Crafting
Learning paths through this topic
Crafting System
Crafting gives the things players gather a use, and lets them decide what to make from what they have.
Item Durability
Durability gives items a life. The player has to decide when to use a favourite tool, when to save it, and when to pay for a repair.
Item Upgrades
Upgrades give the player something to save for and a reason to love one item, while a rising price and a limited top level keep the climb meaningful.
Recipe Discovery
A recipe the player found by experimenting feels like an earned discovery, and a hint after a run of misses keeps a stuck player from giving up or opening a guide.
Crop Farming
Farming gives the player a slow, caring loop with a reward at the end. Planting is a small bet on the future, watering is the attention it asks for, and harvest day is the payoff that brings the player back.
Gathering Nodes
Nodes put the materials of the world in places the player can find, learn and come back to. They turn walking around into a small hunt, and the limit on pickings and the wait for the node to return keep the world from running dry or being drained in a minute.
Make spamming the same craft cost more, then cool down as time passes
Crafting health packs is cheap, so players do it every five seconds in a boss fight and the fight loses its tension. A flat price does not help. This entry makes each recent craft a bit dearer and lets the price fall back on its own, with exact, repeatable numbers.
Let an ammo workshop run on its own without switching on and off every second
The base has a machine that turns scrap into bullets when the stock is low. At the border value it flips on and off every second, making noise and wasting power. This entry gives it two thresholds, one to start and one to stop, and a clean rule for running out of scrap.
Let a recipe accept any kind of wood, even when items count twice
A recipe asks for any wood and any fuel. Charcoal is fuel, planks are both. Picking the first match for each line can wrongly say you lack something you actually have. This entry finds a valid assignment whenever one exists.
Turn stacked armor plating into damage taken without ever reaching zero
Each armor plate cuts damage by thirty percent, so three plates and the player is immune, and the shooter has no more tension. This entry turns armor points into a curve where each plate helps less than the one before, and shows the player what the next plate is really worth.
Count crafted armor set pieces so two identical rings do not fake a set
Wearing two rings of the same kind should not unlock the bonus that needs two different pieces of the set. Players find this within a day and wear four copies of the cheapest piece. This entry counts what is really worn, once per piece, and stacks the bonus tiers.
Learn a recipe from found pages and turn extra pages into scrap
An enemy drops a torn page of a plan. Three pages teach the recipe, but the player finds a fourth after learning it, or learns the same recipe another way first. Without rules the pages pile up uselessly or teach it twice. This entry handles each case and pays out scrap.