[enigma@zebedee]

I agree on that point - I don't see an inherent obsticle to implementing a crafting system on any MUD codebase.

Obviously its going to be easier on some than others - but that is always the case for anything you might want to develop.

Yes, banning them is an option. On certain muds I have seen theoretically banned bots run for a long time before being spotted though - and they are not always that easy to kill either.

Zebedee never banned bots (apart from client fast-follows which were too deadly in player killing) but I remember having an entertaining time confusing and/or killing the few bots that did appear from time to time while I was first playing up.

[Molly]

I don't really see why it would be hard to add crafting skills to an existing mud.

We are in the process of doing just that in my own mud, and it's just a question of either using already existing items as raw material for the different crafts, or creating a set of new items and then resetting them in appropriate places in the old zones. Not much of an issue for a reasonably good Builder.

We also have based the crafts not on code, but on scripts, set on the tools you use for the craft in question. This makes it possible for an entire group of Builders to work on the craft skills and frees the coder for other tasks.

So for each step of a craft, you need to wield a different tool and hold a raw material, and in some cases you need a second raw material in inventory too. Each step creates a new item, that you in turn need for the next step, together with a new tool.

The scripts are a bit tedious to make, but the system more or less prevents players from just making a trigger and then go AFK, since they have to be active during the entire operation, and some asvanced crafts require 10 different steps or more.

Crafts that involve some kind of metal or woodworking are particularly fun, since there are so many different kinds of metal ore and trees, and you may have to travel over half the world to find the right wood for the handle or the right alloy for the blade of your weapon.

I guess eventually there will be a new player economy developing, where some players, who like to explore, will collect the raw materials. and then sell them to the crafters, who prefer just sitting still and do the actual handicraft work. This is all good, since it provides something to do for different types of players, who got tired of Questing or killing mobs.

[Threshold]

[enigma@zebedee]

That is a very good description of why its hard to retrofit a _good_ crafting system into the game.

We have over 5000 rooms coded over the space of more than 10 years with active players from before 1995. Trying to retrofit crafting into that is certainly possible...but it is a very very big job and someone would have to come up with a very good case why we should spend our time on that rather than upgrading old areas/creating new areas/improving classes/creating new secret classes/etc.

Balance in particular would be tricky. If a crafted item is stronger than existing items on the game then no-one would bother with the existing items. If the crafted item was not better then no-one would bother with crafting. If crafting was a way to improve existing items then that now upgrades all of our experienced players and makes the game easier for them. Or we could reduce all weapons and then allow crafting to upgrade them again - but that now penalises people who dont want to get into crafting and increases the advantage of experienced players over inexperienced ones.

None of this is unsolvable - but its far easier to solve when initially designing a mud than it is to solve 10 years down the line.

[John]

Well after a quick look around in the archives I found which does say that each item is hard-coded seperately. I guess when it was imp'd it never occured to the coders to create a system where it had base items that were modifiable by certain items.

The crafting system will probably be re-coded one day, but the problem is Arm has TONS of ideas on how to make the game better (such as how to create better scripts for animals, adding smells to items and rooms, etc) that it probably won't be any time soon.

Thing is, with muds that have crafting systems, it is MUCH easier to create items then restringing (which is normally reserved for people who've proved themselves as good RPers, so typically isn't open to newbies) and it's also MUCH quicker then buying it from NPCs.

They also tend to be quite complex and it's A LOT of fun finding out how the system works.

A lot really. If the world changes (such as gates open and close in cities at certain times) then players will have to go somewhere where it doesn't change. You can randomise how the system works (such as have a forage command that you use to find the materials, then you have a success rate depending on their forage skill, so therefore they might not always get the materials), you can also have environmental changes that affect a player's stats and make them loose mvt points quicker. There is also the threat of aggressive NPCs killing you. It'd be VERY difficult to create a script in the right system. It's just like why don't fighters go in easy areas and create bots to kill all the animals?

[Maia]

I enjoy crafting for all sorts of reaons, many of which have already been mentioned: it's variety, it's cathartic, it's satisfying.  I also really appreciate a deep, complex crafting system that will, as Sanvean points out, enable me to revel in it as a problem-solving exercise, to enjoy the experimental testing of hypotheses.

But there is another reason why a good crafting system has become an absolutely must for me when I'm appraising MUDs, regardless of whether I intend my characters to craft or not.  

About the top of my list of priorities is immersiveness.  I'm looking for a place where I can feel that the character I'm creating is a living, breathing person, in a living, breathing environment.  I want my character to be able to interact not only the other PCs, not even only with the NPCs, but with the very world my character inhabits.  

Having been treated to examples of worlds that are very immersive in this fashion over the course of my MUDding career, I now find that if my character can't take a lump of a world and fashion it in some way, I feel like my arms have been cut off.  The world just feels that much more fake, that much less alive.


