The Crafting Materials are an Unintuitive Mess

[Lombix_4]

In NRFTW Coins are theoretically able to buy everything alse, But The inventories of the stores are limited and you can never actually buy what you need in the quantities that you need only with the coins.

For example: If i need 10 boar tusks, and each one costs 2 silver even if I have 20 silver I can’t get them anyway because the merchants don’t have the boar tusks to sell me and even with the luckiest RNG if I wanted to buy them it would take me 3-4 days (real life).

This is obviously done on purpose and it’s also a good thing, If players could get everything they wanted with money, they would always just end up doing the things that give the most money ignoring the rest of the game.

So, in reality, there’s more than one currency:

• Materials for crafting and upgrades (by far the most Problematic)
• Embers
• Building materials
• Ingredients for food
• Ingredients/materials for Consumables (Wtf)

Selling materials is always a bad idea and you’re always better off hoarding them even without knowing what for.

Having so mach loot is part of the game’s identity and explained like this it makes sense. But in practice many problems arise.

Crafting materials, Recipes and upgrades Costs, are not well Designed

Except for wood and metal, Materials are only distributed by RNG, and the progression of the game can be unclear because of it, and it’s particularly problematic when it comes to upgrading weapons.

Based on the RNG, one player can either upgrade his weapon to level 4 or beyond, while another is forced to either use a level 3 weapon or find a new one, and this happens every time the upgrade recipe requires materials, Sometimes the player can even easily manage to upgrade a weapon above the intended level, trivializing the game.

The Materials for crafting and upgrades are too redundant!

What gameplay reason is there for having three different drops from the same mob ?

This Vast variety of materials has no practical function besides making the system even more complicated and RNG dependent.

There is no need for Deer, Sirens, Wolves, Bears, etc. to drop 3 different body parts, If all 3 drops have the exact same role!

Even worse all the drops in the “Materials for crafting and upgrades” category have almost the same role, because the the only difference between them is a very vague hierarchy which often contradicts itself, and witch creature they are dropped from.

This system also completely lacks the logical connections necessary to make the player understand what he is doing when he puts aside a material, the player only knows that it could be useful later but it is never clear for what until you get the recipes or you consult the costs to upgrade the weapon.

The main reason is that it is not clear what are the uses and the rank of the materials found.

Another reason why it is not clear, is that the materials needed to build something are chosen in a completely arbitrary way i.e. why do I need the heart of a bear to make mash gloves?

You might think this Is because I have to go to the area where the bears are to get a piece of equipment of this level But this is not how it works, you can find and craft/upgrade high-level gear without ever interacting with bears or going to advanced areas, and there are recipes tat do no use bears’s Drops.

And, other Mesh gloves, of the same level that are identical in every way except for the appearance sometimes Require different resources.

The the only clear logical connection that recipe costs have, that player can distinguish without having all the recipes and confirming them, is that the pieces of same Set are intended to require similar materials for different parts of the same creature, for example the “Dark Leather” set requires all the deer drops, Antlers, Skull and Hoof.

This almost seems to have meaning if you think that maybe if you want to make a whole set you can go and “hunt” just one mob.

Too bad that in almost all cases even if you kill all the deer on the map you don’t have enough materials to craft the set, if you’re lucky you can craft two pieces of the set (and the same goes for every other mob except sirens because sirens are everywhere).

So an idea that would have been useful to save the player work only makes him waste time, and the pieces of the armor Set instead of being easier to craft together are in direct competition with each other and therefore it is better to have pieces of armor from different sets, even when you’re crafting them.

And this problem adds to the problems of the enchantments making the personalization of a build or roleplaying strongly disincentivized so much so that it creates a bad experience, in comparison with playing the game “normally” or opportunistically.

Having a custom build is always secondary to completing the game (obviously) so if the game makes the experience of personalizing a character hell most players will simply stop traying and they will abandon creativity for efficiency, because being creative is actively punished by the game, which instead favors being opportunistic not like in an RPG but like in a RogueLike (Except that in a RogueLike the run, the character and the build last about an hour while in NRFTW the characters are permanent and changing builds is problematic). It is always better to use a high level weapon that you find around rather than enhance the weapon you have.

Crafting Materials Critique:

Wood & Metal

These materials clearly have different ranks and are distributed throughout the game. They work well, if all the materials were so clear we would have solved one of the main problems. These are also the only materials you can get without RNG.

