Except that it's not. It's placing items in the right position. If you put a coal above a stick it makes a torch, but if you put it anywhere else on the grid than on the space above the stick, it won't work.

It adds a layer of interactivity and logic to the traditional recipe-based crafting system that I find quite satisfying.

Oh, and WHY ISN'T THERE AN OTHER OPTION ON THE POLL? Spore isn't the only other way to do crafting.

And we'll have to go to some stupid wiki to find out what can even be done and with which materials etc etc. Don't get me wrong, I love minecraft.

But in TES? No thank you.

i think a crafting system like this would be awesome!! How would being able to create your own viking equipment distract from the overall purpose of the game? You would actually be using the stuff you made to slay dragons and assert your dragonborn dominance on a world of NPCs, not just creating things for the sake of creation.

It also dosen't require you to be holding a recipe. That allows you to play around and experiment with different items through exploration.

Sorry, but do you really have so little imagination that you can't think of any way to have players discover these combinations in the game? I mean, I've been active on the minecraft forums since the start of the Indev mode, and there's been lots of good ideas on giving players recipes without having to go to a wiki.

Plus, hey, I said something LIKE minecraft. It can simply be a few set slots in which to place various hilts and blades and such without having to be EXACTLY like Minecraft's system.

Eh, it's not really the same thing. Since all of those are just a small, set number of textures & effects (all fireballs are the same, all lightning bolts are the same, all potion bottles are the same, all enchantments are the same tinted saran-wrap shimmer), with some numbers moved around. Nothing really to them. (Plus, not free-form - they follow the set modules the game gives you. Alchemy - two "Restore Health" plants gives you a Restore Health potion. Fireball doesn't change, you just set it's damage/radius/duration.)

Whacking on a pile of iron, and shaping it into some varied sword shape (needs a texture, needs a 3D mesh) would be different. Doing it like Oblivion would just be a variant on "recipe". You set some variables (type of weapon; which metal, which coal, which gem = durability, damage, weight settings) and it hands you one of the preset "sword" model, with your chosen numbers.





Not really, it's pretty much a recipe. The recipe for "torch" is coal-over-stick. There's a set number of craftable items in the game, and you have to follow the expected patterns (recipes) to make them. You can't just throw some ore & wood in there in some other pattern and get something out of it.

No. No Spore-like system. That game was a horrible let-down and such a system would likely consume any game it was placed within.

That said I would certainly prefer something in the 'middle'. Because honestly, I'm not a huge fan of the 'select the recipe while holding the ingrediants' method. Let's take crafting a sword for example, first you choose your type (two hand, long, short), then your material (Iron, Steel, Silver, Glass, Ebony, etc) which sets the base damage, durability, speed, and weight. After that you can select the blade form (flat broadsword, diamond longsword, cutlass, elvish, katana, etc) and hilt style (say a hand full of different forms each with a couple texture-based decorative variations) which may or may not affect the stats. I'd also say that each material should have a certain element of flair/style just for that material, like they did in... well I think Oblivion actually had that the most.

I really liked Way of the Samurai's component mix and match system. I felt weapons that way were much more customizable.
With most ingredient type systems (mostly in mmo's) I found them kind of tedious gathering a lot of heavy/space consuming and useless ore or rare junk that is time consuming to collect then goes into an unchangeable pre-determined blueprint design which you can most likely find as loot anyway. That or it is just semi-rare where a few specific type of people have it but are non loot-able.