Building Better Crafting Systems

Ever since a cave person way back in the long forgotten mists of history had the bright idea of putting a bit of flint on the end of a stick humans have loved making things from buildings to tools to food to art making stuff is at the core

Of human society and things are no different when it comes to video games even before minecraft mysteriously appeared from space one day and made a billion dollars video games have been obsessed with letting players harvest materials then put them together to make a bunch of cool items to the point that

There are several massive genres basically built around the concept of crafting items being the primary form of progression so why is it then that despite being one of modern video gaming’s most ubiquitous mechanics that crafting systems for the most part sort of stink if you’ve played virtually

Any aaa game and about 50 of indies released in the last five years you’ll be all too familiar with the process of spending hours picking up random junk from the floor tallying up massive readouts of arcane symbols that you’ve then got to turn into other symbols and

Then navigating menu after menu to turn all that stuff and effort into a pair of shoes to give you plus two percent bonus magic damage when you’re on fire you don’t need me to tell you that bad crafting systems are a dime a dozen but what makes the problem of fixing them or

Pointing out why these sucky ones are so awful difficult is that on the face of it a bad crafting system and a good one more or less look identical see in any crafting system you’re always going to be going through the same three-step gameplay loop of collecting resources

Crafting the item and then using it in the world good crafting systems allow you to experience the deep satisfaction of working on something with your own two digital hands and really make your mark on a game but others using this exact same structure can be a total

Chore this of course begs the question if all crafting systems are basically the same then what actually distinguishes the ones that bring us back over and over again from the ones that are a complete ball well this is something that took me a while to work out until i realized that

I wasn’t looking at the big picture crafting systems don’t and in fact can’t exist in isolation you collect materials from the outside world create something with those materials and then use the products of your creation in that same environment regardless of how big or small the crafting system is it always

Has this external to internal then back to external loop and understanding that crafting systems are necessarily separate from the game they’re a part of but connected via the player and the things they create is key to working out how to spot a good one now this is all a

Little bit abstract so let’s break things down into understandable chunks first of all let’s talk about collecting because i think it’s in the build up and foundation of many crafting systems that they make the killer mistakes that end up collapsing the whole thing to show you what i mean take recent indie

Survival darling valheim which is a load of fun until you get to the point where you’ve beaten the first boss and you’ve got to start mining for copper and tin to make bronze gear mining in valheim is in a word laborious not only do you have to find

An old vein which are tricky to spot mining even a single chunk can take ages and when you factor in waiting for your stamina to recharge your tools running out of durability and you’re only being able to carry a certain amount of or at a time getting enough to craft the next

Tier of gear can take hours this is an example of the collection portion of our home’s crafting sabotaging the rest of the game the systems that made the combat interesting like stamina and leveling up end up just slowing down an already time consuming part of the game what makes this extra frustrating is

That sometimes you do get to go on a bit of a dungeon crawl to unlock a mechanic like in the case of smelting itself it’s just over in all of five minutes meaning that most of your time is instead spent milling around in areas you’ve already

Conquered just so you can get to the fun stuff in other slightly better paced survivally open world games like terraria or subnautica the crafting materials you need to progress aren’t in areas you’ve already been to but new ones pushing you towards new items but also new dangers allowing the crafting

Loop and the survival loop to work in harmony of course making gathering stuff super streamlined and quick can have its issues too to go back to terraria as an example many of the crafting materials dropped by bosses are dropped in fixed amounts and are essentially just used as

Tokens that you can exchange for a piece of gear there’s nothing wrong with this inherently but by turning crafting materials into essentially a currency you rob them of the personal attachment and flexibility that makes the best crafting systems great by making resources specific enough to be important but flexible enough to

Actually mean something games can render even mundane scavenging between monster fights interesting in prey for example there are only four resources in the game but each one requires the player to engage with the world of talos one in a different way organic materials are plentiful but only in the crew quarters

And gardens the most reliable way to get metal is by disassembling weapons you might need to defend yourself synthetic material is precious and always in demand requiring you to always be on the lookout and exotic materials require some neuromod investments or for you to fight powerful late-game enemies in

Order for you to get your hands on large quantities praise crafting ingredients are simple and easy to understand but they’re loaded with interesting choices and feed into the rest of the game organically by dictating where you go what you’re looking for and what you have to sacrifice in order to get them

