Frustration with recipes

I finally got an obsidian wolf carcass to drop, and realized I couldn't even butcher it. So, I looked online, and found that I needed a butcher supplies vendor. I went to two separate cities that were supposed to have them. After several hours, I came to the conclusion that they don't exist, and butchers only sell the meat. I've wasted so much time, just trying to locate recipes to craft things, that I've given up.

Why can't you just walk up to a guard, and say, ask for directions? Surely, the locals know where everything is, and would want to support the local economy. The maps are of no help at all, and don't show the locations of basic services most of the time, so they're no help. Even after I find something, it doesn't show up on the map.

On that note, I'd like to try brewing but have no idea how to go about learning new recipes, or even find the ingredients to the recipes I have? I look at crafting sites, which seems to also be useless. I can figure out what's needed, but if I don't have the actual recipe I can't craft it. I'd rather have a crafting site tell me where to get the recipes that what the recipes ingredients are.

 

So if a recipe is re-Teachable, then the recipe can be learned by putting in the items in the crafting station and pressing craft. You will receive the crafted item and you will learn the recipe.
list: http://sotawiki.net/sota/Re-Teachable


If the recipe is teachable, then this means you will have to find the recipe. These are mostly lootable recipes.

List: http://sotawiki.net/sota/Teachable

Also to note that the re-Teachable recipes are also possible to be bought from the vendors. You can find these on the sota wiki mostly.

Not teachable:
Recipes and emotes that are Not Teachable can not be traded to another character or learned through discovery. These can only be learned from recipe items or in the case of emotes, through NPCs that teach them. Some Emotes are Add-On Store only.
http://sotawiki.net/sota/Not_Teachable

 

you can only do that with RE-teachable recipes.

 

Yes, sorry. I was editing the post while your were posting that

 

So, in essence, I've purchased obsidian cooking recipes that I didn't need to pay for. Only to find that once I finally got a single carcass to drop, that the butchery recipe for the meat is not teachable nor sold in stores. Since I posted, I spent even more time running across the world map to Aerie, because another older post said most of the obsidian recipes could be learned here. I'm on my last leg with this game...

 

Whoever had the idea to scatter recipes around and make it a funny little quest involving hours of incredibly enjoyable quality playtime to find the ones you need is either a sadist or someone that has NO idea what is fun and what is not.

@Chris : I can only repeat the plea: Please please end this madness finally. There are really many players in your target group that do not take lightly on wasting their precious playtime on things that by no definition could be labeled "fun". Don't blame it on a low frustration tolerance or "not wanting to work for something". When designing things that need a lot of tedious, boring, frustrating work in order to achieve something, the achievement must be something that makes the player really feel like "wow! I made it! This is soo awesome!". I cannot see someone going crazy over the achievement of finally finding the recipe to make obsidian wolf meat. It's probably rather going to be an "oh god, finally! Now I need a break from this game".

 

All Vendors of a specific type should have all recipes, all seeds and imho all NPC Cities schould have all Vendors and Supply Merchants.

I for example run to Vertas to buy seeds and then to harvest to get cooking Supplys otherwise Estgard Citizens would starve.
Why cant we have all in every City, there are no traderoutes! There is just timesink to run over the OW an loadscreens.

Other thing is, Guards need to know about vendors, poi 's and important NPC and point you in the right direction.
Something i ask for ever!

 

You can often look up recipes on the SOTA wiki. The obsidian wolf meat one can be found in Resolute or Aerie.
http://sotawiki.net/sota/Recipe:_Obsidian_Wolf_Meat

 

If a game its tactics is that crafted items are the most strongest ones, then for one. They should make it more difficult to get recipes. So it is pretty normal that they have been scattered all over the place I guess.
For me this is just normal behavior.

Also to note that some information on the internet and even these forums, is old information. In the past it was possible to learn all recipes through just putting the items in the crafting table and pressing craft.
This is not the case anymore for all recipes.

 

There is a very useful google spreadsheet someone is maintaining (so will not be compete)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vWEixHbrSa3mwzDfUye128UbwGy6YaPoLs6ehsZp0eo/edit#gid=0

On the obsidian wolf carcass specifically, i got mine from the Aerie, in the area area opposite the north entrance i think it is.

Spung

 

I recognise all of this, and I am more than halfway to agreeing that npc purchased recipes should all be available from each category of merchant like Stun says. It drives me nuts I have to go to Brittany to obtain my mandrake seeds whereas I can get garlic and a whole host of others from the npc in my own POT.

However, I guess the argument is to get us to travel around, to visit NPC towns where arguably the range of goods and services would or should be wider, as in the RW and (in time) these trips may spawn adventures, get us to meet and engage with other players and perhaps notice an npc up an alleyway beckoning us on to a quest..

..If just about everything I needed (for crafting) was available in my POT, how often would I leave and how often (as I do now) would I end up exploring or adventuring and totally forgetting what I headed of to West End for ?

The main frustration for me is many of these adventure elements are not yet there, the regional economy is still a WIP. In BDO the regional economy provides a great model, but its simple - some stuff can only be bought or made in one region and as a result it is highly desirable and expensive to buy (if at all) in another region. This way trade (via labourers and pack animals) is fun, satisfying and lucrative. Its also occasionally dangerous and you often hire or personally protect your caravans. Ashes of Creation has pretty much cloned the same idea for regional economies and over-world caravans (and bandits) for its upcoming release, I'm sure that is the vision is here also, and if Port had had more resources they may even have been among the first to implement some of these desirable features.

