PC A simple way to fix crafting! ... ?

[meganoth]

I think crafting of weapons and armors is still in need of a fix. I want to propose a scheme and hope you all can tell me whether it sounds like a good plan for the current game. The scheme isn't really new, but we are older and wiser now and the game is constantly changing.

* Crafting an item of quality n needs a weapon of quality n-1 in addition to the usual ingredients.

* The other ingredients (weapons parts, steel,...) would be adjusted to reflect this change, so to keep the current balance you would need a slowly increasing amount of weapon parts (maybe from 2 to 6) for each step.

* Modded weapons can be used as crafting ingredient, the mods stay in the weapon

There are a few advantages to this change:

1) Finally you can craft lower quality items even if you have less ingredients than your perk allows

2) Currently if you have perk level 4 you seldom craft a weapon quality 4. You wait until you are at perk level 5. And in practice you very seldom build lower qualities because you find a better quality faster than you can craft one. With the new scheme crafting the next step is always a good choice unless the random roll for the current weapon was especially high for the quality.

3) It is YOUR weapon you make better, giving you the subjective impression of having a beloved weapon that grows with you. Our subconsciousness is a sucker for such irrelevant details, or why do you think coloring your weapon and armor is so popular?

4) Crafting a quality 5 weapon from scratch would involve more steps, but this won't really be necessary in actual play. Instead you would save a lot of time because you usually don't need to transfer mods.

 

[theFlu]

From a gameplay perspective, sounds good. Can't come up with anything to complain about. It would also give a great feel for each and every (relevant) gun part you loot, making the random drop of a couple parts a little sweeter. Until you're maxed out, of course.

From the codebase pov, I have couple doubts..

- "keeping the mods" might not be trivial. Nothing to say that it wouldn't be possible, or even easy, but ... Then again, it isn't exactly necessary for the feature to be useful, just a little more manual work for the player. (you'd upgrade roughly 2-4 weapons through a game, maybe 3 times each, as you'll loot some decent ones and will end up storing up Rifle Parts for a Sniper instead of a Marksman (expecting recipe unlocks))

- multiplying the amount of weapon recipes by five might be an issue with the current inventory management. The new recipes would all need to be active at once - I think the current recipe is a single "more dynamic" version. Of course, I'd prefer that TFP sorted out the problems with large numbers of recipes, but, I think that was already decided against.

 

[meganoth]

From a gameplay perspective, sounds good. Can't come up with anything to complain about. It would also give a great feel for each and every (relevant) gun part you loot, making the random drop of a couple parts a little sweeter. Until you're maxed out, of course.

From the codebase pov, I have couple doubts..

- "keeping the mods" might not be trivial. Nothing to say that it wouldn't be possible, or even easy, but ... Then again, it isn't exactly necessary for the feature to be useful, just a little more manual work for the player. (you'd upgrade roughly 2-4 weapons through a game, maybe 3 times each, as you'll loot some decent ones and will end up storing up Rifle Parts for a Sniper instead of a Marksman (expecting recipe unlocks))

- multiplying the amount of weapon recipes by five might be an issue with the current inventory management. The new recipes would all need to be active at once - I think the current recipe is a single "more dynamic" version. Of course, I'd prefer that TFP sorted out the problems with large numbers of recipes, but, I think that was already decided against.

I think "keeping the mods" is essential. Without it you would have a too eye-catching mod ping-pong.

 

[theFlu]

With keeping the mods the feature would be better by an order of magnitude for sure, but even without it it would still be an improvement in my eyes

Now, if you implement "without" as "you just lost two mods", yeah, no thanks..

 

[Star69]

I like your general premise, though I’m stuck on the mod part. Once you get the first mod then you never need to find another. For example, build a better AK with a rad remover. Or build many, supply all your friends and sell remaining for big money. I’m afraid there would be some abuse. It’s an interesting idea nonetheless.

 

[KingSlayerGM]

1) Finally you can craft lower quality items even if you have less ingredients than your perk allows

Why would I want to do that?

