I'll gather all posts and ideas concerning crafting here.

0) make it social, make it fun, don't make us just grind for ingredients
a) http://www.gamesas.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1228&p=10642&hilit=craft#p10642

1) ammo
a) shotgun shells - http://www.gamesas.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2702&start=10#p16158

2) vehicles
vertibird
cycles

3) armor

4) sixy underwear crafting !

5) ...

any ideas ?

Using the Science, Medicine[FirstAid/Doctor], and Repair skills for crafting goodies might be a nice alternative to just "farming" and bartering for necessities. While I think that having a light crafting system would be nice, in other games with crafting systems, the builders have a tendency to over-complicate it, poorly balance it, and over-encourage it. Heavy duty crafting systems actually slow gameplay down without really providing much benefit. It's incredibly easy to turn a well-intentioned crafting system into an obstructive grind factory that brings gameplay to a halt. So you have to be careful with how you do it. If I have to gather six different things that each take me ten minutes to get, and put 40 skill points in an under-used skill, just to create a kitchen knife that I could have picked up three towns ago if I wanted it that bad, I'm probably going to try to reverse-pickpocket a burning paper bag of brahmin poo on one of the developers.

I think that being able to obtain upgrade materials for certain kinds of gear, and then being able to personally apply those upgrades to your existing equipment using techno-skills would be kind of nice. Fallout 3 did a fairly decent job of this in that the craftable schematic items were all unique and weren't readily available at vendors. If I gather up the parts and have the skills, I should be able to make a Piston-Spear, Deathclaw hide vest, Molerat Slingshot, Mr. Handygrenades, Spazm Gun, that sort of thing. Craft-from-scratch items should be oddball/unique/twisted, but I should also be able to use the same tinkering skills to modify some standard gear, like a Turbo Plasma Rifle, making a 14mm pistol fully automatic, sawing off a shotgun, or converting a .223 varmint rifle into the good old .223 autoloader pistol. These items could also become an interesting part of the player-to-player barter economy in the game. How to avoid market-saturation, though...

I think that being able to obtain upgrade materials for certain kinds of gear, and then being able to personally apply those upgrades to your existing equipment using techno-skills would be kind of nice.

Yep and to build a certain item or upgrade you may have to buy some certain blueprint of it which gives you the information how to build all parts/materials together.

Beside that i'd like to see a crafting system which is not only based on repair or science skills. There should be things you cant craft if you dont have the right intelligence to do so. In other words: Just because my character reads some science books/blueprint it shouldnt mean he is a genius afterwards. He should also have the proper Intelligence to understand what he reat too to finaly be able to build some better weapon later for example. So the focus could be more on the main skills you got and less on the materials you need to craft something.

I hated how in Fallen Earth crafting was so easy, you can craft every single type of item, from hat to an atv engine to shotgun shells.

Crafting should be highly specialised no one player should be able to create everything he/she needs.

After all when crafting everything yourself is so easy, one asks the question what happens to the economy.

Oh and i also disliked how you could put 15 items in your craft que and you just wait for them to automatically craft them selves even when your offline.

A nice little puzzle game where you connect all the materials together to make what you want.
Say if you had the same materials you could create 4 different things depending on how you assembled them
You would have to buy schematics, but no automatic assembly as long as you have the parts.

I also hated in fallen earth that all crafting skill where tied to Intelligence, so anyone who wanted to craft had to waste point on intelligence which did nothing on combat for you. If you act like an ass, there will always be someone there to ride you - Bruce lee

Skinning should be a skill, not a craft. Kill it skin it... If you make clothing or armour great, use it. Make the Stuff, if not, sell it, cheap and get money to get materials that You need for your own crafting. Are you an electronics crafter? Then go scrounging around and find some old equipment, break it down and based on your electronics skill lvl you get random certain parts, or even better, certain types of equipment generate certain parts when broken down. Now, use those parts to make your electronics. Weapons crafter? Ok, take the gear you just looted off that mutie scum and break it down, based on your weapon skill you get certain parts, now use them to make yourself a sweet gun, blade, chainfist, powerfist, whatever!!! If not, sell 'em and buy crap ya need!!! And on, and on, and on ad infinitum!

