Building Better Crafting Systems

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For everyone else frustrated by the Skyrim mining animation: Equipping the pickaxe and beating the shit out of the ore vein works just as well, and is much faster.

You know you've got a good video when Minecraft and Modded Minecraft are treated as two separate games, and discussed in their own contexts.

Watching the part about Fallout 4 made me realize something. Preston's "Another Settlement needs your help" line isn't just annoying because he comes out of nowhere to bother you while you're playing elsewhere, it's annoying because it's a reflection of the lack of agency you actually have. You can spend hours clearing all the camps around a settlement, and placing defenses, and assigning villagers to posts, etc. but it won't make a lick of difference. Preston can still say that the settlement needs help from some random bloatflies or something. It's another way the settlement crafting in FO4 is just a tacked-on mechanic rather than an integrated mechanic.

The best crafting I've ever tried was in Noita. You put spells into slots in a wand basically like writing a code with projectiles, paths, effects, projectile modifiers etc. You can have game-ending wands 20 minutes into the game that slice through enemies or fire at machinegun rates or you could misplace something and kill yourself when you first use it. Doesnt get more tangible than that

Star Wars Galaxies had the best crafting system in any game I've ever played. All crafted gear was better than all dropped gear, but you could find rare drops that allowed you to craft the best gear. The quality of the materials you crafted allowed you to craft better gear. You could buy swords for 4k credits that did 100 damage, or you could buy swords for 200k that did 120 damage. All based on supply and demand of the players in game. The better quality of the ingredients you used during creation, the more stats you could spend to make the weapon. So new weaponsmiths would make low stat items like powerups (optional ammo to increase stats) or components to other items like barrels for guns, or lower-tier leveling weapons, while master weaponsmiths could do anything. All items had durability, so gear would constantly break and need to be repaired or replaced. So people constantly needed crafters. You could play as a weaponsmith and have a full experience in the game without ever killing a monster. The richest person I ever met in-game was a tailor who made +skill mods for high-end pvp gear and fancy unstated clothes like custom wedding dresses for roleplaying. It was a really good balance where some players would resource hunt. Other players would mob hunt. Crafters would buy resources and mob drops to craft gear to sell back to the other two groups and pvpers.

I'm so glad that Adam Millard - The Architect of Games™ had talked to me, and only me, at the end of the video. I can feel your jealously from here

Over the years I've grown to dislike crafting systems because most of the time they're only inserted thoughtlessly into games as "just a way to get something" instead of actually rewarding choice and effort with unique options

I just recently bought Skyrim on Switch and got back into it, and one thing I've always loved about its Alchemy system is that all the resources are laid out in bioregionally sensible places, and that you use all the same ingredients regardless of what crafting tier you're at. It supports the unleveled zoning and "go, anywhere" ethos. When I walk past a farm, I think, "Oh, I wonder if they have wheat I can harvest," and not, "Oh look, the level one health potion ingredient." Smithing in Skyrim however, locks you into a specific progression of different metals and armor styles as you level your crafting ability, undermining the core promise of "make the character you want to play." Using heavy armor? Well I hope it's your vision that your character wants to wear dwarvish armor, then orcish, then daedric.

10:40 - Even worse, settlement building in Fallout 4 gets close to useless in the game's general mechanics such as combat when you find out that the massive fortification wall that took you dozens of hours of grinding to build doesn't do shit against enemies invading your settlement - because their spawn points lie inside the boundaries of your building site. What the actual ffff! I spent ages building the perfect fort with heavily armed airlock-style gate yards and watchtowers, building as many automated turrets evenly spaced out on the wall as the game would let me - all to find out that whenever my settlement was attacked, enemies do not even need to get through the fortification to get in, because they start out on the inside to begin with.

I think most modern games add crafting into their games just so they can add loot to locations, without really adding loot. Like, just throw some crafting materials here, some over there, and presto! You've got a location full of loot! How wonderdul.

I fucking love the system Prey uses, even though I haven't played much of the game. Just having this big machine suck up all the trash you throw inside it, cube-ify it, then spit it out is so fun to watch.

I love how he says "crafting should let you express yourself" while building wooden pp in Minecraft

I think Astroneer has my favorite crafting systems. The fact that all items always stay within physical space and not in an inventory, it mean you have to physically pick up things and put them in the multiple crafting stations. It can also be automated towards the end.

One thing that I find diminishes a crafting system is when the items that you can craft are ones that you can also find in the world, like how as you level up in Skyrim, enemies start spawning with higher-tiers of weapons and armor, making it so that there's little incentive to invest in smithing in the early game, because you're always going to be finding better armor and weapons by scavenging than you'll be able to make by crafting. Since players can get away with ignoring it in the early game, the smithing stat only truly becomes relevant in the late game as it impacts how much you can improve the stats on equipment by tempering. Which could cause players to need to craft dozens, if not hundreds of junk items before they can make anything that they actually intend to use.

You should have covered Vintage Storys crafting system because I love it! It uses a mechanic I've seen in VERY few games. You have to make molds for metal tools, pour the metal in the mold and wait for it to cool, little and carve wood for tools, knap rocks for stone tools, use clay to model and mold different molds and pots.

Seeing Sev Tech discussed reminded me of one of my favorite crafting examples: Vintage Story. It’s developed by some of the team working on Hytale a stand alone MC inspired fantasy game but VS is more slow paced and survival focused. In Vintage Story even crafting a pickaxe is locked off until you can make a clay forge and burn it. Super captivating survival external vs internal crafting mechanics.

My least favorite crafting system are ones where most of the crap comes out weaker or more pathetic than the gear you can pick up as loot. And its easy to fix. Gear you pick up as loot is weaker because its used or damaged. By repairing it you get a blueprint to make a better version. Then its a cycle of getting crap, then making a better version to use to find other loot and repeat.

I guess "Is this [crafting system] necessary?" is another one of those questions that seems really obvious to all but the person who should be asking. Thank you once again for bringing to light a game design concept I would never have thought before putting it into a game, your videos are always helpful and insightful for the not-so-informed!

This is just the video I needed, I just finished the base building part of my game and was moving on to the crafting system, This video helped me realize that I need to make sure my crafting system is tied to the world and benefits the game without being pointless!