2) Currently if you have perk level 4 you seldom craft a weapon quality 4. You wait until you are at perk level 5. And in practice you very seldom build lower qualities because you find a better quality faster than you can craft one. With the new scheme crafting the next step is always a good choice unless the random roll for the current weapon was especially high for the quality.

Personally, I never wait to craft something because later I will be able to craft a higher quality one. I will instead craft it twice (if I have enough materials) or as you say, I will just loot it. Your system would not slow me down at looting, it would slow me down at crafting.

3) It is YOUR weapon you make better, giving you the subjective impression of having a beloved weapon that grows with you. Our subconsciousness is a sucker for such irrelevant details, or why do you think coloring your weapon and armor is so popular?

I like this.

4) Crafting a quality 5 weapon from scratch would involve more steps, but this won't really be necessary in actual play. Instead you would save a lot of time because you usually don't need to transfer mods.

Crafting a quality 5 from scratch would be a pain in the ass I think..

 

[theFlu]

Or build many, supply all your friends and sell remaining for big money.

You wouldn't be generating new mods, the old weapon would be used as ingredient and the mods from that one would just transfer to the new one. I don't see the possibility for abuse?

Why would I want to do that?

Beelined to 5/5 Pistols, have 7 pistol parts, find a lucky Desert Vulture schematic. Can't make a Quality 5 one, but could easily make a Quality 1 or 2. Not massively common, but I've stumbled upon that myself a few times; likewise I think both Games4Kickz and Kage848 have shot themselves on the foot by "wohoo, I have the parts I need to craft X => hey, I'll put in more points to get a better quality of it => now it's too expensive to craft"

 

[KingSlayerGM]

Beelined to 5/5 Pistols, have 7 pistol parts, find a lucky Desert Vulture schematic. Can't make a Quality 5 one, but could easily make a Quality 1 or 2. Not massively common, but I've stumbled upon that myself a few times; likewise I think both Games4Kickz and Kage848 have shot themselves on the foot by "wohoo, I have the parts I need to craft X => hey, I'll put in more points to get a better quality of it => now it's too expensive to craft"

I see the point. It never happened to me though. Finding guns and scrapping them for parts is very easy..

 

[Star69]

Oh, I thought he meant the mods would be replicated.....my mistake. If that's the case, then I'd have no issue however there's really no reason for that function since you can just remove the mod from the weapon then use if for creating a new weapon then add the mod to that. /shrugs

 

[Roland]

Oh, I thought he meant the mods would be replicated.....my mistake. If that's the case, then I'd have no issue however there's really no reason for that function since you can just remove the mod from the weapon then use if for creating a new weapon then add the mod to that. /shrugs

It's more a quality of life plus protection measure. Quality of Life for not having to transfer mods out and in. Protection for not losing your mods if you unthinkingly use your modded weapon as an ingredient and the disappear.

 

[uncle.heavy]

I am absolutely sold on the weapon-growing-with-you part.

Also it sems more organic to me; having your beloved weapon, learning a thing or two and making improvements accordingly.

Crafting qualities lower than your perk allows ( read: dictates) might be the main accomplishment, though. In my experience, too, qualities 1-4 - in MP at least and except for bows perhaps - very rarely get assembled, and we cannot craft quality 6.

Seems like we are missing out on some parts 

 

[Crater Creator]

But this seems to gloss over the feature where you can scrap a weapon into weapon parts, which the recipes already use.  With that transmutability in place, we in effect already have the functionality meganoth proposes.  It just takes an extra step.  The only sticking point is the quantity of weapon parts needed, which could be adjusted on their own.

The other thing added here is keeping the mods... I’ve never scrapped a gun while it had a mod on it, out of fear of losing it.  So I’m not actually sure if the mods get kicked out or are destroyed.

 

[theFlu]

There are some (good, imo) changes over scrapping;

Currently (19.3 b6) you get the same amount of parts from scrapping a quality 4 than a quality one, while the higher qualities took a lot more to craft. This would change as you'd need the whole item to "upgrade", so you'd Need the almost as good a weapon (obtained however). It would eliminate the "waste" of crafting a quality 4 and then scrapping it for a quality 5 later, that's around 10 parts lost for no good reason. Sure one can argue that's just the cost of it, but in practice, the balance is so off that people skip crafting the intermediates.

