Crafting is good

I enjoyed crafting in the previous releases I think it's going really good, it will be more difficult to harvest items at release I'm guessing which is no problem, and there will be more recipes I'm sure, I'd like to see a lot more, I like the tables and the mechanism, other games have tables but the way the tables work is a lot more interesting and less confusing than the slot-tables of other games where you are forced to put items in a slot, I enjoy the aspect of taking a risk exploring possible new recipes.

This post is inspired by another game though, I avoid many games like the plague when they are too popular, I avoided WoW for many years, checked it out didn't like it, never tried EQ, never tried DAoC, never tried a lot of games especially the glorified chat room type games like Second Life, but out of sheer boredom I decided to check out what this old game from 2003 was all about, I ignored it for 11 years, anyway the game is most def a glorified chat room, but I can see why it's still around and still somewhat popular, some would say it's because of this and this but what I like about it is it's extreme over the top sandbox-crafting-abilities. In Second Life you can craft anything from your imagination, anything at all, I made a custom skull belt buckle on my 3rd day of playing the game when I couldn't find a good one in the game, it wasn't a circle with a design inside, it is a 3-d skull with a good 14 separate parts I had to link together to make 1 object. It took me 4 hours to make this belt buckle but it's a nice buckle, and if I saw it for sale I would've bought it.

Not only can you create items from scratch you can sell them to other players on the market or at your physical store, so the ultimate reward for crafters is ultimate money and ultimate fame if the item is popular enough, the item has permissions the creator can set, they can make the item freely copyable, transferrable, modifyable. They can put custom scripts in the item, they can put custom textures in the item, there is literally no limit to what you can make in the game, which is why you can report items that are inappropriate, but there are 3 age/maturity ranges in the game general, mature, adult, so if you create something totally crazy you may have to keep it in the more mature ranges. The fact that you can upload your own textures is amazing to me, few games have this, all you have to to is pay 10 in game currency credits to upload a custom image. So the more talented crafters/artists have really high quality hair styles with really high quality hair textures, the same for avatar skins, clothing textures etc.

The extreme freedom with creating a custom item is the only reason I'm going to keep playing the game until SOTA launches, and the crafting is so fun for me that I'll keep playing it even after the SOTA launch, and this is an 11 year old game that you think would be obsolete by now but I have yet to play a single game with such freedom, I don't know how to 3-d mold something for Unity or I would have by now, but I do know how to use the 3-d crafting tools in Second Life, they are complex at first but fairly simple after you put in a few hour of effort in learning how they work, the possibilities are unlimited, there are zero restrictions in the game when it comes to custom made objects, and this isn't offline, this is a game that can hold 100 players per map and they can see and buy your custom made items.

Your designs can live on forever in the game, as long as you sell a good number of them or give a good number away and allow copy permissions your item will be copied potentially a zillion times. It's a really cool feature I haven't seen in *any* games making Second Life unique. SOTA has many unique things but will the general gamer public recognize these unique things as unique enough to quit their current games? I hope so, and I can't speak about the final product, perhaps the final SOTA product will be so unique it draws in millions of players, if not I would really research why old games with unique features have lasted so long and try to not copy, but come up with an original unique idea that other games haven't dared to try before, such as Second Life's extremely free sandbox item crafting abilities.