The best way I can think of crafting is like in WoW with enchants. You get an item that you can take apart and then use the parts to make another item. This could work in with fallout. So even crap items can have a use. Another thing with crafting is it could tie in to other character abilitys. With medicine you can heal other players without stimpacks and create drugs or meds. Science allows you to create robots and as well as hack. Repair of cores can be used to fix up weapons, make new weapons, or even modify them. The only hard part is balancing out the 3 so that players don't pick "the best" but pick one that they like. Converting a game as open to style as Fallout is got to be a challenge for the people working on it.

Agreed. Scavenging, and bartering are major aspects of a post apocalyptic world.

I personally am a fan of detailed and deep crafting systems.
I have been playing, and crafting, in MMO's since using MUDs on AOL when there an hourly access fee (ahh, the bad old days). One of my favorite recent crafting systems was that in SWG (before the major overhaul). Most crafting systems seem separate from the main game, doesn't have a real effect on the player or world other than bragging rights. For an MMO SWG's crafting system was extremely integrated into the game and economy, all players could take part. I know some who almost exclusively crafted. I also liked their vendor system. I didn't like how decentralized it was, hopefully there is a middle ground gamesas can find between SWG's player NPC vendors and WOW's AH.
The resource gathering in SWG was interesting also. I dont think I would want something quite so complex (lees or no maintenance on harvesters, etc.) but certainly something more complex than what is out there in MMO world now.
I also want to mention an Oblivion style crafting system being an excellent place for ideas. I also enjoy that one, mixing ingredients and seeing what happens is amazing.
The 'learn recipe, gather ingredients, push button to make' model is over simplified. I do not think a system as complex as SWG's would be best for an MMO but it was very good. For a long time I have wanted something very free form. Metals, plants, whatever is gathered have certain properties. by mixing these items in different ways items with different properties can be created. I am not sure we really have the computing power yet to do what I am thinking about but I do hope they move towards it and deepen the crafting experience.


now,off to go find a thread about player housing and rant in there................

oh, one more thing.
I miss being able to disassemble items. One of the things I liked about DAOC's crafting system, and others, was that I could break apart crafted items and get back a portion of the ingredients. I would like to see a system where crafted and looted items can be broken down into components that can be used as ingredients for other items.
As an example - an AK gun can be broken down into pieces, i.e. AK furniture, trigger assembly, barrel, springs, etc. Do I get all the components when I disassemble? no. Some things get damaged, etc. But what I do get I can use to make other items. It would be nice to be able to break something down to the base metals, ak to barrel, barrel to steel as an example. Then I can take that steel and make a spring for the car I am also crafting.
This is a huge factor in making a player based economy I believe.
I know, the system I describe in this post and my previous one is very very detailed and I don't really expect something so complex but I can dream

Item breakdown is not unique to WoW. It has been a part of RPGs and MMORPGs well before it was implemented in WoW.



This I like "What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?"

Weapon and armor repair..as in a job you could pay bottlecaps to a qualified player to do.

Fonline 2238 displays this quite well, I had a character with high repair skill and i usually stood in NCR and repaired things for free, to be nice (got xp from it >.>). I'd love to see this in Fallout Online.

I enjoy the crafting system of 2238 as well, although it is dangerously close to grinding sometimes (although the timeout often handles that problem), and as such I think it should be something that involves a variety of skills.

The most simple things, like spears, should be constructible with realtive ease, but something complex, like building a gun, should be substantially more challenging. Scrounging parts from broken down guns, carving stock from wood, looking for a suitable pipe to serve as the barrel...and even then it could all fail.

Same goes for ammunition, acquiring shells from a battlefield, making gunpowder, and finding a way to create the bullets properly.

Yet still, I think the crafting should be limited. Not EVERYTHING should be craftable, but there should be some distinct advantages for those that do it extensively.

But now I'm babbling self-evidencies...

EDIT: Grammar time

agreed I hardly think that a random wastelander that have read some science books and are relatively smart will build a plasma rifle out of some junk, metal chunks and maybe some electronic parts. I think you need to have some real high-tech equipment to build stuff like that :/

Perhaps a profession system woudl allow for the creation of such high end items. Miners and excavators gather materials, theives steal electronics, engineers can put it all together

ah speculation "What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?"

My idea for crafting in an ideal game:

Crafting would have to be done with some logical limitations.
Armor.

You need to learn the skill somehow. this can be by studying with an npc wich would take real time and money/mats. Money mats since you have to practice and make crappy attempts first to get the hang of the craft. the length can be decided during balancing studies.