It's obvious that you don't personally enjoy crafting, Kallekins, and that's fine.  It takes all sorts, and that's kind of the point.  Crafting adds another dimension to your gameworld.  Those who enjoy killing will kill.  Those who enjoy trading will trade.  Those who enjoy politicking will get up to all sorts of devious plotting.  But I really can't see how providing a place in your world for the many, many people out there who apparently enjoy crafting can do anything but enrich the mixture of personalities there, and how can that be a bad thing?



Maia, wondering if the popularity of crafting has anything to do with the fact that few of us these days spend much time IRL working with our hands

[Molly]

We’ve been out of beta for about 5 years now.
We have 16140 rooms (155 zones). Of these about 6000 rooms are Wilderness Grid or Mine, that still leaves 10000 rooms, 140 ‘real’ zones, (all custom, there are no stock zones in 4D).
We have 7360 prototype objects.
I’d say this is a pretty large world, right?
Our player base is still a bit limited since we don’t cater for the mainstream. We rarely peak above 25 players, but I don’t really see what that has got to do with things, since each new feature we add gets on top of and integrated with everything already existing.

Our mud started out as pure hack’n’slash and went from that to being heavily Quest based. We are now in the process of adding the craft skills on request from several players, who want a more roleplay oriented alternative to killing mobs.

So we started out with adding simple trades like fishing, farming, gardening and lumberjacking, so Newbies would have a chance to earn some money without risking their neck too much. Then we added a 1000 room mine, with 10 different kinds of metal ore. Players are mining all the time, but not mainly for the ore, even though that already pays pretty well in certain shops, but because somewhere in that mine is a totally awesome sword, that develops when you use it. You gotta give them an incentive, hehe. (Incidentally that sword is so hard to get that only a couple of players have managed so far, even though the feature has been in for almost a year).

So now we are in the process of adding farming, to get leather, wool, milk and eggs, and a whole scale of integrated craft skills to get an economic and IC use for all those basic raw materials. Our craft system might be different from what other muds usually use, we do tend to do things a bit differently here.

The fact that our world already is pretty big is not a hinder for this, it’s actually useful, since the crafts are based on raw materials, and some of them need to be pretty hard to find. So many of the materials already exist, which makes things easier, and in the cases where we need to make some new stuff, the large world presents an opportunity to spread this out in the already existing zones. You don’t have the same opportunities in a small mud.

Naturally there is the question of balancing, but you have that same problem each time you add a new zone to the world, or the stats of the objects in the game would keep spiralling up all the time. So it’s either a question of dealing with the problem or stop developing the mud.

Balancing in our game is based on two things: Time and challenge.

Time: It takes a given time to kill a certain mob. How long depends on the level of the mob, the level of the player, the equipment of the mob and the equipment of the player. It also takes a given time to get to – and above all to FIND – the right mob, with that choice piece of equipment you want.

Challenge: Basically this depends on how tough you are compared to the mob. In our game challenge is also based on Quests. To find a certain choice item, you may need to solve several puzzles, find some hidden ‘portals’ or containers, run errands for a picky mob all over the world, and maybe on top of all kill a tough mob too. This too takes time, and also the smart players get rewarded rather than the ‘powerplayers’.

So all we need to do is to apply the same balancing principle to the crafts.

Each craft naturally is a bit time consuming. Not too much, that would be just boring. But basically each craft has several steps. You can sell what you produce at each step, but the more you develop the product, the more valuable it gets. Also each craft is based on raw materials. The more rare the material and the harder it is to get, the more the product is worth. And to actually produce armour or weapons that equal what you can find in the game, you have to go through all steps, and use the absolute top raw material.

Take one of the easier crafts, cooking, as an example. You use a cooking book with 10 different recipes; each dish has a market value in different inns, based on how hard the ingredients are to get. So let’s say you want to bake a simple apple pie:
You can grow the wheat for it yourself and have it ground to flour in a mill, then milk a cow and have the milk processed to butter and cream in a dairy.
The eggs you get in a chicken farm, but they need to be fresh, or they will either hatch or rot. *snicker*. (Of cause, if they hatch, you get one of the ingredients for chicken casserole instead).
The apples you can pick from a tree in an orchard, but since apples only ripen in autumn, the season needs to be right. Sugar and salt were luxuries in medieval times. Naturally they already exist in the game, but only in a pretty remote city, which is hard to get to. (This city was originally made as a centre for poisoners, and the salt and sugar was put in as a decoy for arsenic. Now they get a new economic use).
Finally the spices; ginger and cinnamon. These grow in Mediterranean countries, a pretty long journey for most.

Or take one of the more advanced trades, like weaponsmith. You don’t just sit down and type ‘forge sword’ and then listen to a number of echoes. Making a decent sword involves several crafts, like woodworking and leather working (for the handle), metallurgy, forging, honing and perhaps tinkering, for the blade and finally jewel-cutting and goldsmithing for the hilt.

