Procedural Crafting Changes (For After Pre-Alpha)

[ikabod-kee]

• [ ] Remove Elasticity, as it's a confusing stat for players.
• [ ] Make swing speed constant, only changable via modifiers and accessories. Alternatively, keep this as an averaged stat.
• [ ] Make other stats additive or use some other method than averaging. This is to reduce player confusion and prevent them from having to use a wiki.
• [ ] #1570
• [ ] #1339 (fixes most problems)

Making procedural crafting work has been proving to be very difficult. I wonder if there's a different way of doing it...

Anyways, don't think too hard about it. Use your brain for more important things!

[Argmaster]

• I am pretty sure weight should be additive, as this is exactly what players would expect.
• At the same time I think most mean is the most intuitive choice for durability. Although we could verify what would be the impact of geometric or harmonic mean or some other way to reduce impact of outliers. I am not a math guy so the second part may be completely pointless idea.
• Some of the modifiers could stack additively or exponentially (eg. fragile could be exponential to prevent all diamond pickaxes, heavy modifier should be additive so it is intuitive)

[Argmaster]

I want to point out that making swing time constant and using modifiers / effects to change it doesn't really improve our situation. We still have 3 variables, only the means we use to alter those variables change. It doesn't solve the problem, it only moves it to a different place. I still don't understand what exactly are our goals, this is the same situation as last time when we opened rebalancing issue #1430, since then we didn't meet to brainstorm, we were basically shutting down each others ideas in text without moving forward. Since #1430 we started working on #1466 but it doesn't talk much about our goals for balance. We need a document that would specify which materials in what way should be better or worse than others and it should give rough numbers what "good" or "bad" means, what values of stats should be common, what values rare and what values impossible to get. That document should also include rough specification of accessories, possibly armor and weapons, without that everything we change stuff in one place it will break in few other places. For now we are just clashing our unspoken imaginations of how tools should be balanced and apparently these imaginations are nowhere close to each other.

[ikabod-kee]

I just want a system that makes intuitive sense to the player. That is it.

[ikabod-kee]

Here's what I would consider good and bad:

Good:

• System that lets the player experiment with different combinations of materials
• Different materials have different values and modifiers that have a clear advantage or disadvantage over another

Bad:

• Arbitrary stats that the player can't possibly know about unless they look at a wiki (aka elasticity)
• Players being confused on how to craft the optimal tool
• Unclear stats

[ikabod-kee]

So, using modifiers is the best play here, as it allows the player to see how and why their tool is different.

[Argmaster]

I respect what you consider good and bad but I must point out that different behaviors will be intuitive for the player depending on their gaming background / experience, knowledge about irl physics and engineering and their imagination, so that is not a precise specification.

We need to establish what we think is intuitive / what out current community considers intuitive and stick with it. You can't please everyone and if we don't set clear rules we will re-balancing the system over and over again every time someone says that they are confused about something.

This is why following irl physics is beneficial, as it already sets a framework of how stuff should work and interact, but that would be quite boring IMO, so we need to set our own rules. And those rules need to specify how we want different materials to behave on their own and how they should interact with other materials.

I our case there are too many possible combinations of materials in all possible positions, so we can't just check all of them every time. But we still can take some common / important designs and set rules for them, then interpolate that for other designs. We need strict rules for what stats we consider min, mean, max for tools so we can design stuff within those boundaries. Goals first, Implementation later.

Current approach of trial and error without precise planning already let us down multiple times, how many times do we have to redesign procedural crafting system before we finally sit down and design it as a whole, without hoping that new features will magically fix existing systems?

[IntegratedQuantum]

Remove Elasticity, as it's a confusing stat for players.

I think it's not the stat itself, but rather the fact that it isn't obvious in the UI that some slots behave different than others. Same is true for the tip by the way, there is no way for a player to figure out that the tip is different, and even worse it's really unintuitive that only one tip is special. You might argue that it is intuitive that the tip is special, but honestly it isn't at all, since in most other games the entire pickaxe head is made of the same material.

So what we need no matter what is some way of telling the player about it. I think what we should do is introduce some kind of slot tag system. e.g. the tip would have tags .tip and .head, and then diamond would have modifier increase damage by +10 when in tip slot and iron would have a modifier reduces time to swing by 0.1 s when in head slot Ideally we could also color code both the words and the slots to make it easy to see visually.

The only problem is that we are at risk of overloading the player with too much information, so we need to find a way to keep it simple, at least at the start of the game.

[ikabod-kee]

I suggest adding a tooltip for certain slots, telling them how much it will effect the stats.

[IntegratedQuantum]

But wouldn't you then need to hover over all slots and check them individually?

I think we need a solution that directly shows you the big picture.

[ikabod-kee]

Maybe having icons for the different parts of the tool would work out. So slots with identical stats would have the same icon. (also, you should check out #1586. Download it and play around a bit, see how you like it!