Craft Q&A

[Brar]

Another question, Imagine a project than need 2 days:
if I log back after 22 game hour, then log off. Since I haven't spend enough time offline to hit, does it starts back at hour zero or do I need only 2 more hours to finish the first day ?

[Mask]

From what I know, in order of preference.

Light : Padded, leather, studded leather, light chain (chainshirt in dnd)
Medium : Hide, Scale mail, Heavy mail (chainmail in dnd), Brigandine
Heavy : Splint mail, Banded mail, Half plate, Full plate

Missing Ring mail, I think it is equivalent to chainmail but not sure

That's correct - can you update the help file, Brar?

[Brar]

I think, that the wood weapons does not show when you type construct weapon.

Just a thought

[Athon]

Another question, Imagine a project than need 2 days:
if I log back after 22 game hour, then log off. Since I haven't spend enough time offline to hit, does it starts back at hour zero or do I need only 2 more hours to finish the first day ?

Can this question be addressed? Twice yesterday I logged in to check my status and 21 and 22 hours had passed by, respectively. I would like to know if I hurt my time by doing this. Nysan said the base unit of time was days, so I hope that I didn't delay my craft by not logging off after a full 'day.'

[Nysan]

Nothing will reset your timers... outside of some roll back on the server's clock, which is rare. Every second you are offline adds to your current project's completion. Short version, logging in merely puts the project timers on "pause" until you log out again. There are no penalties for logging in, logging out, logging in.

[Athon]

Nothing will reset your timers... outside of some roll back on the server's clock, which is rare. Every second you are offline adds to your current project's completion. Short version, logging in merely puts the project timers on "pause" until you log out again. There are no penalties for logging in, logging out, logging in.

Ah, good! That is music to my ears!

Thanks!

[Belose]

What about getting a focus on weaponsmithing, and you have weaponsmithing and woodworking so you can make those weapons that need wood? You need 2 feats just to make weapons? After seeing all this, I think Braeck will stick with fighting and trying to make babies....

[Nysan]

You only need weaponsmithing trade focus. Woodworking adds to the list of craftables, it is still 'construct weapon' and falls under weaponsmithing, or at least it should. Same applies to wooden shields, they fall under armorsmithing's trade focus.

[Athon]

I'm not here to complain/whine. i just want to give you my feedback on mining/smelting.

I cannot thank you enough for the current changes! Having metal qualities makes a world of difference! It's so good knowing what we're making!

With that being said, I am actually more frustrated with the current system than the previous system in regards to mining and smelting.. Having identifiable metals is much better than the old system, don't get me wrong. I'm just irritated that I now have far more qualities of metal to deal with. Previously, if I was to smelt steel or mithril, I would get about three different qualities of metal, with the highest-quality taking up about 50% of my supply. This was slightly difficult to deal with, but I had enough of each quality to make quite a few pieces of armour. Now, I have to mine 80 pieces of ore just to get 7 or 8 ingots of similar quality to smith one piece of high-quality (or better) armor.

I am a GM miner/smelter. I have 17 str, 16 con. I have 'lucky' luck. I am also able to boost my strength about 4 points with divine power. And yet, I am smelting low and average quality metal of even the 'easy' metals (copper and silver for example) more than 50% of the time from high/superior/outstanding ore. I am statted properly and I have spent hours upon hours getting to GM mine and smelt. I feel like at those levels, I should be mining and smelting the 3 highest-quality ore and metal, period. The only exceptions, in my opinion, should be mithril, adamantite (if it's in the game) and maybe titanium (I have not found all the metals so there could be other high-quality I don't have on this list). These metals should have a greater range of qualities as they are the best in the game, I get that.

As it stands right now, I am disregarding any low and average ore that I mine. I try to dump them on newbies if I can but those are few and far between. The new crafting system has SIGNIFICANTLY lowered the rate at which metal is consumed (i.e. I used to smith 400 pieces of metal in 30 mins, now I smith 16 a day). This means all this low and average ore is just going to waste.

Please don't take this as a power-hungry whine, as that is not my intent. I'm just a bit frustrated that after 300 pieces of iron ore, I still only have 5 pieces of outstanding steel. I'd hate to see what it's like to craft a masterwork mithril plate piece.

[Nysan]

This is really 2 concerns in 1: Mining quality and Smelting quality.

Personally, I have no problems with mining quality. I have a GM miner and lower skilled miner (novice, I think), so I have a nice comparison experience. There is a large difference between the two skill levels, not to mention several lower level qualities the novice tends to mine. I do not feel a GM miner should always, or even mostly, mine outstanding/superior/high quality ore. Mostly because a vein won't be full of outstanding ore. Average is the usual ore type, hence the 'average' title. If I mine 10 ore and 7 or 8 come out average, fine by me. It makes sense and I accept that.

Smelting quality is a whole different beast. I have passed on my concerns about the poor returns of smelting upstairs. I do not believe a GM smelter should get the best ingots possible every time. Would it be nice? Yeah sure, but it brings up balance concerns to have a 95% success rate. The current success rate is a bit low for my tastes, based on Gilain's tests and observations from other smelters. Outstanding ore smelting into average ingots just make me sad. So, we'll see.

Regarding surplus materials, in general, welcome to Gilain's world. In the old system, I tossed away tons of metal because of one smelting failure could impact the the quality of his armor. Nothing wrong with not using everything you mine/smelt, at least to me. As I told several folks in-game, find alternative uses for surplus metals. Gond Forge, lapidary, arrowheads (a spell that uses this as a component is underused in my eyes), heck the smelted metal itself is a component in at least one spell. *shrug* Will you find uses for all 400 pieces you spent last night mining/smelting? Doubtful, but there is more to metal than armor and weapons.

