[Concept]Crafting

[Futuza]

As a reminder (with most Concept Threads), this is subject to (lots) of change and will likely be updated in the future.  This idea has been fleshed out less than some of the other concept threads and needs more discussion between developers and the community.  In fact I'd go so far to say its more of a very rough outline than a full concept.  More details will worked out later.

Crafting

Crafting in Jedi Knight Galaxies consists of four primary activities: Gathering, Assembling, Disassembling, and Repairing.  This write-up assumes you are already familiar with Item Tiers and Durability Concept Thread, and further expands on some of the concepts presented in that thread.  Crafting, like many abilities in JKG, is a skill which must be invested into and purchased using skill points.  Several different types of skills available in the skill trees will interact with crafting and boost or benefit crafting in JKG in various different ways.  For example in the Skill Tree Concept Thread, Junkdog Supreme makes crafting materials more worthwhile to the player.  That said, there will likely be a Crafting Skill Tree itself (which will be expounded on at a later date), which will offer more specific crafting related benefits, than some of the other skill trees have.  At its root, investing into the Craft Skill  will enable you to use the crafting mechanics of JKG.  Player's who focus on and maximize their crafting skill will be able to create much more powerful and valuable items and equipment than is available from other item sources in the game (such as drops from NPCS, quest rewards, or npc vendors).  Crafting can also be used to repair map structures or repair items.  Certain objectives for various game modes or quests may also require the crafting skill to complete (for example: an NPC from Tatooine asks you to construct a gate at the entrance of their home to keep Tusken Raiders from walking in).  After unlocking the crafting skill with skill points, you can continue to increase your character's crafting skill level by crafting.  New crafting levels will unlock the ability to craft higher tier items.

 

Gathering: Collecting Materials

Crafting begins with gathering necessary materials to be used to create an item or repair an item.  Every item or structure requires materials to create or repair.  No skill is required to be able to gather item materials, anyone can do that!  However, as mentioned previously certain skill trees may give you bigger bonuses or benefits when gathering items.  There are several different sources that materials can be gathered from.  Here are the most essential and common sources:

• Containers. For example, chests or footlockers that contain loot.  These are usually spawned as a result of a one-time or temporary quest and are usually hidden out of plain sight, but if you find them can contain useful materials.  There are also long term containers, such as in a player's house or a warehouse where player's can store goods (including crafting materials) indefinitely. 
• Quest rewards.  An NPC or event may reward you with items (including crafting materials) for completing or participating in the quest.
• Natural Resource Spawns.  This includes several subtypes, consider some examples: metal ores (iron, aluminum, palladium, chromium, etc), organic materials (wool, rubber, eggs or bones that spawn in lairs of various NPC creatures, tibanna gas, etc), mineral deposits (salt, orveth gas, eleton gas, skevon gas, kyber crystals, adegan crystals, kunda stones, granite, marble, etc), and so on.  Of particular note, natural resource spawns, such as metal ores or mineral deposits, may require tools to extract such as a mining drill, others can simply be interacted with without any tools in order to extract.
• NPC/Player Remains.  When most NPCs are killed they have a chance of dropping various items which will spawn in their corpse's remainder container.  What is dropped depends on the NPC type and level as well as some other random factors.  Most frequently NPCs will drop some sort of organic remains (such as bones, or exoskeleton, or bodily fluid, etc), occasionally they may be carrying something much rarer (especially if humanoid).  Player's can also drop whatever they are carrying in their inventory (see looting thread).  NPCs which have the animal type, are more likely to drop useful organic crafting materials, while humanoids are more likely to drop synthetic materials or credits.
• Machinery Spawns.  Some types of machines can produce certain types of synthetic crafting materials when paid with credits.
• Vendors.  Some vendors will sell crafting materials and usually carry a specific stock, but can also sell back crafting materials sold to them by other players.
• Others.  Various miscellaneous sources not listed here can also produce crafting materials.  (eg: stealing materials from a shopkeeper?)

Once sufficient crafting materials have been gathered the crafting process itself can begin.  However, before we get to that, I want just to point out a couple of concepts in regards to actually gathering materials in sufficient quantities.  While most individual player's seeking to craft items can simply carry their material goods in their inventory space, there will be a cap to how many items you can fit in your inventory at once (I would expect it to be around 100, but this still needs to be discussed).  Additionally each item in your inventory (including equipped items), will also have a weight value.  If you exceed your character's carrying capacity, your character will become over-encumbered you will not be able to sprint and all movement will be reduced to a very slow walk, furthermore stamina regeneration will not be possible while over-encumbered.  These issues will make it difficult to transport large amounts of materials around with you without several trips, however there will be a couple of things that can still help you.  Vehicles, including animals like Dewbacks, and actual mechanical vehicles such as landspeeders or swoops, will usually have a limited size container onboard you can also stash with additional goods.  Companion NPCs also have some inventory space and can carry some things for you.  Beware though, if you are carrying a lot of goods, you may make it very easy for pirates, looters and other deviants to take advantage of your weakened position and steal your goods.  Player's might consider hiring other trustworthy player's to guard them to and from resource extraction points in order to minimize risk and maximize profit.  Certain crafting materials can only be found from very specific sources and so you might need to travel far and wide or do a lot of trading to get the resources you need.  Certain items may require quite expensive investments of time and vast amounts of materials to actually craft, while other more common place items will be relatively simple to create.  Player's may wish to pool their resources together (such as part of a guild or party), in order to craft specific expensive items a single player alone would have a difficult time achieving.