So to start from the bottom, you need to fell a tree, get it sawed at a sawmill, and then whittle a handle. And to get a top product the wood you use must come from a very rare tree which only grows on a remote Greek island.
Then you must slaughter an ox for its hide, scrape the hide, tan it, cut it to straps and wind them round the handle.
For the blade you need to first mine for the metal ore (a pretty risky business), then smelt the ore and make an alloy (and for a top result you need all ten kinds of ore in the right proportions). Then forge the blade, harden it and hone it - and maybe tinker it to increase the damage, (but with a percentage risk of shattering the blade and destroying all the work you put down so far).
And finally you need to find a rare gemstone for the blade, cut it (with a large percentage risk of shattering the stone), polish it, and finally use goldsmith skills to assemble the weapon.

That’s why I believe a player economy will develop from the crafts, in the same way that it has developed around every rare or hard-to-get item in the game. Depending on disposition and game style, some players, who prefer to roleplay and socialise, will do the actual crafting. While others, with an interest in exploring, will specialise in getting the raw materials together and then selling them to the crafters for a price set by the ‘market’. A simple matter of supply and demand.

And that’s why I don’t think it’s hard to implement a new craft system in an already existing mud. All it takes is a careful design of the craft system, a Head Builder with a good grip of the existing world, a couple of basic scripts, which can be variated with different echoes and vnums for different crafts, and a good Building staff to help with the work. Because this is mainly a build project, not code.

[OnyxFlame]

[John]

[Soki]

[Soki]

[Ogma]

No risks in crafting? This is my favorite line from the deathlog:

Joecrafter at (sometime) by a tragic lumbering accident.

[Soki]

Hey! I pre-empted my comment with the whole tragic bakery fire and the lab explosion!

One time in a mining camp....

[Molly]

Perhaps the number of rooms doesn't matter all that much, but it does matter. I mainly mentioned it  as an illustration of our world size. What REALLY matters however, is the number of existing objects, in particular the objects that are either wepons/armour or potential raw material for crafted items.

That's where the balancing problem comes in. If the crafted items are too good compared with the effort needed to get a similarly valued item by just playing the game, then most players would stop playing altogether, and just sit there forging weapons and armor all day long. If the items you make are too crappy, nobody would bother with the crafts. That's how most players work, they go for the easiest option.

So you need a range of crafted items that correspond with the already existing equipment. The easy-to-make stuff is for Newbies, nobody but the shopkeepers will buy those, but Newbies usually are in need of money. The high class items will need a lot more time, effort and legwork, and also potential dangers, which will be achieved by planting the raw materials for those in some pretty nasty locations - (and that, incidentally, is why world size matters too). But then you also need that little extra incentive, like the artifacts in the game that load very seldom, or that legendary sword in the Mine. If the players know that there is a chance - however slim, maybe 1:10 000 - that they might actually create a 'kick-ass' item while crafting, then many of them will keep trying.

But I still fail to see how the size of playerbase affects it. Regardless of size all muds have a similar problem; the old players, the ones who have been there for ages. If they are 50 or 500 doesn't really matter, the problem still exists. We have players who have been with us since before we went out of beta. They know the world inside out, they have seen it all, done it all, defeated all the toughest mobs in the game, collected all the best available equipment, maxed their stats in any possible way. They don't really have any incentive to play any more.

If they had any sense they'd leave the mud and start fresh somewhere else, but sense very rarely enters mudding. Players are amazingly loyal to their home mud. So they stay on, and either turn to roleplay or just sit at the fountain all day, bitching about how bored they are. And, as most Administrators would agree, bored players are the devil's best friend, since they are likely to get into mischief.

So the crafts are partly for the oldtimers, something new for them to try. Not all of them will bother with them, since player preferences are vastly different, but some will. In fact the demands for the crafts came from just that category of players. The other target group for the crafts is the Newbies. We'd like to attract a slightly different clientel than we have right now, more roleplay oriented. And with the crafts new players get a chance of advancing without the mindless killing of mobs. They get exp. points from crafting, and they get money. And they also get a sort of platform as roleplayers, an actual trade, where your skills can develop with time.

As for the economy, we already have two parallell economies in the mud. One is money based of course, the other is Quest tokens. The tokens are used to buy things like personalised equipment, crashproof houses, personal pets and vehicles, and also to restore lost personal equip if you hit a DT or lose you gear in another way. The tokens have a floating market value in money, which is set by the players. Supply and demand. Some are good at Quests, others couldn't solve the easiest riddle, but are good at powerplay. Buyers and sellers.

So the craft system will just have to fit into that system. For the easy stuff you get money, for the harder you get yet another chance to earn Quest Tokens. And of course the off chance of every once in a while actually succeed in creating a top item. The best crafted things will be quite as good as the best ones you can get from killing mobs. But not quite as good as the stuff you get from the toughest Quests, because we want to reserve that for the really good players, the ones that use their brain as well as their fighting skills.

But the size of the playerbase just doesn't enter this equation. Sure, there are problems that need to be dealt with while introducing the system, but the playerbase isn't one of them.

[Soki]