Hedgerow Hall

Well, I've put the crafting system in with a single test item: the humble leaf blanket.

Crafting should hold few surprises to people who remember the original version, though the interface is a little more descriptive than a verb and then a long input menu.

There's a similar range of different item qualities available, though the quality of items produced at a given skill level is a lot more regular/less swingy than it was in the original version. While repetition of a task does not increase your skill, it does increase your mastery of the given item recipe you're using, though there's a ceiling on that which is based on your skill and the recipe's difficulty.

My plan is to have the basic recipes come just from learning the associated crafting skill to the appropriate level, but the fact that recipes exist as distinct objects in the code now means that it's possible to make some more rare recipes that have to be learned in other ways. All recipes will be teachable, if you learn them up to a certain level.

Items that can be damaged have a condition track that parallels the quality track. An item in top condition has the same condition as its quality (that is, an average quality sword can't be in better than average condition). The item's effective quality for most purposes is its condition. This is a more intuitive simplification of how things worked in the original version.

More items (including blankets and cups) can be damaged and destroyed than could be in the original game... these items didn't suffer wear and tear because of limitations in how they were designed internally. Knowing what the system is going to require of these items from the beginning instead of making it up as I go along makes it a little easier to avoid those pitfalls.

Making cups and bedding breakable is part of my strategy for making resources more scarce and thus more valuable. Another is upping the amount of resources it takes to make an item. Blankets used six leaves in the original version only because the icon was made by stringing six leaves together, not because six was a good number for balance.

The other thing that making household items breakable will do is give more of a purpose to having multiple tiers of durability. Metal cups > wood cups > bark cups > leaf cups, for instance. Also, since silver and especially gold are not very durable, this means fancy stuff will require careful maintenance if it's frequently used.