But just making gathering interesting is the easy part regardless of how much a games crafting takes up it’s easy to motivate players to explore or to collect things because it’s in our nature to do that stuff anyway on the other hand the actual crafting part of a

Crafting system is more or less isolated from the rest of the game and so there’s a very real danger of it becoming a pointless vestigial mechanic with no real reason to exist horizon zero dawn is a really interesting case study of this to begin with crafting feels great

You have to scavenge and struggle to survive forcing you to make clever use of limited resources and choose which ammo you want to craft to tackle particular enemies most arrows even cost metal shots which also serve as your money adding a further dimension to even routine combat and baking crafting into your immediate

Gameplay concerns as you get more powerful however you’ll easily collect massive quantities of all the basic resources meaning that while the gathering systems remain just as compelling you no longer have any real decisions to make as part of crafting even powerful hardpoint arrows which are 10 times more expensive than the basic

Ones become essentially free eclipsing this cool resource management decision completely if at any point crafting feels like padding and you’re not really having to think about what you’re making or why you’re making it then that system has failed because it’s no longer connected to what you’re doing in the

Rest of the game or what you want out of the experience most crafting in animal crossing new horizons for example is a horrendously time-consuming and fiddly process that in no way services the game’s core conceit of a relaxed stress-free playground and so feels completely out of place i found the

Crafting systems that have the strongest middle sections are the ones that feel tactile operating less on strict restrictive recipes and lots of boring menu navigation and instead letting the player mess around an experiment breath of the wild for example not only directly ties its cooking to the rest of

The game through its fire and weather systems but it also lets you cook basically any combination of ingredients just to see what will happen giving the player a real sense of agency a wonder that successfully hides the fact that it’s terribly balanced until nearly the end of the game the atelier games which

Are all about alchemy use a system of item tags to allow you to mix and match ingredients without having to stick to highly specific recipes and the in development game potion craft represents its crafting in the form of this big map with different ingredients moving you in different paths along it creating

Different effects as they go and encouraging you to mix it up and get creative to create the strongest possible potions to sell another way to connect the synthesis portion of a crafting system to the rest of the game is to make it part of the game’s journey

To mastery and give it a skill based component of its very own final fantasy xiv to make my subscription fee a work-related tax write-off is an example of a game where crafting is a little bit more involved rather than simply clicking a button to make something you’ve instead

Gone to play a little crafting minigame that determines how well you made it because you get to take on an active role in the crafting process you get that exact same feeling of growth and mastery leveling a blacksmith as you do leveling a black mage going from barely

Managing to make basic items at level 1 bashing things together like an ape with a rock to having mastered intricate rotations to optimize your quality score by the time you reach max level crafting and gathering even have their own gear it’s insanely in-depth to the point that many players prefer crafting in-demand

End-game gear to actually doing raids ultimately though regardless of how interesting they are to source ingredients for or how engaging they are to actually craft the things you make in any crafting system need to be useful the outputs of a crafting system is where all the effort you’ve put into

Making something over the course of a crafting loop rejoins the rest of the game opening up new content making you more powerful or generally changing the way you interact with the world logistics games like factorio satisfactory and technically focused minecraft mods get a real leg up here

Because making stuff is central to their progression structure they can have you make stuff that either automates making stuff or makes future stuff you make easier to make i just said that word too much and now it sounds weird for example in the ultra hard minecraft mod pack

Sevtek the ability to make a basic ass furnace is locked off at the start of the game meaning you have to make do with these crappy clay kilns and other crafting methods that require constant babysitting and only do one thing at a time this makes the eventual acquisition of an honest-to-god minecraft furnace

That you’d previously taken for granted a huge deal and the utility it offers namely semi-automated cooking and smelting feels like a major step up because it drastically changes how you approach future crafting endeavors other logistics stuff works the same way building your first truck in satisfactory doesn’t get you any closer

To end game or unlock anything new but what it does do is allow you to autonomously and efficiently transport lots of resources vast distances creating a new paradigm of factory design because you could now start building specialized satellite bases supplied by a fleet of trucks solving several logistical problems and creating

A bunch of new ones not every game can completely base itself around crafting though so the question becomes how can titles make forging a new weapon or assembling a pickaxe feel just as important as leveling up or beating a big boss the trick just like in those

Logistics games is to make the things you craft feel immediately impactful and relevant to the player’s wants and needs the reason why very few people stuck with the fallout 4 settlement building but loved its weapon tinkering is because the former system really only ever interacts with itself it’s hard to

