Crafting in Stouthollow Tales was also meant to be one part of a cycle that fed into your shop. You’d have the option to harvest materials, refine those materials and sell them in your shop. One of the problems we discovered came when we started plotting edge-cases for main quests.
The third quest a player gets requires them to harvest 5 logs.
5 pine logs, pretty easy, there’s tons of wood to collect in the forest. While writing this devlog I reproduced the issue perfectly. I got to the wood and I got my 5 pine logs. The problem was that I got 4 regular pine logs and 1 uncommon pine log. The next leg of the quest would have me go to the carpenter and craft 1 pine counter, which is impossible.
Even though I have the requirements, the old crafting system does not recognize it.
One you had at least the minimum number per requirement in a rarity you’d be able to select the rare ingredient. Also this old screen looked a little rough :P
And then we could craft the pine counter. But once again, the user would need at least 5 rare logs to use their rare logs. And considering we have super high rarity items which would be very hard to find, this is a really big issue.
Mix and match
Now the player can mix and match different rarities of items. If you use some normal and some rare items and some normal items you have a chance of getting a more rare item at the end.
This was, overall, a fairly straightforward refactor of the existing feature but it came with many challenges. This should be the last refinement phase for the crafting feature, we're moving on to adding additional customization features for the player's bedroom. Also we’re looking forward to turning the alpha testers loose on the feature so they can complete destroy it. You know how you are.