Crafting thoughts: Blacksmithing, Mushroom farming, and others

[Ranperre]

I finished brewing last night and have some thoughts regarding a few of the crafts currently in the game. My primary complaint (blacksmithing and carpentry) is that there are super obvious routes that require half the materials vs other options.


Blacksmithing (50+): Too easy with throwing knives (though almost entirely wasted since nobody buys at full) or too hard with gear (ridiculously expensive & tedious). I feel like you're asking people to take too much of a financial hit with little benefit, especially when it starts to require three tools. Obviously this will change over time since blacksmithing is intended to be more of a helper skill like textiles/tanning, but it's an odd skill to level at the moment.

My recommendation:
- Lower crafting level of throwing knives (this was too easy, even at a huge loss)
and
- Give us a way to sell armor stakes. If metal armor is going to be difficult to make, that is fine, but something has to give if throwing knives are rightly nerfed. Asking people to make several hundred pieces of gear losing 2-3 slabs, a rivet, half a tool, and a gem for a mediocre return might be too much. Giving us a way to offload these stakes, which are easier to make than level equivalent gear, until armor smithing comes would be nice.

Also... crafting all of the statues once might give too much xp.


Mushroom farming & Fishing (Ice fishing) : Too good? If it was your intent to stop all (most) foraging for mushrooms and fish, it's doing its job. But as is, I have absolutely no use for mushroom forage boost stuff (arrangements, alcohol) because it's foolish to do it any other way. I hope that as the cap increases, we have a reason to go outside to get this stuff aside from leveling.


Brewing: Fine. Leveling this skill puts every other craft to shame and some of the benefits are really neat. I can boost my armor by +180 plus liquor (haven't mapped them out yet) for bosses. In another post, Niph said 3500ish barley is required if you do 1-30 with casks, I agree with this number. You also need about a thousand hops. Lacking any source of green apples is a pain.

Buckle Artistry: Do this with dye making. Buckle artistry requires a ton of different dyes, the only other time you will make most of these is when leveling dye making. If you're just doing dye making, suck it up and do buckle artistry too.

Carpentry: Cow/deer shoes too easy? Or just a gift for toolcrafters? Great wooden cow/deer shoes, level 63 crafts, require only a single piece of cedar, a single tool, and a crystal. A screaming deal.

Fletching: Collect feathers for a couple of weeks and you can finish it. This skill is too easy to level, requires zero thought and is cheap. I could understand this working as intended though.

Flower arrangement: A truly pleasurable skill to level and use. It upgrades everything that you do. Going to grind in a place with wood? Need to forage in sun vale? Foolish to do it without an arrangement. This isn't even getting into cotton and gardening displays, which are absolute requirements. Grinding this skill early on definitely paid off. My one little hint about this is that when leveling, make arrangements, not bouquets (in most situations), but that should be obvious to all but the most dense.

Gadgeteering: I haven't done it and I see absolutely no reason to.

[Ashreon]

Ice Fishing & Mushroom farming
- I'm cool with this, however, it also needs to be much more readily accessible in the World than it currently is in that case. Some mushrooms & fish you may as well forget trying to get in a decent amount even with a mushroom or fish arrangement/display (Field Mushrooms, Sharks/Eels). If there weren't mushroom growth boxes and/or Ice Fishing available it would be nigh-impossible.

You know my position on Brewing already as I told you time-wise it's only a few hours longer than tailoring (I actually think Flower Arrangement beats both of them)

Flower Arrangement
- I absolutely do not agree with this. It takes days of flower growing as well as seed grinding to get anywhere. The latter levels being especially painful unless you have a healthy amount of Red Rose Seeds/Elven Lily Seeds. It is amazing to use, true, but most definitely not to level, I made some 600 bouquets just to go from 50-60 (because these were the cheapest and most exp rewarding). In truth I believe I spend about an entire week "powerleveling" it in the belief that it was necessary for Tailoring - it is not necessary by the way and you will just find yourself with a surplus of Perfect Cotton should you use the Cotton display. The gardening display, however, is amazeballs, so are the bouquets and other displays you can use (- fishing and mushroom because these are better done with ice fishing/growth boxes)

Carpentry is fine as is. It might be easy to level, but there is a host of other things (Storage Crates, Calligraphy Benches etc) that needs materials which requires blacksmithing and leatherworking.