Problems

1. Waiting for refinement doesn’t serve any real gameplay benefit, it only offers a little bit of immersion, it makes you end up back in town more often, and the game already incentivizes you to return to town with different mechanics, the result is that this mechanic is completely redundant and contributes to the problem of having to return to town too often. Refining higher rank materials takes too long.
2. Metal is either used for too many things or too little. A player who happens to have a build that has both a metal weapon and a metal armor is always short on metal, while someone with a wooden weapon and a non-metal armor always has plenty.

Solutions

1. I would increase the available space in the “refineries” from 8 to 15 (fifteen seems like a good number to me, so the interface is well balanced) and all materials regardless of rank should take the same amount of time to refine.
2. If we sacrifice a bit of immersion and always use both wood and metal to upgrade weapons, we have an easier to balance experience for everyone, I also believe that metals should not be used for armor, and there should be a metal that fulfills that role, just like cloth or leather, adding the mail and plates.

Weapon & Armor Shards

Weapon & armor shards are distributed throughout the game, They are used to upgrade weapons and armor.

Problems

1. They do nothing useful to the game, If they were removed from the game no one would notice, if there are too few of them they are annoying, if there are too many is as if they do not exist, they are never used alone, they are always accompanied by other materials and these are always rarer than them so they have no role, Making them rarer would just be frustrating.

Solutions

1. The names are changed to: Small Plate and Medium Plate, and a Large Plate is added and they take on a role similar to that of cloth and leather, but for plate armor

Armor Materials

These materials have different ranks and are distributed throughout the game. They work well.

Problems

Waiting for refinement doesn’t serve any real gameplay benefit (same as before, same solution).

1. While with the different fabrics are easy to understand which is the highest quality material, with leather the order is not clear how to distinguish one from the other.

2. Materials for the chain mail and plates are missing, and instead we must directly use metals that already have other uses.

3. Armors don’t really need levels, upgrading armor isn’t as satisfying as upgrading weapons (and upgrading weapons isn’t particularly satisfying either). If armor didn’t have levels like in Elden Ring, there would be way fewer customization problems.

Solutions

1. leather icons should be changed so that it is easy to understand which is the highest quality material.
2. I believe that metals should not be used for armor, and there should be items that fulfills that role, just like cloth or leather, but for mesh and plates: Loose Mesh, Average Mesh, and Tight Mesh; Small Plate and Medium Plate, and a Large Plate.
3. If this system continues to be unsatisfactory, it is worth removing all these materials directly and not having to upgrade the armor at all (This would also make different armor types easier to balance).

Torn resources

They are used to upgrade items and exalt them.

The Torn resources are Prefect.

“Hunting Trophies”

They are used to upgrade items and crafting them, by far the most Problematic resources.

Problems

1. Unintuitive Mess, very vague hierarchy.

2. There is no need for Deer, Sirens, Wolves, Bears, etc. to drop 3 different body parts, If all 3 drops have the exact same role!

3. Crafting recipes, They have an arbitrarily chosen level, if you craft a weapon you don’t know out of curiosity, and then you don’t like it, you have wasted important resources to upgrade your weapons also It’s terrible to craft an item that’s too high level and you can’t use it.

4. Finding these resources is not well integrated into the game is the RNG easily causes progression issues, Searching for these resources is not fun.

Solutions

1. As a first step they should be properly ordered in the inventory according to their hierarchy instead of being placed randomly, The rank of the item should be expressed in the description on the top right corner with a numerical value similar to the level of weapons, the icons could be modified to help us understand the hierarchy better.

2. Extremities: (Clows, Paws, Hoofs & Hands)Should be used to upgrade weapons, in a similar way to how Smithing Stones work in Elden Ring.
   Miscellaneous: (horns, heart etc.) or are used for specific purposes, such as how wolf kidneys are used as food, or are removed.

3. Skulls: Should be “refinable” into bone dust in a manner similar to that of wood and metal are refined into boards and ingots but higher ranking skulls only yield more bone dust (instead of having several ranks of bone dust), bone dust is used to craft Runes, Weapons (Always at level 1) and Armors.

4. Creatures that drop “Hunting Trophies” Always drop al least 1 extremity (Clows, Paws, Hoofs & Hands), Hunting quests can be obtained by talking to a specific NPC, You can select the creatures you want to hunt, When you finish a hunting quest you can start another one and the creatures you can hunt depend on the story’s progress (so it’s not possible to level up the weapon too much).

