Bulk Scrap Recipe

Currently, the process to scrap items is to go to a crafting table, and meticulously select up to 15 items, in a very tiny window. Then you click the Scrap button and scrap your materials.

A Bulk Scrap Recipe would be a Recipe you can select, and it would automatically add the correct type of scrappable materials related to the type of crafting table. It would add up to around 40 (or more) scrapable items. You then click the Scrap button and scrap your materials.

This would remove the extremely tedious process of manually adding 15 items at a time, from an extremely small window.

 

That’s a lot of work, Chris has complained more than once how hard it is to design and create recipes for the game (the process in Unity is difficult not coming up with ideas). I suspect it would be easier to just change the value of how many items can be placed on the table at once.

On the plus side, it sounds like Chris May spend a week next release delving into the crafting system looking for systemic issues. That may roll over into the month after that as well as he needs to spend time learning the crafting system design and implementation. He wants to spend time trying to understand the pain points while messing around with crafting. Sometimes there is a miscommunication between what is brought up by players and their understanding of what the problem is, and he wants to examine the systems so he can better understand what the issues may be. (This came about after he noticed some systemic issues with taming skills over the last couple of days.)

 

The problem with a bulk scrap recipe is there is (with some exceptions) no singular definition of items to scrap. For instance, I can loot a long bow, and either scrap it, sell it, or MW/EN it...

Something that might help here is a variety of item tags that your inventory can be sorted by... for instance, all the junk loot items (all the "new" junk loot, plus the old junk like shoddy bows, lesser wand/staff, etc) having an item type of "junk" would allow us to filter the inventory for "junk" then shift-click the lot to drag them over for scrapping.

Some tags I have found myself wishing for:

(insert weapon type here) - for sorting metal scappables, wood scrappables, and combo scrappables
Armor
Reagent
Gem - for all gem types, fragments, whole gems, etc
Smeltable - for any metallic of rock item you can get from an ore node
Food
Consumable - for potions, foods, etc
Deed
Decoration

I'm sure everyone can come up with their own lists. Something I would like more than a bulk scrap recipe... is just being able to drop more than 15 on the table!


Last note: You aren't limited to SELECTING 15 items... you are merely limited to DROPPING 15 items on the crafting table. If you have 105 items, you can select them ALL in either your inventory or the crafting table window, and drag them into the recipe window... some will stay so you can scrap them, and the rest will remain HIGHLIGHTED in your inventory, ready to drag back into the recipe area when the scrapping is done.

 

What I do is open up my inventory window and select as many as I can, then drag from that window into the crafting window. Now, it will clear you selection of stuff in your inventory the first time you get a new component/scrap type, but once its gotten it once, it will not clear what you have selected anymore. For exmple, if your scrapping longbows and have like 250 of them, select 15+ and put them in and scrap. Once you have gotten a wood scrap, maple bow staff, pine bow staff, leather string and cotton string, then select all the rest of the bows and they will stay selected and then you just drag and drop.

 

If salvage would start at 20, and have a batching skill that would increase that number, then I wouldn't have a problem. Just 15 at a time is too few.

 

I think the 15 item limit is okay if you're salvaging for patterns/special components.
For all the other stuff, what I'd really like to see is something that many other games do for bulk refinement - basically, dump all the junk loot into a cauldron with appropriate fuel and start it melting. Come back after x amount of time and you have a nice pile of metal scraps (or wood scraps). This could use some of the same functionality brewing does (ie, put stuff in box, and it has a maturation time). It could be a new kind of crafting table - like a giant oven - fill er up, set it going, and wander off. You could even apply the same thing to smelting....There's far too much emphasis on tedious "one at a time" progress bars in refinement and this would be an eloquent solution. You'd still need to make individual components and such but the initial conversion of raw to processed goods could really do with being simplified.

 

I think for bulk scrapping, the easiest solution is to increase the maximum number of items you can put in to be scrapped based on one of your skills.

I think if it was brought to be able to compare to other "resource" skills it would work nicely.

This simply means increasing the worktable capacity based on the person's bulk resources skill.