From The Mana World
< User:Crush
Revision as of 23:52, 28 October 2007 by Crush (talk | contribs)

Outdated template, please use Template:Status Under Construction to mark pages as unfinished. Some notes about crafting that need a lot more refinement.


To craft an item the character first needs to obtain a formula for the item it wants to craft and some raw materials. What kind of raw material depend on the formula. A sword could, for example, ask for 5 units of metal. What type of metal is left to the discretion of the player. The player can either use cheap and easy to use materials or expensive and hard to use materials. Depending on the used materials and the general difficulty of the crafted item the success chance is higher or lower.


Collecting Formulas

In the medieval ages aspiring craftsmen from all kinds of proffessions used to travel from city to city for a year to learn the local crafting techniques of different places from as many different masters as possible. I think that we should simulate this tradition by making craftsmen collect different crafting formulas from all around the game world.

Every NPC who sells items can teach the player characters one or two different crafting formulas. But before these NPCs accept characters as their apprentices and teach them their secrets they first have to do a quest for them. What kind of quest varies. But usually these are non-violent errants.

Collecting materials

Raw materials are either obtained as regular monster drops or from mining raw material deposites. These deposites are beings that can neither move nor attack and drop some units of raw material when killed. They can take different shapes depending on the type of material. Deposites of metals or gemstones appear as rocks, herb or fruit deposites as bushes, wood deposites as special trees and so on. Deposites can be mined by attacking and destroying them. Most deposites have a very high armor defence that is ignored by specific weapon types (tools usually used for harvesting this resource).

Material deposites spawn in specific areas. Low level ingredients spawn in save areas that are easy to access while high level ingredients spawn in remote and dangerous areas. The player should spend much more time searching for material deposites than actually harvesting them to make the collecting process more interesting and not just button mashing (like in runescape, for example). For that reason the areas in which material deposites spawn should be large and the density of deposites should be low.

Every type of material has a challenge rating (that determines how hard it is to work with this material), a quality rating (that determines how good the items are that are crafted with this material) and in some cases additional effects.

The crafting process

When a character wants to craft an item, the player opens the crafting menu with a button click. Then a list appears with all formulas the character collected. When the player selects a formual a new window opens with item slots in which the player has to put materials from its inventory. When all slots are filled with items a general challenge rating for the item is calculated. The challenge rating is:

reciept challenge rating + sum(material challenge ratings)

When the player presses the [OK] button the item is crafted.

determining quality level

The first step of the crafting algorithm is determining the quality grade of the item. This is done by ten times throwing a random number between 0 and the crafting skill level of the character and a random number between 0 and the challenge rating. The quality grade of the crafted item is the number of times the characters number is higher.

A quality of 3 or lower is counted as "failed". No item is created and the ingredients are lost. The quality grades have different name that appear as a prefix in the name of the item:

4 rubbish
5 dilettantish
6 crude
7 average
8 fine
9 flawless
10 masterpiece


determining item properties

The properties of the created item depend on the archieved quality level, the formula and the total quality of the used ingredients.

Each formula has a number of different multipliers for all item properties. In case of a weapon this could be damage, penetration, speed, strength requirement, dexterity requirement, skill requirement.

The final value of all item properties besides requirements are determined by calculating a random nuber between 0 and (reciept_proporty_multiplier * sum(item_quality)) once for each quality grade and taking the highest value. That way high quality items will have all properties close to the maximum while low quality items have very random properties.

The requirements are calculated in a similar fashion: Like when determining the other properties a random nuber between 0 and (reciept_proporty_multiplier * sum(item_quality)) is calculated once for each quality grade. But the lowest 3 values are discarded and the average of the remaining rolls is used. That way a skilled crafter can reduce the requirements but extremely low requirements for very strong items are very hard to archieve.

Example

Crafting disciplines

Weapon forging

Forging weapons out of metal and sometimes gemstones for giving the weapons magical effects.

Formulas (Examples):

Metal slots Gemstone slots
Knife 1 0
Dagger 2 0
Ritual Dagger 1 1
Short Sword 3 0

Materials (examples):

Material Type Quality Challenge Special Effect
Bronze Metal 1 1
Copper Metal 2 2
Iron Metal 3 4
Steel Metal 5 7
Titanium Metal 7 10
Runesteel Metal 3 10 Adds a rune slot
Endural Metal 10 20
Ruby (Fire)

Sapphire (Water)
Emerald (Wind)
Quartz (Earth)
and others...

Gemstone 0 5 25% of weapon damage becomes elemental damage.

Bow making

Forging bows out of wood and bow string.

Armor forging

Creating armor out of metal. These items are usually used by heavy fighters.

Jewlery

Forging jewels out of metal and gemstones that increase single stats.

Sewing

Creating clothes out of threads or leather. These items are usually used by light fighters or magic users.

Alchemy

Brewing potions. The art of alchemy differs a bit from the other disciplines. The formulas are rather few:

Slot
tiny potion 1
small potion 2
medium potion 3
large potion 4
great potion 5
elixier. 6

But the effect of the potions that use the same formulas can differ a lot depending on the used ingredients. All potions created with the same formula and combination of ingredients are identical. No quality levels are used in alchemy. Crafting a potion either fails or succeeds.