Crafting

Crafting is one of Untold Dawn's signature systems. Characters can create a wide variety of different objects with different skills from different materials, and in many cases customize those objects to their specific desired look.

The majority of crafts in-game right now works via the tcrafts system, though there are also legacy crafts available under the old crafts system, and tailoring currently uses its own separate system for clothes.

The Tcrafts System

Under the hood, Untold Dawn's tcrafts system is simply a way for the code to make different outcomes happen after a skill check, so you might find a lot of things that other games wouldn't call crafts as falling under this system. Fishing, for example, is a 'craft' that requires bait as your materials, a fishing pole as your tool, and may or may not reward you a fish! This might seem a little strange to think about, but in practice it's as simple as typing the action you want to do (e.g., fish spot).

All of the crafts that use the tcrafts system have a common kind of structure, so once you get the basics down it's simple to expand. First, we'll discuss looking at recipes to understand their requirements, then show the process of actually making a few items.

Looking at Recipes

The many different things your character can make can be seen by typing tcrafts:

tcrafts

Available crafts:

assembling                    cooking                       tools                         

digging                        woodcutting                fishing                       

tailoring                      fabrication                   gathering                     

games                          skinning                      medicines                     

domestic                      hydroponics                   

You can then type tcrafts <category> to see the recipes within a category that are available to you. Your character gains access to crafting recipes based on your level in the relevant skill, so every time you level up you'll probably find more things visible on this list! If you want to know EVERYTHING available in the crafting system, a full list of recipes can be seen in our game dashboard for Patreon subscribers.

Let's look at assembling, our biggest and most-used category:

tcrafts assembling

Available crafts:

assemble copper-toilet-seat    assemble plastic-toilet       

assemble iron-mixing-bowl      assemble iron-shovel-blade   

assemble stainless-steel-shovel-blade assemble iron-cooking-pot     

assemble hemp-single-mattress assemble hemp-double-mattress

assemble hemp-king-mattress    assemble hemp-super-king-mattress

assemble iron-table-folding-mechanism assemble copper-table-folding-mechanism ...

The list goes on and on, but let's focus on looking at one specific recipe, the shovel blade. We can do that with tcrafts <category> <recipe name>:

tcrafts assembling assemble iron-shovel-blade

(assembling) assemble iron-shovel-blade

You need assembling at level 4 for this craft.

Phase 1

This phase requires an item in room with assembler tags that can store materials

This phase consumes 0 minutes of effort.

Phase 2

You roll assembling during this phase.

This phase requires an item in room with assembler tags that can store materials

This phase consumes 0 minutes of effort.

Phase 3

You roll assembling during this phase.

This phase requires an item in room with assembler tags that stores 1000 iron

This phase produces an iron shovel blade.

This phase produces a malformed iron shovel blade.

This phase consumes 0 minutes of effort.

WHOAH. This is a lot of information. What is it actually telling you?

Well, most importantly: "This phase requires an item in room with assembler tags that stores 1000 iron" means that you'll need to have an assembler item in the room, the most common tool for assembly recipes. This item, "a heavy assembler", is found in many places in game - there's a communal one in the Work Room that's open for everybody's use. The assembler will need 1000 grams of iron to complete the recipe.

To figure out how well-stocked your assembler is, type assess assembler:

assess assembler

This item has the following flags: assembler.

This is a assembler.

This will destructively process any materials with weight and a material type.

This is storing 3000 grams of glass, 51901 grams of carbon, 3650 grams of perlite, 340 grams of organic, 1200 grams of steel, 23814 grams of copper, 64340 grams of iron, 0 grams of plastic, 4540 grams of nylon, 201950 grams of wood, and 50300 grams of hemp.

You look a heavy assembler carefully.

With 64,340 grams of iron, making a shovel blade won't be a problem! (If you didn't have enough iron, you could go mining to get more - but that's for another tutorial.)

You can also see that in both Phase 2 and Phase 3 you roll assembling. This means your skill level will be tested twice, with two different places to fail - you must succeed at both to gain the desired object, the 'iron shovel blade' mentioned at the bottom. If you fail in Phase 3, you get a 'malformed iron shovel blade' instead. Either way, the recipe will cost you 0 minutes of effort - a marker of how much free time and energy your character has for side work beyond their official 'job'. In the future more recipes will take effort, but for now it's common for many to require 0.

