Yet Another Metalworking Rework

[Rias]

Okay, we've got a newish metalworking system yet again. First, some important points:

- If something isn't working or doesn't feel right: DON'T PANIC! This hasn't been heavily tested yet and things may change with feedback. Some things may be wonky or broken or in need of tweaking.
- Feedback is important. Remember to post feedback here in this thread if you want it to be seen, as chat is ephemeral and often not seen by game staff.
- Legacy characters with any "Forging: General" skill now have those skill levels in the "Metalworking" skill. The other forging category skills are not in use but the skill levels remain (hidden) on characters in case we ever want to utilize any of them somehow.

Now on to some more informative points about the system itself: Each recipe now has a skill level associated with it, and skillgains require that the crafter be working on a sufficiently challenging recipe for their skill level. In other words, you'll occasionally need to move on to other recipes to keep getting gains. No more getting to the skill cap simply by forging nails all day every day. On that note, there are currently no recipes with a high enough skill challenge to get someone anywhere near the current 2500 skill cap. I don't feel every skill needs to be able to reach that cap. If you can't find any more challenging recipes to continue increasing your skill: Congratulations, you're a peak metalworker!

Forged item quality is determined by rolls, meaning the quality of your items will vary. (Morale does affect these rolls! Turn on the ShowProcs option to see when that happens.) For now, quality can be anywhere from Terrible (-3) to Average (0). Qualities higher than that are not yet implemented, and will take additional steps after the initial forging (with the ability for metalsmiths to potenially improve the quality of most existing items).

Anyone can poke around with a few basic metalworking recipes, and get up to a small amount of skill with them. Forging ingots out of blooms is a good way to start. Further groups of recipes are unlocked via ability points, which can be found by ASKing the appropriate trainer about training, such as Tor in Shadgard or Evan in Corvus. The current abilities are:

* Metalcasting Basics
* Forging Basic Tools
* Forging Bladed Weapon Components
* Forging Crushing Weapon Components
* Forging Ranged Weapon Components
* Forging Basic Armor Components

There are more to come as well, including the Forging Advanced Armor Components ability. And yes, that is a goodly number of abilities! The design intent here is to let metalworking be an involved craft that requires investment and allows potential specialization, rather than existing as a side gig that anyone can master on a whim. Expect many of the other crafts to follow in a similar vein so that there's more opportunity for individuals to be considered valuable specialists instead of any one character being a one-stop-shop for everything crafting-related.

Repairs of many metal items that have been reduced to 80% or below durability now require access to that recipe in order to repair. Doesn't apply to some more complex multi-component items (such as metal armors) yet.

The wiki now has a "Metalworking" page which can also be viewed in-game by typing: HELP METALWORKING

Trivial updates: Evan's boots are bronze-toed now instead of iron-toed, and references to "Blacksmith" in Corvus have been updated to "Smithy" or "Metalsmith" as pedants will point out that "blacksmith" traditionally refers specifically to smithing of iron and/or steel, which are forbidden in Corvus. For similar reasons, this BBS section is now called "Metalworking" instead of "Blacksmithing".

P.S. Feel free to discuss things in chat, but once you've gathered your thoughts and/or come up with ideas or suggestions, post them here so they get seen by staff and can have an actual impact!
P.P.S. Ability points no longer require levels, but many have minimum skill requirements. The vestigial COGG experience/level system is still slated for complete removal.

[Zeldryn]

Just wanted to pop in quickly here and say that the effort, and the elaboration on the changes in system are appreciated as always.

Very eager to start bullying my local artisans again. Thank you kindly.

[Smoothcoffee]

So just out of curiosity. My artisan was left with sort of an ungodly amount of metals in bars. Should they just be chucked?

[Zeldryn]

Also popping in here with a follow-up observation.

It would appear that the legacy smithing abilities are still on people's sheets, and we don't presently have the ability to unlearn abilities. Just wanted to pop this here quick so it could be corrected so people could get to thoroughly testing!

[tunafish]

I cannot seem to get into metalworking at present because I have 0 skill, know no metalworking recipes, and don't gain any skill from asking Tor for training. Maybe a 0 skill ability for basic metalworking can be added to give access to basic recipes and repairing lightly damaged items?