 

Gathering: Blueprints

Once the crafter has the necessary materials at hand, they can begin using them to create, repair, or improve items and structures in game provided they have unlocked the blueprint required to create the item.  Blueprints for various types of different items and technologies can be acquired through quests, vendors, or rare drops from certain npcs.  For example, a blueprint for a Blastech DLT-19 Heavy Blaster Rifle would first need to be known, before you could craft the weapon.  Blueprints come in three different forms:

• Blueprint Fragments  - These represent incomplete pieces of a blueprint.  Blueprint fragments have two parts to them: type, and size.  Whenever the player receives a blueprint fragment, the fragment is usually assigned a random type (this can be overridden by a quest/objective etc to give a specific type if needed, but is not the default behavior).  There are different types for each type of item (eg: pistol, carbine, shield, consumable, material, jetpack, etc.)  Each additional fragment of the same type, increases the player's current blueprint stack of that type, by whatever the fragment's size is.  Once the stack reaches 5, the player receives a random blueprint schema for that type and the stack for that blueprint fragment type is reset to 0.  Blueprint fragments do not take up inventory space and do not weigh anything (you can view these from the crafting menu).  Blueprint fragments are fairly common item drops/rewards, especially for things like destroying an enemy droid.
• Blueprint Schemas. - These items represent complete blueprints and take up inventory space.  For example, you might acquire a KYD-21 Blaster Pistol Blueprint Schema.  A player can choose to "learn" a blueprint schema, by activating it.  This will consume the blueprint schema (destroying it), and unlocks the blueprint it refers to permanently for the player who activates it.  Blueprint schemas cannot be activated if the player has already learned the blueprint for that item.  Blueprint schemas can be sold to other player's or NPCs or destroyed.  Complete Blueprint schemas can be found by completing quests, buying them through vendors, through rare drops from certain npcs, or by acquiring enough fragments to unlock a random schema.  Blueprint schemas are rare item drops/rewards.  Blueprint schemas take up inventory space, but do not weigh anything.
• Blueprints - Once a blueprint schema has been learned, it unlocks the secrets of how to construct/repair/scrap that type of item.  For example, a KYD-21 Blaster Pistol Blueprint would allow the player to craft KYD-21's.  Player's can view a list of blueprint's their character has unlocked.  These are not items, but more akin to unlocking a skill.  The blueprint will also list the material component list required to assemble or repair the item as well as the estimated disassembly rewards (see below).

 

Crafting: Assembly/Disassembly/Repair

Now that you've unlocked the right blueprints and have the right materials on hand, you can start crafting. There are three different ways to craft something.  Note: field crafting requires a separate investment of skill points.

1. Field Crafting
   Requires an additional "Field Crafting" skill to be learned in the crafting skill tree.  Limited to simple items, this skill allows you to craft items, equipment and weapons on the fly provided you have materials on hand.  While something complex such as a new gun cannot be created, simpler items such as grenades, sequencer charges, medpacks, bacta stimulants, and other consumables can be created.  Equipping a crafting item such as hydrospanner will reduce material costs and speed up the crafting time while equipped (usually 5-30 seconds depending on the skill level and item being created).  This skill is unique in that it can be done pretty much anywhere and does not need to be done at a workbench (see below).  Additionally you can repair most items in field if the item has a durability score greater than 5 and is of Elite Tier or worse quality.  To begin crafting simply access the crafting menu.  See below for details on this process.
2. Workbench Crafting
   The most common form of crafting, if you have the crafting skill you can use workbenches to create or repair items.  Requires use of a workbench which can sometimes be found in public locations or purchased for a player's house or vehicle.  To begin crafting you will access the crafting menu via pressing use on the workbench (or by opening the crafting menu while next to a usable workbench).  See below for details on this process.
3. Structure Crafting
   Usually done as part of a quest or during some sort of match objective.  For example, you might be asked to repair a broken control console, but will only be able to do so if you have the crafting skill and the necessary materials on hand.  These types are structure are highlighted with a blue-green hollow transparency when a player puts their cross-hairs on the structure, indicating that it can be repaired or created by structure crafting.

