Crafting

Crafting is the second phase of the industry loop of Rhizome, where components and final goods are produced. Crafting is a free-form process.

Recipes for crafts aren't learned; if you have a skill, you are immediately capable of crafting everything within it. You can see what those are by looking at crafts <skill>, which will list the required components to make that craft. Crafts are usually at least partially hierarchical, in the sense that you can craft raw materials into components, and then combine those components together into a finished craft.

Components, like say, an ingot, inherit the quality of the raw material, ore, going into them. As with gathering, a master smith can reach the maximum cap of a low quality ore while producing ingots, but a novice might degrade the quality due to lack of skill, while conversely a novice smith will always degrade a high quality ore while trying to turn it into ingots, while a master preserves the quality. Components will also acquire descriptors from the raw ore -- silvery ore produces silvery ingots, rust-red ore will produce rust-red ingots, serving as a marker for players to know the physical properties of what they're looking at. This means there is no blending of raw materials during the component step.

Final crafts are typically combinations of different components -- a dagger blade, a wooden handle, and a leather strip come together to form a dagger. In this case, you can have different materials; a blood-red dagger blade, an ebonwood handle, and a sharkskin leather strip, for example. The final quality of the craft is the aggregate of the quality of its materials, plus a bonus based on how good the crafting character's skill is. Unlike with component crafting, the maximum quality at this final step is completely uncapped. Three low quality components in the hands of a master may come out actually significantly higher than any of their individual maximum quality.

Once you have finalized a craft, a default short and long description will be provided for it. You will then be prompted to give it a custom description if you wish -- both sdesc and ldesc can be customized fully to reflect your vision. Remember that the quality diamond will be appended, so the apparent quality of your craft is obvious to everyone, so keep that in mind and describe it faithfully to its real quality.

Training crafting skills is based on the quality of your output -- if you want to train to high levels of crafting, you must work with high quality materials to produce high quality outputs equal to your skill, or you won't learn anything as you are coasting on low quality crafts.

Finally, there are rumors of esoteric elements to crafting; maybe, just maybe, you'll make something truly legendary.

Command                          What it does
crafts                           Lists your crafting skills and levels
crafts <skill>                   Lists that skill's recipes: output, inputs, tools
craft <recipe>                   Makes it from carried inputs (plus heavy ones in the room)
craft <recipe> into <container>  For a recipe that produces a liquid