Greetings Warriors of Calradia!
In this post, as one of the designers working on this feature, I wanted to make this thread to explain some of the changes on smithing that came with 1.6.0 and share a bit about our future plans and gather your thoughts and feedback.
Let me first quickly recap the patch notes;
As you can see there are quite a lot of changes and additions, let me go over and give you some more details about how the new system works.
Crafting Orders
With 1.6.0, the crafting orders will take place as the main method of getting experience for smithing, and the current system(current system in this post will refer to 1.5.9) will be labeled as "
free build" mode.
The main difference between the free build and the crafting order mode is that in crafting orders the items you craft/smith instantly given to the NPCs giving the order and in free build, the item gets added to your inventory.
There are also several slight changes in terms of smithing experience and part unlocks.
First of all, the experience and "part research" gained are lower than the current crafting system, however, the amount of experience you can get through crafting orders is higher (respective to the current experience gained for crafting the same item). Also, crafting orders will provide a good amount of gold income, as well as they will almost always be priced higher than the maximum market value of a given weapon. This means you can nearly always turn a profit while fulfilling crafting orders.
Currently, orders spawn in towns and can be accessed by a tab in the smithy.
Orders are generated periodically throughout Calradia (and unfulfilled ones are replaced with some chance) we hope there will always be some orders you can fulfill.
Here you will be able to select crafting orders. The crafting order's difficulty should be at most 50 higher than your current smithing skill to attempt an order.
Each order will have a weapon type (e.g. one-handed sword) and minimum stat requirements (e.g. swing damage, handling, etc.), and going below these requirements will incur hefty penalties on both the experience you gain and the gold reward you obtain from completing these orders.
This means you can attempt orders which are higher difficulty and push your luck to attempt harder(and more profitable) orders.
Going above the expectations will similarly cause a small bonus to be added on top of the usual reward of the order.
We also added effects to two perks which enable you to gain relation with nobles and notables giving the crafting orders. A more thorough update to smithing perks is underway.
Another change we made is about crafting pieces and their weights on how they affect the difficulty. Before each piece affected the same amount. Now, this is not the case and pieces like "blades" and "handles" are weighted higher than "pommels" and "guards" when determining the actual crafting difficulty of a weapon.
This means it will be a bit harder to craft high-valued items with low smithing skills, but players will be able to add pommels and guards to improve the aesthetics/stats of their weapon without too concerned about its difficulty.
Future of Crafting
- Perks
We already introduced perk effects which provide relationship gain with each completed order this is not the final improvements coming to the perks.
Something we were postponing for a while was updating the perk tree of smithing to bring them in line with our other perks (i.e. two effects per perk) and streamline some of the "non-choice" perks so that they become more meaningful again. With the crafting orders completed, this is possible and we are working on updating the perks.
- Crafting Pieces and Unlocking
Another issue we had was the fully randomized part unlocking system and the lack of pieces for certain weapon types. We will try to address these issues together as we make the unlocking system more "controllable" such that the items player crafts and the item pieces they unlock are inline and players can focus on smithing certain weapons to progress faster in the crafting pieces.
For this reason, we also plan to expand the "piece catalog" of some weapon types. These will be the types in which we currently do not have many parts available (e.g. two-handed maces).
- Crafting Issues
The nobles and notables will be able to take advantage of the new order system and we will be able to provide you with smithing-based quests Perhaps you can provide weapons to a local gang or work on the most legendary weapon ever ordered by the Empress herself. Who knows what the future holds?
Item Valuation
We also worked out some improvements on item valuation and with 1.6.0 we curb some of the worst offenders such as javelins to have more realistic prices. We are actively working on improving value calculation for weapons. More so, a lot of crafting pieces had their stats readjusted to better reflect their tiers.
I hope this post gives you some information about the future of crafting and smithing in Calradia as we improve on it. We look forward to your feedback on crafting orders.
Thank you for taking the time to read this long post!
