CLOK BBS

A few updates to Lapidary:

- You must now polish a gemstone down before attempting to facet it. (Some gem types are still unable to be faceted by design.)
- You now gain facet styles as you become more skilled in Lapidary.
- Traders will gain facet styles faster if they take advantage of the Lapidary ability within the guild.
- Facet types now have difficulty ratings.
- Easier cuts yield no bonus.
- Difficult cuts yield a bonus to the sell price if the craftsman manages to take the gem beyond the 'crude' stage so the cut is visible.
- Faceted gems are now worth more than polished gems.

Landion,

Does geomancy have any effect with lapidary as it does with mining?

Arphaxad

Not currently, no.

Why is a polished gem worth less than the raw chunk of that gem?

I'm not the lapidary guru, but I'll put forth a possible explanation: You managed to mess up and mar the gem to the point that it's uneven, rough, and ugly. It would be worth more as an unprocessed gem that could potentially be turned into something better.

Think if you were making a shirt out of silk and messed up. I think the raw silk cloth would have been worth something, since it could be made into something else. But who wants a shirt that has an extra arm hole or something? Nobody would buy it at that point. Unlike metal which can be melted down and recycled, mess up a gem and there's nothing you can do with it.

Well...silk and stone are two different materials but if that is the reasoning...

That silk happened to be used in the example isn't the point. I was trying to demonstrate that it's not just gems that the concept applies to. The point is that gems can't be salvaged once they're messed up. An unprocessed chunk of gemstone has the potential to be brilliantly polished and faceted - a fair value. A gem that has been nicked, chipped, and had half of the side accidentally ground away is going to be pretty worthless, regardless of what it's made out of. There's nothing you can do to salvage it. It's ruined. That's why your gem that you attempted to polish (and didn't do a very good job, for whatever reason) is selling for less than the raw chunk. Does that make sense or am I still not being clear?

Also keep in mind that this is conjecture on my part - I have had absolutely zero involvement in the lapidary system.

What is happening is that you are getting a quality bonus to your ore from mining. This is likely because your mining is significantly higher.

When you turn around and begin to use lapidary, you are lowering the quality if you are not skilled enough yet. Thus the system calculates a lower price.

If you are not a talented stone smith, you are not going to be increasing the quality of gems and buyers are not going to be paying you more. Lapidary simply has a chance to increase the quality significantly. It does not promise an increase. A master stone smith could triple the value of a raw gem. An unskilled worker, or someone practicing their skill has a chance to decrease quality

This is exactly as it should be.

Not necessarily. Even if someone does not polish a gem correctly it is still worth more than the raw ore. The polish would be to get the residual dirt off and the final faceting of the gem to make it more valuable.
If I run gold ore through a table mill the gold hasnt been smelted to purity but it is still worth more than if it was in the ore.

I imagine what is happening when you polish a gem and it sells for less is that you did a particularly poor job. You ended up with a flawed gem, due to a mishap while polishing it. Unlike metal, which can be re-smelted and you can just try again, a flawed gem is forever flawed. There's no way to repair it or get anything out of it at that point. Thus the value will go down. I would pay more for an unprocessed chunk of gemstone that could be polished and faceted into something nice than I would for a chipped and cracked gem that had been marred due to a polishing mishap.

Invest in something that can be turned into something extremely valuable, or buy something that is broken and can never be repaired. What choice would you make?

Will you adjust the market so that gemstones appear in there when sold?

Main problem is that I don't want a million and a half different entries in the marketplace for each quality tier of each gem. This is the reason they're currently not available for buyback.

Could you open different stands or sub-selections in the market place for buy back?
• Trinkets
• Gemstone
• Cut Gemstones
• Lumber
• Butchered Meats
• Hides
• Bars
• Ores

>List
What stand would you like to look at?
>stall 6
1. Raw Wolf Meat
2. Cooked Wolf Meat
>stall 3
1. Crude Quarts
2-5 other quarts
>stall 6 1
You purchase raw wolf meat.

I was thinking a similar thing. Order in the market (or some new market command) gives a list of the item categories up for sale. You then look at that sub-list in the same way that you do with leathercrafting (for example, "lcraft clothes" gives you a list of clothes that you can make). This would also be useful in the pawnshop.

Yeah, the pawnshop is a nightmare, thanks to Landion and his accursed crafting!

Good ideas.