[Selveem]

Mostly because a vein won't be full of outstanding ore. Average is the usual ore type, hence the 'average' title. If I mine 10 ore and 7 or 8 come out average, fine by me. It makes sense and I accept that.

This was talked about before, but I'll mention it again: there should be no 'outstanding ore.' Ore is ore. There is no inherent quality like there is in gems; it'll always just be ore. What you do with it from there determines the 'quality' it becomes (namely how well you smelt the impurities from it).

I think the successes with smelting should determine what you get from it (and as a GM, it could be a range just like it is from mining, but you should be able to re-smelt it until it becomes "outstanding" if you failed the first time; the materials are still there).

That being said, Gilain, I do have a question: About how long is the entire process to produce a full piece of MW armor (or have you done it yet?)

[Lirith]

This was talked about before, but I'll mention it again: there should be no 'outstanding ore.' Ore is ore. There is no inherent quality like there is in gems; it'll always just be ore.

Ore is not just ore. You get different grades of ore depending how much mineral content there is in it, and the quality of metal obtained from the ore is dependent on the ore quality (less mineral content = less metal). Having said that, the smelting process is what will ultimately affect the quality of the metal obtained, and it is entirely possible for poor quality ore to produce good quality metal if the smelting is repeated and done properly.

I agree that it should be possible to re-smelt low-quality ingot into better quality ingots, but I'm not sure how this would work with the coding of the system as we have it.

[Eltsac]

I tend to think like Lirith that there are different qualities of ore.

Maybe having the possibility to smelt again 2 ingots to try to get 1 higher quality ingot ? or something like that (would get less metal trying to remove more impurities from the low quality ingots)
And you could have a limit according to your smelting level (_for exemple_... if you are only apprentice at smelting and you try to smelt 2 ingots of average quality to improve their quality, you could get a message like "your skill is not good enough to improve the quality of those ingots").

It would allow to get more higher quality ingots with work, even if it uses more ore, and it would also allow high level crafters to do something of all the extra low quality ore they have.

El & co

[Athon]

I'm not saying this is how it should work in FK, but this is pretty how much how it goes in real lfie:

There is no difference in "qualities" of ore. Quality in regards to metal is a vague term. At an atomic level, there is no difference between one atom and another atom of the same element. Some ore might have more of the actual metal in it, but that doesn't make it a higher quality - it just means you need more ore.

The process of smelting is simply "purifying" the metal, aka removing all of the impurities from the ore. At this point is the only time that "quality" should come into question, because the highest-'quality' metal is going to be that with the fewest impurities. We're talking fractions of a percent (almost all smelted metal is greater than 95% pure, with many processes allowing greater than 99.9% purity). In this regard, it doesn't matter where you mined the ore or 'how well' you mined the ore, but how effectively your smelting process purifies the ore.

I repeat, I'm not saying this is how it should work in FK, but I wouldn't oppose it, either. I just wanted to clear some air.

[Eltsac]

Well... I indeed use the word "quality" for ore to say if the ore has more or less metal/impurities in it (and not to describe the metal's quality).
It does not seem such a bad use of the word for me...
But English isn't my mother tongue.

It's only semantics to me

El

[Nysan]

That being said, Gilain, I do have a question: About how long is the entire process to produce a full piece of MW armor (or have you done it yet?)

As I have mentioned elsewhere, my in-game time is limited lately due to my current college work load. So, I have not been able to progress Gilain's projects as much as I would like. To the question at hand, no I have not crafted masterwork armor yet, for 2 reasons:

1. When I make MW armor, I'm going all out and making full plate. It doesn't feel right to spend time on MW scale mail for my first live server set.

2. Masterwork armor requires outstanding ingots, no other quality will work. Factor in my limited game time and the current success rate of smelting and you can understand the lack of outstanding ingots in my bags for projects.

However, if I remember my test port experiments... it took roughly 11 weeks for one piece of MW full plate armor with no failures. This may have changed since the system went live though, so take it as you will.

[Nysan]

As for mining and quality... Some things cannot translate into games perfectly. Yeah, RL ore doesn't have a quality and ingots are more about purity, but for game balance and simplifying code its just easier to have it in the current game form of qualities.

Resmelting ingots into higher quality ingots, personal opinion incoming... Maybe, but it would require some sacrifice and some new additions. 1 to 1 smelting into higher quality wouldn't be balanced. The game would be flooded with outstanding ingots within a week and that won't fly. However, I think of how we used to resmelt armor and weapons and got like 1/3 the metal back and something like that might work. Where's that old thread about turning metal into sheets to save space... Could adopt that. Smith 10 average ingots into a sheet and smelt the sheet for 1 or 2 high/superior quality ingots. Now, this is all theory. I have no idea if this is code-able. No harm in thinking out loud though.

[Athon]

Personally, I'm fine leaving the mining/smelting system as it currently is. I just would like to have a bit better success rate as a GM miner/smelter, especially with the smelting side of things. I feel like I get way too many low/average ingots from my high/superior/outstanding ore.

[Nysan]

Me too, I like what we have with maybe minor tweaks to the success rates. Its nice to brainstorm idea though, even if they don't get used.

[Nysan]

Alright. Got some time in-game and work a large supply or iron(steel), silver, and titanium ore. Success rates is definately under-preforming. So, yeah.... we'll see what happens.