Crafting-focused Angband mod under development

[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.