Making the Item

All right, so you've got your assembler with 1000 grams of iron, and you're ready to actually make an item. This part's simple- you just type the recipe name!

Of course, for a recipe with two separate skill checks, simple may not mean EASY...

assemble iron-shovel-blade

You approach a heavy assembler and begin to work on the design of a shovel blade.

You finish the design of a shovel blade but it is flawed.

You have gained 5 xp in assembling.

Now, failure isn't necessarily a bad thing - on Untold Dawn, it's how you level up skills! You can always try again. This was a failure at Phase 2, so no item was produced and no material cost was deducted. What happens if I fail at step 3?

assemble iron-shovel-blade

You approach a heavy assembler and begin to work on the design of a shovel blade.

You finish the design of a shovel blade and begin to print it out.

You finish the design of a shovel blade but it is flawed.

This creates a malformed iron shovel blade item which I can't use to make a shovel. So I'll type hold blade and put blade assembler to return the iron to the assembler's stocks. This won't typically get 100% of material cost given back, but it's helpful! All right, so when I get that shovel blade just right...

assemble iron-shovel-blade

You approach a heavy assembler and begin to work on the design of a shovel blade.

You finish the design of a shovel blade and begin to print it out.

You print out a shovel blade.

Voila. The shovel blade's created! Of course, it's not a full shovel or anything yet. If I want a full shovel, I'll need to put it together manually.

Tcrafts tools craft shovel shows me how that works - I need a blade, shaft, and handle, and then two mechanics checks to put them together into a working tool! You might notice, if you look at this recipe, that it says the end outcome is a shovel with {{items.204.short_description}}. This is just code notation to say "the shovel's final description will be different depending on the type of shovel blade that went into it." For example, this would create 'a shovel with an iron blade', but blades made from other materials are possible to use as well.

So overall, while the commands are quite simple, the intricacy of crafting from a coded perspective tends to lie in the combination of different materials and steps needed to make something - just like in real life, where we don't tend to manufacture complex items in a single step. This method adds both realism and interdependency to our crafting system, where making unusual items like fishtanks that require glass and steel might require that you reach out to a chemist skilled enough to fabricate your raw materials before you can assemble them.

Retooling Items

Okay, so, to some extent a shovel's a shovel. But what if you want your items to have a little extra spark or customization?

For tailoring via the tailor system, this is built in - you can define the short description of the item (how it appears in your inventory or in the room) and the long description (what you see on look item) as part of the basic design.

For other items, however, we have the retool system. There's a separate guide just for the retooling process, so I won't say too much here, but the essence of the idea is that you can set the short and long descriptions on items shortly after making them, for a fee that differs from item to item. To see if an item can be retooled, hold it in your hand and assess it:

assess canvas

This item has the following flags: art canvas.

You can retool it for 5000 credits.

You can retool the following properties: short_description & description. You should do this soon after crafting the object.

Warning: Restarts or crashes in the server will render the object unable to be retooled.

You look a blank art canvas carefully.

So, if you type:

retool canvas short_description a painting of a beautiful sunset

The item's short description will become 'a painting of a beautiful sunset', and 5000 credits will be deducted from your account.

You could then type:

retool canvas description This painting depicts a beautiful sunset on Artemis in a wash of spectacular shades, all red and gold.

Then, on typing look painting, this is exactly what people would see.

Of course, these descriptions are short and simple, but you can feel free to say a lot more when you do real retools! Just stick to what makes sense within the original parameters of the base item. For example, don't describe a wooden object as being made of priceless gold, but you can absolutely retool a vase to be painted with colored glazes. You can use color as well to really make your retools pop. Check out the retooling guide linked above for a lot more tips on how to get the most out of your retools.

NOTE: The keywords by which the item can be targeted include both its original keywords and the new short desc ones, so this painting could be seen on look painting or look canvas. However, if you put color in the short description, any words with color in them will not work as keywords. So you'd probably want to avoid putting color in the word painting to make sure people could still target it.