Anyway, to my point - I would say that 95% of my frustration in obtaining recipes dissipated when I started to use the Wiki and other sources (which over time you get preferences for based on completeness and reliability). @Vodalian and @Spungwa's suggestions are two I would use regularly. I would be bold enough to say that I NEVER currently find myself in a situation like @Shadow describes - travelling to a town for a recipe and finding it's not there. Using these guides (and others) make it just about a cast-iron certainty that a trip to a location for a recipe is a success, at which point frustrations dissipate and ideas to scrap this and that mechanic remain, but at a much reduced level of intensity, at which point you may concede to wait and see what's planned longer term..

That said, I would however love to hear what @Chris or @DarkStarr believe is achieved by the scattering of npc available recipes around the map and what, if anything, is being laid down to achieve at a future date with this currently frustrating mechanic.

 

I would like it if for example Viking Recipes like Chairs, cloth is only from Estgard.
Shogun - Ardoris
General stuff - Brit, Etceter etc.
Seeds should be allover the places available, like all general Crafting Recipes and Supply. For special Stuff like Constantan, white iron or whatever they can make it the way it's spread allover the world. Maybe the Viking smithes use white iron, the Ardoris Constantan or all the Leather Stuff is Viking, because their patterns are light leather ones.
For Cloth maybe go Ardoris ,for chain Etceter or what fits and for Plate Brittania e.g. Just examples i'm not that much familiar with what the best belongs to what City.
I ever found it a little bit confusing a Winter Town like Vertas has all the Seeds and is a a main City for agriculture and cooking stuff.

 

Sadly there's been a lot of changes to recipe acquisition since persistence, and if I'm honest, the situation has been getting worse, not better.
Originally you could discover everything. It was awesome. Sure, there was a wiki that had all the recipe lists, but you still had to get the materials and make the item to get it into your recipe book even if you did have a 'guide'. This was a good system.

Then they scrapped that almost entirely and added a bit of haphazard 'teachability' and 're-teachability'. Which was okay. You could learn stuff without making it now, or just go buy it like you always could.

Then they scrambled all the recipe locations so you have to roam the entire world to find the right npc who knows how to chop a wolf carcass up.

This was stupid. Its still stupid. You're telling me I know how to chop up a wolf but I can't figure out how to chop up a slightly darker colored wolf via discovery? Really?

And then to make things even worse, they removed all the secondary gear components from buy/teach completely, and you must now kill 2000 bandits and hope one of them has the particular recipe you want in its pocket, which it never does. You destory this recipe immediately upon reading it. I do not know in what universe this makes sense, that you couldn't you know, 'discover' how to make bronze if you already knew copper (original system, it was fine) or 'learn' how to make bronze from a player or npc blacksmith (teaching system, also fine). But nope! You must now kill and rob bandits until you find the one of those who knows how to make bronze and its completely random. Or you can pay tens of thousands of gold - per recipe - to players who find and sell these things. Because crafting didn't have enough money sinks.

The recipe acquisition is one of the biggest frustrations to new people coming into the game - many just give up on crafting entirely since there's a MASSIVE barrier-to-entry.

 

Why do you not import missing seeds to your POT? You are afraid, that you do the hard import work, and others have adantages? You can add some coins to the selling price, either they run on their own or buy it from you.

When some realize it is a burden to find a buy-able recipe, why not buy more then one and selling them in your POT?
Someone has asked the town owner if he or she place a central vendor for such things? Or should Port. do this for you?

Is all about complaining, until someone brings everything to you on a silver tablet?
Is this a MMOC (massively multi-player online complaining) or MMORPG? There more then one player out there, and many have vendors that are available 24/7. Mostly you do not even need to speak.

(you can mark me red if you want for this words)


For discoverable cooking recipes there books available in Veritas Sanctuary (gears merchant). That is a in-game resource and you can learn almost every cooking recipe from them. They are also cheaper as you have bought all the recipes from a merchant. (Will books appear as loot when sold to an NPC?)


The idea to scramble all recipes around the world and have some as drop only is, that not everyone can craft everything. But it seems not to work out well.

If you can speak german i can give you a book how to brew.
Another source are the release notes... They are in english

 

The butchering recipes really should be on butchers, but I do get the point of lowering the number of vendors that sell recipes.

 

This is another major reason I do not craft. It is completely absurd that it is so freaking complicated to figure out. If it weren't for @EclipseMaiden I would never have been able to figure brewing out.

Recipes need to be buyable everywhere. Raise the prices on the recipes if you have too but having them scattered to the four winds is simply stupid and creates yet another meaningless grind mechanic.

 

That is very useful. Now if I could figure out why the majority of time when I kill an obsidian animal, it just drops a normal carcass... This was the first obsidian carcass I have ever come across. I suppose they want to make the ingredients rare, but these are for consumables recipes. They're meant to be consumed. It makes zero sense that you'd get a standard wolf carcass 98% of the time, then 2% of the time finally get an obsidian one.

It at least makes sense, when an animal drops a head but you need a pristine version of the head for a recipe. But carcasses, no.

I can't imagine how many people out there have tried the game, and just walked away shaking their head. The only reason I've even put this much effort in trying to figure things out is a vested interest in the game.

 

The recipe system in this game is not good imo. First off when we started and everything was discovered by placing items on your table by trial and error was the system. Then some players complained about the time sync so they changed it so that vendors sold recipes. Then with complaints of needing loot improvements someone had the horrible idea to take basic recipes and scatter them as loot instead of creating new loot, even new fun recipes could have been loot but not the basic recipes imo. Imo basic recipes should have been earned by skill advancements or from doing something not added to the loot table.

 

It was never implied, but I always thought they changed it to this awful system to discourage crafting. If not the case it does have this result.

 

I would like a chance of discovering a new, similar recipe when crafting an item in addition to basic discoverability. So craft some iron and copper ingots, have a small chance of discovering white iron or constantan ingot.