Building materials

Used for Building real estate and to craft some decorations in the house.

Problems

1. They are really only used for one thing and after you have upgraded or built the Danos’s projects they only take up inventory space.

2. It seems to me that the game vaguely hints at the fact that clay is the most common material while granite is the rarest, but it is not very clear, also salt does not seem to be a building material.

Solutions

1. They should be used for more things.

2. The salt stones should be replaced by gravel, making the order Clay Gravel and Granite clear to everyone.

Food

Food ingredients are fine, recipes are not.

Problems

1. Recipes are not well distributed in the game in a coherent way with the ingredients and therefore you cannot use the ingredients, and they block the inventory.

Solutions

1. Going to talk to the Chef after finding a new ingredient gives you the opportunity to learn a recipe (that uses it) at the cost of money. This solution also makes the chef more integrated into the game since at the moment you go to him after having upgraded him, buy all the new recipes, and you not return until you have upgraded him again, in the end you interact with him like 4 times in the whole game.

Ingredients for Consumables

Used to Craft: Potions, Bombs, Elemental Bombs, Blade Oil, Elemental Blade Oil And Repair Powder.

Problems

1. It seems that the recipes and the materials that compose them have been thought of separately and do not seem to make sense either from a gameplay point of view or from a logical point of view.
2. Nobody uses bombs. The bomb throwing animation is slow compared to the damage they deal and they deal so little damage that it’s not worth crafting the stronger versions. Using Metals to craft bombs is too expensive. Using gems to craft elemental bombs is completely ridiculous (It doesn’t matter if you craft 5 of them).
3. Blade Oil and Elemental Blade Oil last too little
4. In general the whole system could be revised.

Solutions

1. It would need a rework of all the recipes and the ways of obtaining materials, they are terrible, and perhaps there is a need to invent new materials.
2. The bomb throwing animation should be twice as fast, the damage should be rebalanced, so that it is worth using the higher level bombs.
3. Increase the duration of Blade Oil and Elemental Blade Oil to 2 min, like the positions.
4. There should be a topic dedicated to Consumable items.

In Conclusion

Interacting with this system should be enjoyable, and making the player understand the purpose of the items right from the start is essential to making this system fun.

It is also very important how you obtain the items, It must make sense in the context of their use.

The cost and effort required to upgrade weapons and armor must be reduced to compete with the fact that high-level weapons and armor are essentially found for free throughout the adventure.

But at the same time the maximum level to which a weapon can be enhanced at a given point in the story must be clear, and must be the same for everyone, not dependent on RNG (Hunting quests Idea).

And since the upgrade materials rarity is reduced it makes sense to upgrade a weapon/armor from Lv1 so weapon and i makes sense that weapon/armor recipes provide only level 1 items, and since the recipes provide level 1 items it makes sense that they in turn require level 1 items, thus making testing easier.

Since you can craft a weapon/armor that interests you with simple materials, you can try it out and only then add the important materials to upgrade it.

I would like to point out that these changes do not reduce the difficulty of the game, but rather give players the option to choose what to do, whether to upgrade/craft weapons or try out those found along the way.

Inventory problems

I think you may have noticed that I haven’t particularly decreased the amount of items in the game, obviously I could have if that was the objective, and it wouldn’t have caused negative consequences if done correctly, but I decided to keep the amount of items similar, because I think that the reason why the system is problematic is not because of the amount of items.

But it is also true that one of the reasons why this system is frustrating is that the available inventory does not match the number of items found in the game.

I think the solution I have proposed here: Ichor System Balancing Solution is still perfectly functional.

That is: every time you consume an Ichor all the inventories should be upgraded by 4-3-3-2-2-1 slots on the side until they are complete (this weird number sequence solves the ichor distribution problem while remaining it an only Boss drop)

Thank you for reading!

[Gweddeoran]

Thanks for putting in the effort to compile all this and analyze the issues with crafting. I agree with what you have mentioned, it is very hard to understand what is needed for what.

One can’t even argue this is for immersion, since as mentioned in your post, needing a Bear Heart to make a pair of Mesh Gloves makes no logical sense. Overall, this is yet another complicated system that can be simplified to improve the player experience.