Fletching, might be easy to level if you have a ton of feathers stacked up, but not to the new player that have a hard time getting feathers in the first place. It also requires a ton of materials from other crafts (surveying and/or alchemy) and while I think it is cool that you actually need arrows to kill things with Archery, I don't think you want to put too much of a strain on a combat class just because its associated craft is easy to level up ;).

That being said. There will always be an easy level route (there should be an easy level route) in crafting. These are for the purpose of leveling the craft more-so than actually using said items. This is not a job, it's supposed to be fun and most people (while they do enjoy leveling) won't enjoy leveling everything just for the sake of leveling. I know several people that has given up on crafting because they find that aspect of games not to be fun and the ... insane grind PG requires you to do to craft means they'll never touch this aspect of the game even if their life was on the line.
Maybe, if crafts was changed so that the amount of resources spend also meant that you got more experience it would be a way to take alternate routes? Other than that solution all I can think of is increasing the amount of experience required and that would probably kill crafting off rather than help it feel less repetitive.

[INXS]

@Asheron for FA when you get to lv 40 I think you get wolfsbane bouquet, spam that, keep some for GQ, by the time I got FA to lv 40 I has hundreds of those saved up.

[Daguin]

Ice Fishing & Mushroom farming
- Everyone is discounting the elusive Myconic XP that comes from actually foraging mushies. I like having options, and the boxes are good for cheese + a little rent making, if you remember to harvest and utilize the proper moon phase/substrates. For ice fishing my only complaint.... CLOWNFISH! :) Gazluk could probably provide some spots too.

Brewing
- Boring like cheese, but no hassle except the mats of course. Wish hops were more plentiful, and the rare fruits. I love the buffs, but it would be nice to have the buff effects actually listed on the icon with timers.

Flower Arrangement
- Love this skill overall, and it's a great way to stack buffs. Since many players won't bother growing so many flowers, I think of this as one of the more unique crafting skills in the game. The displays always generate goodwill in the community, and can be really helpful for newbies or veterans just looking to do some chores. I always forget to use the bouquets and single flowers in dungeon runs, but they can be great for maxing out builds. Leveling this one is really expensive and difficult....

The latter levels being especially painful unless you have a healthy amount of Red Rose Seeds/Elven Lily Seeds.
It's also technically one of the "end-game" (for now) crafting skills so that's not unexpected.

Carpentry
-Carpentry gets leveled enough early on just making secondary crafting materials, but it slows down a lot at higher levels. The only suggestion I have is the ability to craft magic staffs with different inherent mods (the white ones you can't change). Currently all staffs have a +staff skill mod inherent, but I want to be able to craft +battlechem +fire, +ice +fire, +psychology +fire, +mentalism +ice, etc. staff types.

Fletching
I've never played archer (after Anagoge), and I maxed fletching in my first few weeks playing by bumming a TON of feathers from Kur Tower regulars. Prepared Fletchings maybe should taper off in XP after 10000000 crafts.

That being said. There will always be an easy level route (there should be an easy level route) in crafting.

The primary crafting skills (-> blacksmithing -> tailoring -> leatherworking) are the only things that have made me "take a break" from PG. Any time I seriously tried grinding those skills I get insanely bored / tired of endless recipes and infinite mats grinding. My best strategy for playing the long-game has been just doing those skills when I have profitable work orders to turn in. It hasn't made me the best at anything, but it's more enjoyable getting a level every couple weeks than burning myself out again.

[Ranperre]

Thanks for the responses guys.


Flower Arrangement
- I absolutely do not agree with this.

