Good day everyone,

We hope you had an excellent weekend - here is our question of the week, submitted by Triox, who asked the developers:

Any info on the types of crafting available? Will it be the standard breakdown of armour/weapons/accessories or will there be a few more specializations, maybe like weapon upgrades or armour mods or vehicle creation (multi-discipline required, eg engines, transmissions, armour etc).

This week we would like to focus on crafting and answer Triox’ question. As we mentioned before, every item in Earthrise will be crafted by its players. This includes not only the usual fare of weapons, armor and devices but everything from mixing their own drugs and medicine to cooperative construction of buildings and vehicles, including mechanized exoskeletons. Crafting in Earthrise is a complex process that is easy to understand but ultimately difficult to master. The basic rule of crafting is that every item is made of components and every item can be broken down to its composites. Some components are used for specific items, others are used in a wide array of items – for example, a hand gun grip can be used in the creation of various hand guns, while electronic chipsets can be used to create specific devices. Players often will break down items to their components in order to combine some of them with other components to produce new, different items. Crafting and salvaging requires specific skills, depending what item is created or salvaged down, and players will have access to dozens of skills, covering mechanics, electronics, engineering, construction and programming in several futuristic industries. Here is a quick and simple example – let’s have two hand guns, a simple “Kruger” and an advanced “Raider” with electronic aiming. Using his weapons engineering skill, a player can deconstruct “Kruger Hand Gun” down to “Hand Gun Grip” and “Kruger Mechanism”, and then combine the “Hand Gun Grip” with “Raider Mechanism” and “Raider Aiming Processor” to produce the electronics-assisted “Raider” hand gun. Often complex items will require several tiers of components construction before the player can create the final product, and each of those components will require different skills to craft. We want to make most complex and powerful items in the game a serious crafting investment, often requiring two or more crafters or varying skills and expertise to work together in order to tailor each element of the final item. That is not to say that Earthrise favors custom-crafting of individual items only – majority of items will be rather simple to mass produce given components are available and will provide everyone with the means to join the conflict between Continoma or Noir, or carve their own name in the history of Enterra.

Transformation of one type of item to another - either through crafting or salvaging - has damaging effect on the used resources and the final item will always have lowered quality value compared to the input components, depending on player's crafting skill. This renders impossible the infinite transformation of items - even for a true expert, constant crafting and salvaging of the same item will make the resources useless and any item made of them prone to quick damage and lessened effect. This is when items will "break" completely - when they cannot be any more repaired, or effectively salvaged to craft a new useful item.

That's it for now! Please feel free to discuss the questions below in this thread, and post any questions you have on our QOTW thread here. We read every question, just so you know.

See you next week!
~ M.

Nice! that sounds amazing!

Do it exactly this way. Don't bow to the masses allready crying about it beeing too complex 

*faints*

G@MER- If the system is as involved as it sounds like it could be, even an extremely high end crafter might not learn much from a deconstruct.  I could be way beyond the system they have in mind, but things like metallurgy would be a good "black box" for what the original crafter was doing.  If the game goes to this extreme any part could be run through a series of construction options (sticking with metal pieces here) leaving questions like: forged, cnc billet, or cast, or what after treatments like heat, cryogenic or even electroplating.  Now that would require some hefty machinery (fair sized guild to support), but it would allow for some seriously unique pieces off a short list of base designs (and a fair amount of T&E in the system).

I'm liking what I hear so far, I just hope that it's possible to have 1 toon do everything in the crafting process, that the limit would be how impractical it would be to learn them all to a high level of mastery.

Wow that sounds great it kind reminds me of the old SWG crafting system and Ryzom's crafting system. In Ryzom you got a schematic and the components but they were just a generalized list so the player had to experiment with the differnet kinds of materials and diffenert qualities of materials and they all had differing effects on the finished product!

This does indeed sound awesome - it's just really important, I think, that it is combined with a well-functioning economy, an easy to use trade system between players and guild common-access storage.

mm.. I dunno, I don't mind work - I have always been a huge fan of Eve's crafting system, but there is no doubt it is very close to being work.
I'm not sure that is such a bad thing.