The primary crafting menu might look something like this (forgive the temporary images, I'll get better gui concepts up later):

Spoiler

The first column would have buttons allowing you to select different crafting options, all options except "View Known Blueprints" would be grayed out if not near a workbench or possessing the Field Crafting Skill.  The second column would list all materials currently in your inventory you are capable of crafting (that you have blueprints for).  The third column would list your blueprint fragments in order of highest to least (if the current amount for a type is 0, it is hidden from view). 

Clicking the View Known Blueprints brings up a list of all blueprints you currently know, on which you can view information such as which materials are required to craft the item, repair the item and which materials can be produced when disassembling that item. 

 

Repairs

Clicking the Repair button will then bring up a list of items in your inventory with durability less than full.  Those with the lowest percentage of durability will be listed first.  You can hover over each item to view the material cost to repair.  You can then click the "repair" button after selecting an item to repair, and the game will then consume those materials and restore that item's durability to full.  The higher an items tier, the more rare/expensive materials usually required to repair it.  Items of higher tier, require a higher crafting skill level to repair.  You can attempt to repair items for which you do not yet have sufficiently high enough crafting level with the risk that you may damage the high tier item and decrease its durability, instead of repairing it.  If you successfully repair the higher item, you will gain double crafting skill xp, than you would have otherwise.  Each time you repair an item gives you crafting skill xp, with more xp for higher durability items.

 

Assembly

Clicking the Assemble button brings up a list of possible blueprints to select from for which you have all the materials and of which you have a high enough crafting skill level.  After selecting the blueprint you want to use as a template, you will then select the materials to use to craft the item (required material components will automatically be added, but some blueprints allow for optional additional material components, eg: dye to change the color of the item), as well as which item tier you wish to attempt to make the item.  You can also specify a quantity of how many you wish to attempt to craft in a single session.  The screen will show you a preview of the new weapon and what its stats might look like if the crafting attempt is successful.  You may then click the "craft" button to start.  I'd like to have some sort of crafting minigame, but this idea may get scrapped and just skipped over entirely, but review the spoiler below for an explanation of how it might work.  I still want suggestions for possible minigames for crafting, but I think something along the lines of a rhythm or timing game would match fairly well.

 

Spoiler

Depending on the item and its item tier quality, you will be shown a circuit board from which two sparks will jump from either side.  When the sparks connect you will need to quickly click mouse 1, not too soon and not too late in as close to perfect timing as possible as the sparks connects.  The closer you are to perfect the more quality points you will accumulate.  The sparks will connect randomly and will start connecting more slowly.  Clicking Mouse1 within the correct capture timeframe will allow the minigame to continue.  If you time it wrong, the minigame will end early.  Items of greater worth will have more chances for success and a higher possible total quality points and each new chance will be more difficult than the previous (speeds up each time and has a smaller capture timeframe).  Occasionally sparks of the wrong color (orange?) may also be randomly interjected into the normal sequence, and will require you to do Mouse2 instead.  The wrong key input will result in the minigame ending early and accumulating less quality points.

After the circuitry minigame finishes, the game will then take your quality points and add them to a formula that will determine your chance of successfully crafting the new item.  It'll probably go something like this: increase base chance by 1-10% (depending on minigame results) up to a max of X%, depending on item tier.  Other RNG formula things will also be considered, such as increasing the items durability, damage, and other stats in which more minigame quality points will also increase the chances of the weapon having better stats, as well as factors such as your crafting skill level and other skill trees, etc.  The server will then roll RNG and see if successful.  If successful, the material components are then consumed from that player's inventory and the game will continue to the final assembly crafting screen, where the item's actual stats are shown and the player is given a chance to give the weapon a nickname if it is of Elite Tier or higher.  Once a name has been picked and/or the item's stats are reviewed, the item will be deposited into the player's inventory.  If the crafting attempt is unsuccessful, the material components will be consumed, and/or if one of the components is an item with durability it will be damaged.

Notes: There are many factors that will actually affect successful item crafting as well as the product's final result.  One very important factor is what item tier material components are being used.  For example, the highest chance of successfully creating a superior item will require elite tier materials to be consumed.  One technique that will always help ensuring you will have a higher chance of success is including the item you are attempting to craft, but one tier lower than the desired tier.  eg: If you are attempting to craft an Elite KYD-21 Pistol, including a refined KYD-21 as an optional material component will greatly increase your chance of success, but may also result in the refined KYD-21 being damaged (or possibly destroyed if its durability is too low).  This sounds a bit messy to me though, and I might rework this "upgrade" mechanic into something a little simpler later.  I will also include add information at a later date that will go into details for how crafting formulas themselves will actually work since this is more of generic summary.  Maybe that will just be built into the blueprint recipe itself?