I spammed lumberjack's #5 (https://forum.projectgorgon.com/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=5) as it pretty closely mirrors what you can harvest in sun vale. The way I see it, it's important to get maximum efficiency (xp) off of the higher level flowers, poppies and marigolds - they are also the two rarer flowers in sun vale iirc. So instead of doing poppy bouquets (43) and marigold bouquets (38), you can spam mycologist #5 (https://forum.projectgorgon.com/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=5) 's (46, 2x poppy & 2x marigold) with your leftover marigolds from lumberjack #5 (https://forum.projectgorgon.com/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=5) 's (49, 1x marigold + daisies and a pansy, which are more common). That's what I was getting at with arrangements. Red roses & elven lilies were a nonstarter at the time.

Extra perfect cotton is true, but my surplus mostly came from doing pockets too long. Plus, I was able to sell perfect cotton at 100c within 24 hours at my shop. If you card 6k cotton, the display provides an extra 500 perfect cotton you wouldn't have had without it. Maybe it isn't absolutely necessary, but it's almost always worth your time.


That being said. There will always be an easy level route (there should be an easy level route) in crafting.

I completely agree. I am just of the opinion that the blacksmithing & carpentry are too easy. They require half the materials of any other route... and subjectively they just felt like cheating. Not really, but sort of.







Ice Fishing & Mushroom farming
- Everyone is discounting the elusive Myconic XP that comes from actually foraging mushies. I like having options, and the boxes are good for cheese + a little rent making, if you remember to harvest and utilize the proper moon phase/substrates. For ice fishing my only complaint.... CLOWNFISH! :) Gazluk could probably provide some spots too.


Myconic is something that I just don't understand. I got level 70 mycology through foraging, I did not spam a single recipe, yet my myconic wasn't high enough to get mushroom teleportation until I did some quests/hangouts. The way ice fishing synergizes with sushi making, bridging you until cheesemaking is kind of neat. If only Nigiri was truly instant.



Carpentry
-Carpentry gets leveled enough early on just making secondary crafting materials, but it slows down a lot at higher levels. The only suggestion I have is the ability to craft magic staffs with different inherent mods (the white ones you can't change). Currently all staffs have a +staff skill mod inherent, but I want to be able to craft +battlechem +fire, +ice +fire, +psychology +fire, +mentalism +ice, etc. staff types.

Yup. I got myself to 50 just building random crap, then hit a huge wall, which was fine until I leveled fire magic.

[spider91301]

Yup. I got myself to 50 just building random crap, then hit a huge wall, which was fine until I leveled fire magic.

Carpentry is easy you just put workorder up for cedarwood for 10k a stack then make the staffs then sellem and lose only a fraction of the cost then again I did that when we had a huger playerbase

[Golliathe]

I don't know if it has been requested in game.... but if brewing is going to have so many recipe combinations can we please have a menu that tells us what the alcohol will become when the ingredients are inserted but not yet combined(assuming we have made it once before).

It would nice to not have to alt tab to look at a spreadsheet for known alcohol recipes.

[ShieldBreaker]

...
Lacking any source of green apples is a pain....

We do now have a source of green apples. Trents in Rahu Sewer, looted lots of the rare fruits off them

[Ranperre]

We do now have a source of green apples. Trents in Rahu Sewer, looted lots of the rare fruits off them

Finished mapping liquor over the weekend. 240/240 bourbon tested. I purchased most and farmed some. They seemed to have a semi equal chance of dropping any of the higher level fruits, so you'll be there for awhile for the necessary 80+.

[Niph]

Finished mapping liquor over the weekend. 240/240 bourbon tested. I purchased most and farmed some. They seemed to have a semi equal chance of dropping any of the higher level fruits, so you'll be there for awhile for the necessary 80+.

It is now possible to map all liquors from low level to high level with minimal effort. The wiki contains enough information for that, I believe.

[Ranperre]

It is now possible to map all liquors from low level to high level with minimal effort. The wiki contains enough information for that, I believe.

Indeed, it seems like the wiki has that information now.