Crafting is a central part of the player-driven Economy in Crowfall. The most obvious goal of crafting in Crowfall is to enable players to create amazing items that tie directly into the different systems, like equipment, city building and sieging. The less obvious but equally important goal is to create interlocking behaviors that drive players to engage with other players.
Every character has the ability craft some items from a variety of resources, from the beginning of the game. Further crafting requires the accumulation of recipes via Discipline Runestones and other gameplay mechanics.
Crowfall’s recipes are fluid and the ingredients are not strict, which leads to a higher degree of system exploration. The player can choose which tiers of the resources to put in the slots and as long as the slots are filled with something valid, the recipe will craft. This reduces the recipe count significantly and every recipe in the Crowfall player’s book remains useful.
There are 3 types of recipes in Crowfall:
- A starting player will have access to all of the basic recipes, and can use them “in the wild” by opening their crafting UI (via the J key.) Basic recipes encompass all recipes that produce the beginner's crafting tools, weapons and armor. These recipes typically require very basic materials like Slag and Knotwood.
- Intermediate recipes are a new type of recipe. While they appear for all players (of any skill level), they can only be accessed when the player uses a crafting station of the correct type. The intermediate recipes will require named resources such as Copper and Iron, as well as allowing some kinds of experimentation; however, these recipes don’t allow the crafter access to imbue their goods with the complete spectrum of stats. The purpose of intermediate recipes is to give players some type of upgrade they can do themselves (without a high degree of dedicated training) and to show the player what crafting stations are and how to use them.
- Advanced recipes are available only to those who have progressed to a specific spot in the Skill Trees. (Hooray, we can allow recipe usage based on Skill Tree advancement now!) In the case of advanced weapon recipes, the player must train the first skill node in the Blacksmithing Basics Skill Tree before they can access the advanced recipes when they use a crafting station.
Recipes
As of Pre-Aplha 3.9, there are the following crafting categories:
- Basic Crafting
- Runemaking
- Alchemy
- Cooking
- Blacksmithing
- Woodworking
- Leatherworking
- Necromancy
- Jewelcrafting
- Stonemasonry
