Hangout of the Avatar ~ Crafting Discussion

On the possible benefits of different liquids, here are my thoughts

1. Alcoholic - reduces negative impacts of pain inflicted perhaps realized as a health boost. Too much may be detrimental to skills requiring dexterity.

2. Caffeinated - from caffeinated teas or maybe coffee beans. Stamina boost.

3. Juices - takes on the properties of the fruits/vegetables used to make them. For example, something like orange juice to prevent sickness. Carrot juice gives improvements to skills that require good sight like accuracy or better night vision.

4. Herbal teas - takes on the properties of herbs used to make it. Examples, Milk Thistle and Dandelion detoxifies so maybe resistance to poison. Rosehips good for immunity so maybe a health boost. Maybe Chamomile tea could provide similar benefits as rest/sleep. Ginger tea for preventing sickness.

 

Like others here, and as evident from my other posts on forum, I'm a fan of the sick -- having hunger accumulate -- and have food address that. But as Bowen mentioned, many ingredients were used both for culinary purposes and medicinal purposes, and these should provide the benefits -- the carrot -- in addition to the stick.

 

In the videos, the devs discuss how you'll put your tools on your crafting table for making items. I have some questions about this.

* Will there be any way to craft things out in the wilderness, without use your bench at home? Possibly using only the tools themselves, or setting up make-shift crafting stations -- campfires, tanning racks, etc ? Make-shift crafting stations probably wouldn't work for everything, or at least would require some complexity. Say I wanted to make a potion in the wilderness. Maybe I could heat something up on the campfire? Or be restricted to the mortar and pestle?

* If you leave a lot of items on your crafting table, and then close the crafting window, will you be able to see them on your table in the normal world view?

 

I hope for your first question the answer is 'no'. Or at the most it would be a very rudimentary version of the crafting stations ability. I would rather see the repeat visit to the stations (or the crafters using them) be the way to create items.

 

Campfire-Cooking, Fishing, Grain Farming, Vegetable Farming, Fruit Farming, Skinning, Shearing, Herb-Gathering, Flower Picking, Plant Gathering, Milking, Bee Keeping, Assaying, Surveying, Trapping, Hunting, Taming. They all could have a wilderness component in the gathering-refining-creating process, if applicable.

Some definitely need to be gathered in the Wilderness. Some wouldn't suffer too badly with a refining step in the wilderness, but I think final product combines, it's probably best kept to civilization hexes (housing, villages, towns, cities).

 

Gathering won't need crafting tables. The question is about processing. So, the obvious, campfire - cooking. But any other processing in the wilderness?

 

I would hope that some stuff could be done in the wild. If all you need is heat, then you have a campfire. Maybe portable crafting kits could be sold that have only the simplest tools (containers, tongs) for the really low-level items. Things that may be useful when exploring so you don't have to go all the way back for stupid stuff.

 

Preliminary steps of skinning, tanning, taxidermy; the first steps of a lot of alchemy/cooking -- reducing (think of it as chopping, boiling, filtering, trimming, off the unwanted bits of the 'round' from the 'element', of the 'element in the round' which you just collected). Snipping off side branches that will make it harder to drag/roll/move the log towards your crafting table. Reducing encumbrance by knocking off the bits of rock which aren't oreiferous (or for gold miners, auriferous). Drying (another form of reducing, this time of water weight).

 

I guess it depends on how you define "Processing". Is draining a honeycomb, processing? what about heating the resulting wax over a camp fire, in a cooking bowl? What about dressing out a deer? There's skinning, then there's butchering. skinning is probably a wilderness process step, unless you could drag the entire deer back, for taxidermy.

the plant gathering/farming stuff, threshing can be done with a blanket in the wind. grinding can be done with a hand mill or quern. For taming, maybe you can capture a young vermin or young animal with trapping, then take it back to your house for raising it, is that gathering or processing?
for milking there's really only the gathering part, but what about cheese making, a hand churn doesn't really NEED a house, but that's where they normally are found. For cotton, most of the processing requires crude machines, but flax can be processed by scutching it with a simple knife & scraper.

