The paradox of freeform crafting

[Legend]

It is impossible to have a crafting system that...

1: allows all things to be mixed/combined

2: is stable

3: is simple



Take for example poison and water. Mix the two together and you'd get poisoned water. Mix that with water again and again and again and what the heck happens? The only solution that doesn't break everything is to treat water as a solution and track all the internal chemicals.

It needs to be treated like a real world physics and chemistry system with impurities.


So I'm not exactly sure what to do. It doesn't sound fun for me or the player if every individual object has a unique chemical makeup and crafting involves complex ratios instead of integers.

[the-pi-guy]

Reminds me of groups.

[the-pi-guy]

Usually what I see games end up doing is either basically have a garbage item or limiting the choices you have.

For the former: gold + gold watch ends up being garbage.  Garbage + anything is still garbage.  
For the latter: Gold + gold watch is still a gold watch.  


Practically speaking, it's probably better for the player and the developer to make some approximations.  

Like anything below 1/16th poison could be too low to be poisoned water, and you could make approximations like saying 3/32th poison is pretty much the same as 1/16th poison.  
Then you are pretty much dealing with 17 items {water, 1/16th poison, etc} instead of an insane amount.

[Legend]

Usually what I see games end up doing is either basically have a garbage item or limiting the choices you have.

For the former: gold + gold watch ends up being garbage.  Garbage + anything is still garbage.  
For the latter: Gold + gold watch is still a gold watch.  


Practically speaking, it's probably better for the player and the developer to make some approximations.  

Like anything below 1/16th poison could be too low to be poisoned water, and you could make approximations like saying 3/32th poison is pretty much the same as 1/16th poison.  
Then you are pretty much dealing with 17 items {water, 1/16th poison, etc} instead of an insane amount.

The problem with junk/no change is that it's not stable. It can be used to duplicate or delete items.

Aproximations tend to fail for the same reason. They can work great when a player goes along with it, but edge cases can be exploited.




I think what I'm going with is a chunky molecule system behind the scenes. Every object can have impurities and funky stuff mixed in. To the player, this is just expressed with a "quality" value. So one gold bar could be 100% quality and thus 100% pure gold, while another could be 50% with other things in there.

Crafting with 100% quality things always produces the expected output. Otherwise the output feels more and more random as  quality lowers and impurities can affect things.


Doesn't require rewriting most of my code which is nice. And can still have fully discrete materials from the player point of view. Hopefully I don't find another edge case that breaks it.

[kitler53]

the only crafting system i ever "enjoyed" was world of warcraft.   
 
 - high end crafting took time to level up
 - high end crafting took time to farm the recipes
 - high end crafting took time to farm the materials

but..

 - the recipes were simple,.. just a few recipes really.   like a dozen per craft i suppose so it was easy to know what you wanted.
 - you could sell your wares on the market place for a lot of money
 - and each and every recipe was worth it,.. everything had a substantial impact on gameplay raid encounters scaled so well as to always have something you could only win with a razor's edge margin of error and the crafts were often the difference maker.  and thus the crafting was a necessary, a core element of gameplay and raid design.

very rewarding.  nothing else has ever come close imo.  the problem with every crafting system i've ever placed elsewhere is the game is design to be playable if you never craft.  and thus crafting has no need or purpose.

[Legend]

the only crafting system i ever "enjoyed" was world of warcraft.  
 
 - high end crafting took time to level up
 - high end crafting took time to farm the recipes
 - high end crafting took time to farm the materials

but..

 - the recipes were simple,.. just a few recipes really.   like a dozen per craft i suppose so it was easy to know what you wanted.
 - you could sell your wares on the market place for a lot of money
 - and each and every recipe was worth it,.. everything had a substantial impact on gameplay raid encounters scaled so well as to always have something you could only win with a razor's edge margin of error and the crafts were often the difference maker.  and thus the crafting was a necessary, a core element of gameplay and raid design.

very rewarding.  nothing else has ever come close imo.  the problem with every crafting system i've ever placed elsewhere is the game is design to be playable if you never craft.  and thus crafting has no need or purpose.

Never played wow.

Your second to last point is something I've thought a lot about. Almost every crafting output should be interesting. It's silly to have a bunch of things that offer nothing to the player.

Your last point is something I'm not doing however, since the game has immersive sim style combat. There are a million different ways to deal with every situation.