Care about new ways to supply potatoes to preston garvey and his mates when what you really want to do is blow up some super mutants and find cool new guns a desire that the settlement system only indirectly satisfies and even then not very well but the weapon mods help

You do in a tangible way often making the things you craft feel important can actually mean reducing the number of options players have crafting in the last of us might be incredibly simplistic but the few options you do have matter a lot rags can be used either on molotovs arguably the best

Weapon in the game or crucial health kits forcing you to choose between offense and a safety net equally blades can be used either to turn melee weapons into a one-hit kill on humans or to create shivs and arrows the only way to safely kill deadly clickers all of these

Craftables change the way you approach the main game in some meaningful way rather than being obligatory busy work you need to do in order to optimize your character the classic example of that being stuff like making bigger bags in red dead 2 or in far cry a bigger inventory is incredibly powerful the

Resources to do so are in no way limited so you’re basically forced to make them in spite of the fact that it’s a big old grind and you’re not really expressing yourself in any way as a result which means that doing that work never really feels satisfying the best crafting

Systems are a way for players to make their mark on the game world through interacting with it in the same way that food you’ve made yourself always taste that little bit better than something that came out of a packet for example monster hunter as a franchise is built

On this sort of intrinsic reward for making stuff in monster hunter you don’t just fight big boss monsters you also cut them up and harvest their bits once you’re done killing them allowing you to build new weapons or a hat for your cat out of their bones claws hide and

Parasitic insects apparently having to exterminate the local population of wrathions over the course of a few hours can be a bit of a grind and it would feel very unsatisfying to just get an abstract plus 10 damage as a reward for your troubles instead most hunter allows

You to literally wear a trophy of your achievements that you made yourself tony wants ultimately a simple stat change into this great milestone moment and a constant reminder of the work you put into making your new more powerful gear when the three steps are combined crafting systems become a fantastic way

For players to give back to a game and exert their own agency either by making interesting decisions getting to customize their strategy or simply getting to feel the satisfaction of a hard day’s work just like in the real world making stuff is an expression of emergent problem solving and creativity

Which leads me onto my biggest and most important discovery from researching crafting systems namely that not all games benefit from having one not all games are about giving players control over the way they want to play and letting you organically interact with the mechanics and if this

Isn’t the case games shouldn’t have a crafting system and you should go out of your way to avoid them if they do exist to speak ill of my beloved resident evil one of the weakest elements of the newer games is the fact that they let you craft medicine bullets and grenades

Whenever you want meaning that you’ve always got this safety net of craftables you get to fall back on by pausing the game fiddling about for a bit then instantly healing yourself to full or crafting the exact ammo type you need obliterating the sense of oppressive tension and lack of agency the games

Work so hard to put you under many games even managed to ruin a delicately paced cinematic story with pointless asides for crafting related chores a lot of bioware games most damningly dragon age inquisition actually have a pretty good story if you beeline the hell out of the main quest unfortunately because you’re

Definitely going to get distracted by the crafting and gathering side quests out of a need to optimize and complete the game you’re going to end up ruining the pacing for yourself and getting bored before you’ve left the hinterlands worse still is when games pretend they have crafting in order to satisfy some

Phantom executives mechanics checklist in ghost of sushima all of the crafting materials have a single use or are used for basically everything iron upgrades melee weapons wood upgrades ranged silk is used specifically for the final upgrade tier of armor and all of them need loads of supplies what this means

Is that the game spends a lot of time trying to offer you this feeling of self-expression and fulfillment that it can never quite commit to because at no point during the crafting process do you actually get to make a decision it’s all just sort of something that happens to

You ultimately coming at the expense of all the stuff it actually does really well just like many trends before it crafting gets shoved into titles it doesn’t belong in where it adds nothing and just generally gets in the way lending to its poor perception however that doesn’t

Mean that crafting systems are a bad idea far from it used correctly to enhance and add context to your interactions in a wider world crafting can create limitlessly interesting systems and unparalleled opportunities for players to flex their creative muscles as it has been since the beginning of time crafting and

Creativity are more than the sum of their parts simply copying and pasting systems from one game to another isn’t enough crafting mechanics need to inform our actions in the rest of the game and give players work to do that feels both meaningful and the result of their own

Personal decision making whether it’s a new shiny sword an impressive house or just some delicious food the only thing i reckon we do need to stay away from though is making crappy youtube videos about a topic that’s sort of been already talked to death we’ve had quite

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