Ok you now got Armor level 1 for example. Well this means you can make armor out of wood , leather, and metal spikes, bolted on pieces of scrap metal. Well now you dont make stuff with your bare hands. Have to get an Armor level 1 Crafting kit. Hammer, leather punch, scissor, pliers etc...
Now you need raw materials, Hides, wood, metal, rivets, glue, tough string etc.. get this from scavenging yourself, buying from other players, making player quests to get this for you in return for caps, making them armor for free if they get the crafter the mats or other barter items. Buying from NPC but this would be the most expensive way since its the fastest in game.

Ok , now you have the knowledge, the crafting Kit, and the raw materials. It's not impossible to think that one could sit down on the side of the road and start making armor. The quality of this would probably be low end but its probably better protection than the spandex breathable material the Vault Jumpsuit is made from.

Now, for an additional fee a crafter could go to a town that has an armor shop and rent space there and create a better quality armor at a faster pace than compared to one from the side of the road. The higher quality could be reflected by giving bit higher damage resist to items made in the crafting shops.

Now to get to the next level of Crafting armor there are some choices you can make.
One is through experience. Making something over and over again should give ideas as to how to make something better. so for instance after making 50 armor pieces gain enough XP to learn how to make Armor levl 2. Now you can make armor from synthetic fibers, kevlar, plastics, alloys etc...
or again go to an NPC who teaches the skill and get the required mats for practice and wait the real time to "train" and learn this next level without having to make those 50 pieces of armor. The first method could be slower real time but cheaper in mats, and the second could be faster in real time but more expensive in mats to give people a choice of what is more important to them... real time "time" or in game "money, material".

This method could be used all the way to Power Armor. Of course this would mean deciding on a specific path to follow in the game. One would have to choose to be aligned with one of the technological advanced groups in the game i.e. the Brotherhood, NCR, Enclave or others as the devs decide.
so first one would have to be accepted in the Group. Then prove their dedication enough for the group to entrust in them the secret of Power armor. Then they would need the materials and then they would HAVE to build the item in the Groups advanced workshop with advanced tools.

Also, if possible it would be Stupid Awesome if Clans could create their own workshops inside Clan towns or something similar to Create Unique looking armor with unique abilities.

For abilities I'm thinking have adjustable stats for the different armor pieces. For example if one decided to make a boots have Maximum armor for that class of boots fine but it would instill a speed penalty and raise the strength requirement needed to wear the boots. Think of a bunch of sliders for Armor, speed, resists, etc... that were all linked to each other by some ratio. So adjusting one of the sliders would adjust the other sliders to a degree.

For looks have pre set pieces that could be mixed and matched within armor classes and colored differently. This should make lots of room for armors to look different enough from each other.
Lastly let the clan name the armor whatever they wanted. So when you mouse over the piece the name would pop up as whatever it was named as.

This would create an in game economy as people would compete to make armor( and other items) that other players want and to create diversity among items in the game world. Cause in FO 1& 2 there was only a hand full of armor types. Vault suit, Road Warrior gear, leather armor, metal armor, Battle suit, and Power armor.

Of course these Crafting shops would take a monumental amount of resources to construct. Dozens of different types of materials and hundreds of each type. Also there would have to be at least one player with a master level of building construction skill or something like that so as to actually erect the structure.
And to gain the knowledge to construct this structure would require either a lengthy and expensive investment of time and materials into research for the structure OR a very challenging quest needing many players at once to complete.

For example some Super Mutants have made an old airplane factory their base and inside there plans for crafting equipment that the Mutants have not touched since the Mutants are relatively stupid and have no need for this type of knowledge. The quest would be to get inside the base and retrieve those plans.

So that's my idea of how crafting could be EPIC in the Wasteland! MMO's... MMO's never change...

NO RNG.

I really enjoyed the crafting system originally used in another company's game based in the "star wars galaxy". I didn't like how the resources had overly complicated statistics system, but the idea of requiring specific types of items to build something was pretty fun. Simplify it down to just needing specific categories of parts with the option to swap in a rare part or two in and increase the chance at getting a rare or unique quality to your final product could be a lot of fun.

There you have it -- pretty much the perfect basis for a crafting system (sorry, but the colour was killing my eyes)

??? don't know what that means, elaborate please?? MMO's... MMO's never change...