 

Anything that normally would require a crafting table.

 

We don't know what normally requires a crafting table, in SotA.

 

• A small mortar and pestle for grinding and mixing reagents seems appropriate for the herbalist and alchemist.
• Cooking could be done in the wilderness with relative ease, while advanced potion making could not.
• Whittling, fletching, some bowyering, flint-knapping, some metallurgy, the polishing of stones
• Butchering should be possible in the wilderness, but maybe you suffer losses until you reach a high skill level
• Smoking meats

 

Yeah, I agree with this. It would make sense to be able to cook at a campfire, but maybe not craft an entire chair.

 

No, but what about basic herbalism stuff? Possibly you could make some teas using the campfire and the cooking skill , but what about grinding beforehand using your mortal and pestle?

What about things that would help in wilderness survival, like tanning furs on a rack and butchering meat?

 

If you need a rack, then it's probably something that you couldn't do out in the wild. I know you could just throw it over a branch... but then you have to build that into the game. Is that something they are willing to do for realism?

I have no problem with the wilderness trades being able to do lower level stuff out in the wild, but once you need a device or piece of equipment that is not easily transportable then you need to either go back to the city/towne/village or have your own homestead out somewhere with it.

 

Yea I agree, it should be lower level stuff.. the question would be what type of stuff that should be. Small carry-able equipment like mortar-and-pestles, and pots for cooking over a campfire, and sewing kits? Scissors would be useful for making bandages out of clothing. Maybe camp kettles for boiling water. And maybe some portable tanning rack could be allowed, but heavier?

 

You could cut bandages from cloth with shears in U7. I think that's another good example of crafting on-the-fly.

 

Thats a good gameplay reason for having basic items like clothing in loot, too, despite apparent uselessness. You can salvage it into things like bandages.

 

I think this is a very good topic. How different is alchemy and cooking really? There's a fine line and I feel in real life the line between medication and product for consumption has been crossed throughout history. Coke was initially sold as a health tonic cure-all, wasn't it?

I say, allow food and drinks to cast spells on those who consume them. The effects should vary based on the ingredients and method of preparation. Spell books and cookbooks could be two sides of the same coin.

Potions are overused in most fantasy games. I can't think of a single fantasy story (book/movie) where the heroes walk around carrying various potions, ready to drink up when in the middle of big battles against stronger enemies. The whole reason behind these potions is to assist games in allowing the player to feel like they've gained in power over the course of the journey. 'Look at me now, I'm lvl 40 and my health and mana bar/pool is 10 times bigger than it was when I began'. This is part of the problem with modern games, and eliminating this method of gameplay I believe is a primary goal of SotA.

That in mind, I feel that alchemy can be integrated more into cooking, like it should be. It makes more sense for buffs and abilities to be integrated into food and drink through magical incantation and utilizing specific ingredients and methods in the cooking process.

The different states of worktables could be extremely useful for artwork throughout the game.. a broken cooking table in a brigand cave, an abandoned alchemy table (with cobwebs and expended candles) in the dark recesses of a dank cavern.. and then if we have the ability to change a table's state, we could possibly repair one of these tables to fulfill an action that would assist us in completing the dungeon. (beat the boss by brewing a potion left incomplete on the table by the long dead witch in the hidden side cavern; etc.)

In the end, I think powerful potions should not be something you can stockpile. they should have an expiration date and turn to mud or disintegrate the bottle they are in after a certain reasonable amount of time. In short, magical potions should largely be made for the occasion on hand. If someone needs a special potion, they should have to find the wizard capable of brewing it, then need to gather the ingredients the wizard requests to make it fresh for their order, and finally once it is created be able to use it within 24 hours.. or by midnight, or before the sun rises the next day, etc.. everytime.