And currently you can't craft the intermediate qualities, that gets solved as well. Of course than can (and I think "is planned to be") solved by other means, but this way would make the progress though the tiers "mandatory", so it could never be wasteful.

One can argue that it can take away decisions from the game, but the upsides of the decision to craft a q4 are severely lacking at the current cost.

The mods, currently you can't scrap or craft from items that have mods (dyes will get destroyed). I wouldn't mind having to juggle them manually, but keeping them would certainly be a plus.

 

[meganoth]

But this seems to gloss over the feature where you can scrap a weapon into weapon parts, which the recipes already use.  With that transmutability in place, we in effect already have the functionality meganoth proposes.  It just takes an extra step.  The only sticking point is the quantity of weapon parts needed, which could be adjusted on their own.

So the scheme solves the problem that you can't craft a lower quality weapon than your perk AND removes an annoying step.

Remember that the A16 weapon scheme was changed because all that swapping in and out of weapon parts was too much inventory grind. Personally I get the same feeling again with swapping mods in and out of various weapons and armors. I can't imagine anyone having really fun while doing this.

At the moment crafting a better gun means this: After collecting all the ingredients and producing a weapon (~10 clicks) you need another 9 very mindless clicks (with 2 mods, no dye) to really switch to the new weapon. Does saving 50% clicks sound like a good deal for a GUI improvement?

There is a small disadvantage here, a quality 4 item is made more valuable for crafting than a quality 1 item while scrapping them makes them equal. But this discrepancy is already in the game since their monetary value is very different.

The other thing added here is keeping the mods... I’ve never scrapped a gun while it had a mod on it, out of fear of losing it.  So I’m not actually sure if the mods get kicked out or are destroyed.

Nobody is forced to take the highway .

 

[BFT2020]

Remember that the A16 weapon scheme was changed because all that swapping in and out of weapon parts was too much inventory grind. Personally I get the same feeling again with swapping mods in and out of various weapons and armors. I can't imagine anyone having really fun while doing this.

At the moment crafting a better gun means this: After collecting all the ingredients and producing a weapon (~10 clicks) you need another 9 very mindless clicks (with 2 mods, no dye) to really switch to the new weapon. Does saving 50% clicks sound like a good deal for a GUI improvement?

Is this any different from crafting anything in the game?  Typically I go to the workbench and pull up the item I am wanting to craft.  Then I go to my labeled storage boxes and start pulling the items.  Then I go back and recheck the recipe to see if I missed something.  Then back to the storage boxes to gather what I forgot.  Then finally queue it up in the workbench.

At that point, I go off to another task and by the time I come back to the workbench, the item is completed.  At that point, I simply swap out the mods (and dye if I am using one).  While I wouldn't say this is a fun task, I don't feel it is an inventory grind.

My crafting is always at night (unless I really really want something during the day) so it is always one of my many tasks I am doing that night (crafting weapons or tools, crafting items for my base(s), upgrading my bases, trying new things so changing things around, coking food and drinks, keeping the forges processing raw materials and fabricating new items). 

Probably the only grind is really putting in extra / unwanted mods into weapons / tools / armor to sell to the traders.  I am not constantly crafting weapons / tools / armor to require multiple mod changes.

 

[hiemfire]

But this seems to gloss over the feature where you can scrap a weapon into weapon parts, which the recipes already use.  With that transmutability in place, we in effect already have the functionality meganoth proposes.  It just takes an extra step.  The only sticking point is the quantity of weapon parts needed, which could be adjusted on their own.

The other thing added here is keeping the mods... I’ve never scrapped a gun while it had a mod on it, out of fear of losing it.  So I’m not actually sure if the mods get kicked out or are destroyed.

If you're talking vanilla, scraping is disabled on items that have mods in slots other than the cosmetic slot (where the dyes go).

