. How are you planning to determine the number of quality points allocated to a recipe? Just from the base items? Jewels is kind of what I was thinking when I suggested using money in order to avoid messages like "You find 200 gold pieces worth of rubies" -More- "You pick up a ruby (p)" Which seems kind of funky. I imagine the player stash as a collection of verious precioous metals and gemstones with probably a couple shiny knucklebones and some other junk that was mistaken for loot. But I agree that angbands money curve is somwhat ridiculous and would be difficult to use. And Magic dust didn't really feel right either I was just trying to think what would come from refining magic items and what would be used to make them or add quality points to other recipes.

[PaulBlay]

Hey, Optimality.

Work still going on on this variant or has real life taken over?

[Optimality]

Hey, just a quick update about Craftband.

Real life hit me pretty hard at the end of May - I started a new job, which has been pretty time consuming. However, I'm settling in now and expect to be spending more time on this project in the next couple of weeks.

[thapper]

Good to hear! I really like the idea and I was looking forward to play it a bit more when you could do some more crafting. The only thing I managed in 0.2 was to disassemble daggers and craft something small (like a hard leather cap or something, can't remember) but already that was fun!

[Optimality]

Hey - thanks for the encouragement .

Now that I'm finishing up grad school, I should have a lot more time to work on this.

However, I've decided to move it away from being an Angband variant and instead I'm going to make a from-scratch roguelike that implements a lot of the ideas I've been kicking around. So, progress will be a lot slower, but hopefully the game will, as a result, be more coherent and balanced.

Thanks for the feedback everybody; I suppose I'll be posting updates to a different location, probably the rgr-dev mailing list or something, since it doesn't qualify as a variant anymore .

The old codebase is still available if anybody wants to pick it up.