Crafting-focused Angband mod under development

[Magnate]

Yep; I'd looked through it previously, and the numbers on the wiki should more closely reflect them now.

It does (barring some very recent changes), though you rate the IGNORE_FOO flags as a lot more valuable than I do, and you have +dam at 1 where I have it at 2 on weapons and 4 on nonweapons. I also think you underrate the combat modifiers - brands, slays, shots/might/blows - these should all be proportional to the base damage of the weapon (i.e. dice or launcher multiplier), so that they're more expensive on better weapons. At the moment your table makes +1 shots the same cost as +1 STR, and I know which one I'd rather have on a bow!

You've also missed off +Searching, which is in the same league as +Infra and +Tunnel.

[Optimality]

It does (barring some very recent changes), though you rate the IGNORE_FOO flags as a lot more valuable than I do, and you have +dam at 1 where I have it at 2 on weapons and 4 on nonweapons. I also think you underrate the combat modifiers - brands, slays, shots/might/blows - these should all be proportional to the base damage of the weapon (i.e. dice or launcher multiplier), so that they're more expensive on better weapons. At the moment your table makes +1 shots the same cost as +1 STR, and I know which one I'd rather have on a bow!

You've also missed off +Searching, which is in the same league as +Infra and +Tunnel.

Thanks! I made most of those changes. Having low-price ignores means people are probably just going to always take them, but I'm okay with that. I'm leery about making the weapon modifiers vary based on the weapon damage: I'd like to make the prices as predictable as possible for the player. Hopefully I can implement those with some clever UI that makes it easier for the player. I don't want the prices to look they came from some magical source.

[Nick]

Sorry to hijack the thread for a moment, but it seems like a good place to point out that I could have had Andrew Doull's money.

[Optimality]

What, #8? I don't think Craftband qualifies as a real release yet . Maybe if I finish it this year...

Progress has been held up by RL concerns - namely, finishing my Master's thesis before it's due . Progress will probably remain slow until mid-May.

[Pete Mack]

Infra and Tunnel are actually worth something. search isn't, after around dl 5.

[Magnate]

Infra and Tunnel are actually worth something. search isn't, after around dl 5.

Are you sure? Searching boosts Perception (I think this is quite a recent change but I'm not sure), and that's a life-saver for me. Perhaps I'm just much more careless about detecting traps than most people. Infra is made redundant by ESP (there are a negligible number of warm-blooded monsters with EMPTY_MIND), and tunnelling gets less and less important throughout statgain (as your STR goes up and your weapon gets heavier).

[Magnate]

Sorry to hijack the thread for a moment, but it seems like a good place to point out that I could have had Andrew Doull's money.

I too thought #8 was an odd prediction. But I think the funniest is his touching faith that Diablo 3 will ship this year (though he's spot on about what will happen once it is - I've already booked my sabbatical).

[Jungle_Boy]

I tried this out for about 10 minutes at the end of work today and it looks good. The only thing so far is that it seems like there are only a few items that I can refine or extract. I understand not putting everything on there, though that would be cool, but it seems like I ought to be able to get a lump of iron out of iron spikes, all I have to do is leave it on the floor on front of a fire hound.

[Optimality]

Thanks for trying it!

Right now, I wouldn't consider it anywhere close to release-ready. It's only got a small set of recipes in it - that's one of the later things I'll put in for release. It's actually pretty easy to add them in yourself; they're contained in the recipes.txt edit file. If you come up with a good set of recipes, I'd be happy to incorporate them.

There's a page on the wiki that talks about what's been done and what's coming soon:

http://code.google.com/p/craftband/wiki/DevTimeline

Thanks again for trying it!

[Jungle_Boy]

I can't find a recipes file anywhere.

[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]

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]

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!