 

[RipClaw]

2) Currently if you have perk level 4 you seldom craft a weapon quality 4. You wait until you are at perk level 5. And in practice you very seldom build lower qualities because you find a better quality faster than you can craft one. With the new scheme crafting the next step is always a good choice unless the random roll for the current weapon was especially high for the quality.

3) It is YOUR weapon you make better, giving you the subjective impression of having a beloved weapon that grows with you. Our subconsciousness is a sucker for such irrelevant details, or why do you think coloring your weapon and armor is so popular?

Your approach would only make sense to me if random values were disabled. If I sacrifice resources and my current weapon to craft something better, it should always be better and not depend on luck.

 

[theFlu]

Randomness could be handled in many ways;

- they could keep the original rolls and just apply that to the new version. This would make players scrap "bad" rolls.

- they could run new rolls per craft, and choose the better of the two, making any weapon randomly improve over crafts. This would make the high quality ones have the best of 5 rolls, so they'd end up pretty much identical - not great if you Want the variance.

- they could allow re-crafting at some cost, essentially re-rolling the randomness

 

[Maharin]

More randomness in many areas of this game would be beneficial.  If each zombie was more random (player damage, block damage, health, appearance, etc.) instead of a static set of traits for a given appearance.   A nerdy biker or a buff little lady.  Both should be possible as well as everything in between.

As for items and crafting, I think making a thing should produce different results instead of the same result each time, mods included.  That gives you a reason to make multiple things where you currently only need to make one (why bother with ever making more than one head lamp, for instance?).  Also, if crafting stations had a range of quality then there could even be special crafting stations found in higher end POIs or biomes that are able to make better gear or mods (if you can kill your way to them, that is) than what you can with the stations you can build.  Hell, you could even learn how to make higher quality crafting stations from exploring those POIs or biomes.

The biggest problem with the current system in my opinion is that there is no guessing.  You find a thing and it pretty much is what it is except in a few cases now with armor.  If there was more variability AND you used one thing to build another like the OP suggests, then you truly get something that grows with you.  Not only with your level but also with your ability to craft and/or mod.  Right now, a level 5 axe you find is exactly the same as the level 5 axe you build.  I'd like to see that change.

Added to that idea is the thought that some perks allow you to tighten the range so that you more frequently make the better quality items than the lower quality ones.  Quality is too rigid with only 6 levels.

 

[Crater Creator]

So the scheme solves the problem that you can't craft a lower quality weapon than your perk AND removes an annoying step.

Remember that the A16 weapon scheme was changed because all that swapping in and out of weapon parts was too much inventory grind. Personally I get the same feeling again with swapping mods in and out of various weapons and armors. I can't imagine anyone having really fun while doing this.

At the moment crafting a better gun means this: After collecting all the ingredients and producing a weapon (~10 clicks) you need another 9 very mindless clicks (with 2 mods, no dye) to really switch to the new weapon. Does saving 50% clicks sound like a good deal for a GUI improvement?

There is a small disadvantage here, a quality 4 item is made more valuable for crafting than a quality 1 item while scrapping them makes them equal. But this discrepancy is already in the game since their monetary value is very different.

Okay, but not being able to craft a lower quality weapon is only a problem if that's something people want to do.  And the only reason people want to craft lower quality weapons, is because it takes fewer weapon parts.  Right?  That's the only reason I know of... maybe people want worse weapons for personal challenge or something, but I kind of doubt it.

Assuming that's the real reason, then I would propose that the game will craft the best quality weapon you're able to make, with what's in your inventory.  Suppose for illustration you need 3 rifle parts per quality level.  Your character may have the skills to craft a quality 4 hunting rifle, but that'll take 12 parts.  If you go to the workbench with only 9 rifle parts, you'll make a quality 3 hunting rifle.  There's already some player communication for this, in the form of showing what quality you're going to make before you press craft, although it could be improved to better communicate what quality you could craft if you had the parts.

On swapping mods, okay, it's annoying and clunky.  But why just target higher quality weapons of the same type for a quality of life improvement?  How about, you select a weapon in your inventory, you see the installed mods on it as you do now, and you can simply drag and drop them from there onto any other item that accepts that mod?  That'd cut it down to one mouse action per mod, and apply to all items.