A fairer crafting system

The Artisan/Crafting system is already a great one. However, it can be improved, as everything else.

While writing this, I am aiming to make the system both more rewarding and more challenging.

Currently we have recipes we can use, or we can just use the mats on the crafting station. It works both ways. We also can find new recipes by placing mats on the stations. A great design.

But it is easily exploitable. Users can share the recipes on the web, thwarting the game and it's balance.

How can we fix that? Most will answer immediately: "Impossible!", and won't ever check for a fix.

I am proposing a way that, I hope, will preserve the good of the system while protecting it from abuse.

The basis are:

1.- Make the recipes mandatory, and disallow the direct use of mats to produce anything.

2.- Lets discover new recipes by researching random mat combos and, when finding something new, creating the corresponding recipe.

Note that mat uses in research aren't NOT the sames than the used in the production recipe.

E.g., the payer want to find how to produce Constantan ingots, he/she use :
1 nickel and 1 copper -> don't work
2 nickel and 2 copper -> don't work
1 nickel and 2 copper -> don't work
...... many more ......
3 nickel, 4 copper, 2 iron -> it works! -> a recipe (listing 1 nickel + 2 copper) is generated

The researching mats should be random, so one player will need 3 nickel + 4 copper + tin, other 1 nickel + 7 copper, other 2 copper + 4 iron... etc, making some web sites much less useful.


This two small changes will preserve all the good of the current system, without allowing the recipes to be posted on the web, and copied back.

Ideally, the player would have two buttons. The first would be "Create" (or "Build", or similar) and the second would be "Research", this one allowing to freely mix mats. Note that on success, the Research option returns a recipe, not a item.

The recipe should be read by the player in order to allow him/her to build the new item.

On implementing it, a list of the previous Research trials must be kept to avoid the players using the same mats (the cheapest possible) over and over. But might be safe to reduce (or delete) the list after a while. However, it's impossible to remember all previous tests, so a duplicate should not be invalid, just have lesser chance of trigger a discovery. E.g. if the player is using 1 copper again and again, each time the change of finding the recipe is lowered, but not zero.

Each of the buttons may activate the same script used currently, with just some minor modification.

 

unique recipes, quests, paths, story, skills, spells, harvestables/raws, reagents, consumables, languages, tasks, milestones, etc; all have been suggested over the past three years on these forums. Apparently none of them are a current design goal for SotA.
Given the time investment and the Millions of XP required to reach GM for each skill, unless that were to change, I would prefer a 'known' recipe system, myself.