 

Disassembly

By choosing the disassembly button you will then be brought into a menu of your inventory of all "scrappable" items (usually items with durability).  If you select the item, and you have a high enough crafting skill, your character will attempt to disassemble the item into its material components.  Each component has a base 25% chance of being destroyed during this process (this risk can be reduced with higher crafting skill level and certain crafting skills).  You can select multiple items to do this with, through this menu as well, instead of just doing one at a time.  When the process is complete, the item will be turned into its material components, which can then be recycled into use for something else or sold/destroyed.  The disassembly process cannot be started if you do not have room in your inventory to receive the max amount of materials possible, if you are disassembling more than one item at a time the game will attempt to disassemble all of them, running through them one at a time - if your inventory becomes too full to receive more material components it will stop the attempt.  You can attempt to disassemble higher tier items higher than your current crafting skill level, but the chance of each component being destroyed increases by 25% for each tier above your current skill level.  eg: Someone who can disassemble refined tier, who attempts to disassemble a superior tier item would result in a 75% chance that each material component would be destroyed.  Each material component created from the disassembly process nets an increase in crafting skill xp.  Successfully disassembling higher tier items results in higher xp rewards.  Finally, each time you disassemble an item you have a chance to gain 0-3 blueprint fragments for that item type (depending on the RNG gods and the disassembled item tier).  For example disassembling an Elite DL-18 Blaster Pistol might result in rewarding you 2 blueprint fragments of the pistol type.  Generally, disassembling common tier items have a very low chance of producing any blueprint fragments, while higher tiers have a higher chance of producing a few blueprint fragments.  Disassembling inorganic items while near droids upsets them, and disassembling organic items near meatbags may also upset them.

 

Final Note: I would also like to include some sort of temporary trading system where player's can pay a crafter to do something specific to their item (such as upgrade it by one tier), without risking the other player stealing it.  Not sure on how exactly that might work yet, but it'd be a nice feature to have to support crafters.

 

 

Edited February 21, 2020 by Darth Futuza
Improved grammar and added missing info

[Ramikad]

I like it, maybe the minigame part not so much.

Another thing I feel will have to be considered is the possibility to create blueprint schemas based on the already known blueprints, unless you already pointed it out in the post and I somehow missed it.

[Futuza]

3 hours ago, Ramikad said:

I like it, maybe the minigame part not so much.

Another thing I feel will have to be considered is the possibility to create blueprint schemas based on the already known blueprints, unless you already pointed it out in the post and I somehow missed it.

Yeah I don't know how I feel about the minigame yet, I think I want a minigame, but I don't like the one I came up with.

I haven't mentioned anything about creating blueprint schemas based on already known blueprints, but just to clarify are you talking about being able to produce blueprint schemas to then sell to other players for example?  Or like combining known blueprints to create entirely new non-existing blueprints?  The way this system is setup at the moment, the second is probably not going to happen.  Blueprints can only exist for items that are actually in game, the system isn't clever enough to model a new gun and generate new stats for example (plus I don't really like procedurally generated models/items they always end up feeling like filler content and not really fitting in).  That said, we could probably do something like collecting certain combinations of blueprints might unlock hidden blueprints not listed on the menu.

I added some information about disassembly, since I forgot to include it earlier, but it is somewhat related to your request:

You can attempt to disassemble higher tier items higher than your current crafting skill level, but the chance of each component being destroyed increases by 25% for each tier above your current skill level.  eg: Someone who can disassemble refined tier, who attempts to disassemble a superior tier item would result in a 75% chance that each material component would be destroyed.  Each material component created from the disassembly process nets an increase in crafting skill xp.  Successfully disassembling higher tier items results in higher xp rewards.  Finally, each time you disassemble an item you have a chance to gain 0-3 blueprint fragments for that item type (depending on the RNG gods and the disassembled item tier).  For example disassembling an

Elite DL-18 Blaster Pistol might result in rewarding you 2 blueprint fragments of the pistol type.  Generally, disassembling common tier items have a very low chance of producing any blueprint fragments, while higher tiers have a higher chance of producing a few blueprint fragments.

[Ramikad]

I meant the former. As in, you finally acquire the blueprint for an E-11 Blaster Rifle, and now that you "know how" you can create a blueprint schema for that E-11 rifle which then you can give or sell to other players (or vendors, why not).

The blueprint system kind of reminds me of Rust.

[Futuza]

9 minutes ago, Ramikad said:

I meant the former. As in, you finally acquire the blueprint for an E-11 Blaster Rifle, and now that you "know how" you can create a blueprint schema for that E-11 rifle which then you can give or sell to other players (or vendors, why not).

The blueprint system kind of reminds me of Rust.

Hmmm, maybe some form of that could be possible, but I think creating those blueprints would need to consume something (so player's aren't producing valuable items from nothing and contributing to rampant inflation), perhaps consuming 5 blueprint fragments or some material components or something?