Just to add on a thought to this topic, rather than making an entirely new thread; I love this game, but as OP stated, the current system for learning patterns is just... bad. The randomness of unlocks adds no value to the game, and with how many there are across so many item types, it just adds a massive time waster that doesn't feel good in any way as a player. It's rather punishing, frankly. An elegant solution to this, perhaps, would be to have in each part of the world, or maybe at blacksmith shops specifically, to add an NPC that would teach you smithing patterns/parts for money and time. I think it would be reasonable to have to travel to different parts of the world to learn how to make the local weapons, but at least that way, the time spent is to gain the knowledge that you actually seek in an active, intentional manner, instead of purely random, frustrating chance. One could even get the woodcarving shops in on this for teaching handles/shafts.
I can't help but feel like this would be a pretty easy to implement solution to the vanilla game.