[artus]

Finally, it came!

Thank you for the awesome work, as always. I'm not learning anything yet as the change is going to make planning abilities more challenging without a bigger picture. There's a bug, though. We oldies goldies are still stuffed on abilities and unable to unlearn them and only some are shown, so right now we can't really do anything much yet. Could anything be done about this, please? Not an urgency though so suppose it's just a bug or something.

[Vazbol]

Right, I still have the old blacksmithing abilities taking up slots. So still unable to do much else other than smelt bronze ingots. Curious if those deprecated abilities can be removed from people's sheets, or can be converted.

Also, I have noticed something with the smithing categories. The forging: bladed components ability has a lot of crafts under it. From swords, daggers, spears and axes. The list for crush seems sparcer. Now, this is probably due to a lack of other crafts not being yet implemented, but someone is going to get a lot more out of one weapon category over the other at the moment. however, this is assuming other abilities won't force someone to specialize their bladed craft more to get better qualities. Just thought I'd poke at that, since we used to have blade and heavy headed crafts to split the lists up.

[RememberNehima]

I'm a bit confused by this bit in the main post: "Anyone can poke around with a few basic metalworking recipes, and get up to a small amount of skill with them. Forging ingots out of blooms is a good way to start. Further groups of recipes are unlocked via ability points..."

The way this reads to me suggests the intent was anyone should be able to dip a toe in and do the very basics without an ability investment. So you would be able to mine ore and process it into ingots, but making anything more complicated would require an ability. If this is true, then there is a discrepancy: operating the furnace at all requires the Metalcasting Basics ability. The market also doesn't pay for crushed ore.

After observing another character work, another point is that the furnace doesn't seem to actually require a flux substance for heating copper up to cast into ingots. I'm not sure if that is an optional step, if copper just doesn't require it, or if something's broken there.

[Squeak]

After observing another character work, another point is that the furnace doesn't seem to actually require a flux substance for heating copper up to cast into ingots. I'm not sure if that is an optional step, if copper just doesn't require it, or if something's broken there.

The flux is likely only required for making alloys.

[artus]

I'd honestly love it if metalcasting basics and forging basics could be combined into one ability, because it looks a bit weird. Metalcasting is what you need to operate the furnace and forging basic is what you need to unlock other forging categories. Forging basic has a prereq of 100 metalworking, which, in theory, you need to get metalcasting first to work the furnace and then get forging basic, abandon metalcasting and get a 1 month cooldown if ability unlearn is to stay the same.
If what Nahima said is true, then it's a bit odd that you can just shape blooms into ingots without an ability when you need the furnace to make blooms in the first place. It seems like an oversight. I'm not sure.

[Lysse]

Can't you just buy ingots off of the market, and forge one of the other couple of items that anyone with 0 in the metalworking skill can make? Or pay someone with the metalcasting ability to make you a bloom (assuming that's not a bug or an oversight). I feel like taking on the front-end gathering part of blacksmithing isn't really part of "dipping your toe" in. But making some nails and other base components does feel like a pretty introductory experience.

[Rias]

Everyone should now have access to the ingot, stake, and tiny rod forging recipes at 0 skill and no abilities.

As Lysse said, you can buy ingots or get them from others. If you want to provide your own, you'll need that ability investment to work the furnace.

Not requiring flux is ... hm. Probably intended? I think at some point I decided requiring flux for the smelting was an annoyance that didn't feel very good, and so I disabled it. But flux or something similar to that same kind of thing could still be used for alloys and rarer metal types, probably.

Old metal bars don't work with the new system. I'd say hold onto them if they're rare metals so they can get updated at some point, but if it's more common stuff just toss it. Some people really did have insane amounts of those stocked up.

I'm still deciding whether it's best to just remove all abilities characters have that don't exist in the current system. I probably will, since I still have all the old data in case I ever need to know whether characters had old version of the skills at some point.

We'll have more crushing weapon options once more crushing weapon types are restored/introduced.

[Adresin]

Will there be a way to drop abilities like we had on cogg? Right now there's no way to do so at all.

With things coming in gradually, understandably, it's really hard to plan both for legacy chars and those of us who can't get into any guilds yet. It'd be nice to be able to play around with what does work for now, but not be permanently locked into something especially since we don't even know what's in the pipeline.

It is nice to see one of the crafts up and running again, even though I know it's not 100% complete yet. Thank you for that!

[Squeak]

Random curiosity - Will you be adding more recipes to encompass a wider variety of things, or giving crafts people a way to modify end products somehow? For instance, a one time option upon completion that allows one to choose from a pre-determined list of pre-fixes - i.e. you could have single-edged, serrated, twisted (for stilettos and the like) ... I dunno. I'm sure there's plenty more. Perhaps dependent on end rolls or what have you.

[tunafish]

Thanks for setting up those 0-skill recipes!

[tunafish]

I've spent another day in the workyard and I have some feedback and a bug report. I was able to work my metalworking skill up to 60 with forging ingots and that feels rather generous since the ingots can be re-smelted into blooms to be reforged into ingots. I don't get anything to take to market but at least I'm not using up material to make poor quality items that I also couldn't take to market. That feels really good because I'm paying time and sweat to get skill instead of paying time, sweat, and riln, which would feel worse when starting out and funds are tight.

By the time my skill stopped going up from working on ingots, I was able to produce the 25-skill recipes and get market quality about 90% of the time, which felt good. I only had a half-dozen or so items to throw away by the time I reached 100 skill (which is where my gains stopped completely). If what existed now was the intended end state I would ask for messaging when we mess up a roll (like we get with chiseling gems out of ore) and that partially-forged items be treated like ingots/blooms so they could be thrown back into the furnace for smelting, or some kind of reclamation bin that we could toss low quality items into to get credit for ingots (or other stuff?). BUT, if we'll eventually be able to improve item quality from poor to market ready, those other suggestions aren't really needed.

As far as pace, I paid for skill training the whole time and had easy access to metal I'd saved up from mining when this rework was first announced, so going from 0-100 took less than 16 hours, without training I would guess it would take less than 32 hours. I could tolerate a slower rate of skill gain, but certainly not everyone will feel that way.

I haven't checked out all the recipes, but I think there is room to make things more interesting there. Some items sell better than others, so smiths will naturally want to make more of those and less of other items, and some items are better for training because they have a higher number of steps for the amount of metal they use up (the recipes list how many "steps" they have and each step is a chance for skill gain; if there are two recipes that both use a whole ingot but one has 10 steps and another has 30, a smith can get more training out of the 30 step recipe - that skill gain opportunity is valuable even if the item sells for less). I'd love to see more intentional variation in the recipes like that, since only a few outliers sell better or are better for training and everything else seems to sell for roughly the same and are in the same general neighborhood for training benefit and all the recipes in the same tier grant the same skill gain (at least, this is true for all the 25-skill recipes, they all give the same gain per step/success).

And last, the bug report: my skill stopped going up at 100 when working on 25-skill recipes. I'd assumed that meant it was time to move up to the next most difficult tier but I didn't gain any skill from working on 50-skill recipes, 75-skill recipes, 100-skill tool recipes, or 100-skill ranged recipes. I know I should be getting skill for those because they're challenging enough that I haven't managed to make any market quality items from all the pieces tested.

[Deborah]

Hello everyone,
I have some feedback to share. As I continue crafting recipes and checking out new ones, 25 points at a time, I have now reached Metalworking 90.500 and have been crafting buckles since I was at Metalworking 80. However, more than 70% of my crafted items are either crude or cheap.
I am not great with numbers, but I have noticed that harder recipes require more resources and don't allow one to earn enough riln to cover the cost of ingots (especially for those who haven't picked up mining). Would it be possible to find a solution to this issue? I have a couple of suggestions:
1. Raise the prices on the market so that items of average quality can be sold for a price that at least allows crafters to break even with riln.
2. Decrease the probability that an item will be of bad quality.
Currently, ingots can be smelted and reused, but other crafted items cannot. Therefore, I believe there could be a fair compromise that benefits both the game mechanics and the dedicated players.
I look forward to hearing your opinions on this matter.