TL;DR: I actually like all of SC's suggestions and would urge staff to consider them. At the least, however, a light-weight and reasonably priced fodder item, especially in a pack like cards were, is something I feel is required in order to make reasonable progress in the crafting system.
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Part of the problem here is that, to me at least, it's unclear what staff actually want the crafting system to be. How cost intensive, how time intensive?
To give some perspective here, I'll give some numbers from my previous attempts with tinkering, so people can see what things were like. I had discovered a path using the cards that made a total of 4 ingredients at reasonable rates. This provided me with 1,344 base permutations to test, with a total of 34,835 cards needed to test all permutations, or 670 card packs, and would require ~58 real life hours just to get the cards out of the packs. Based on a success rate of around 25%, this means I would have discovered approximately 336 valid recipes. This seems like a lot, however, the recipes are not guaranteed to be unique or even good. I would consider 40% of my discoveries to have been useful, and all of these were additional ingredients and not otherwise usable items. For example, I have recently discovered 3 ways in tinkering to make a single Caltrop.
Now for the real numbers, add in crafting modifiers like schematics, and multiply the previous result by that. I've come across 5 different modifiers thus far, which means the total number of permutations I had to investigate was 6,720, requiring 174,175 cards, 3,350 card packs, and 290 hours to pull cards out of them. To me this feels a little extreme, but ultimately workable.
Now, it is likely that one would discover usable recipes without needing to explore 100% of this line of permutations, but based on my previous success rate of getting nothing useful except for more ingredients, I cannot make any reasonable estimates here. However, this should give people an idea of what delving into the crafting system is like, and why suggestions like 5gp base crafting items might seem reasonable, but ultimately are not.
In a crafting system that is entirely random, with little to no logic to be found in terms of actual recipe structure, the only way to find recipes is via trial and error. With the amount of possible permutations we are dealing with, a light-weight, acceptably priced fodder item is the only way to make reasonable progress.
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Part of the problem here is that, to me at least, it's unclear what staff actually want the crafting system to be. How cost intensive, how time intensive?
To give some perspective here, I'll give some numbers from my previous attempts with tinkering, so people can see what things were like. I had discovered a path using the cards that made a total of 4 ingredients at reasonable rates. This provided me with 1,344 base permutations to test, with a total of 34,835 cards needed to test all permutations, or 670 card packs, and would require ~58 real life hours just to get the cards out of the packs. Based on a success rate of around 25%, this means I would have discovered approximately 336 valid recipes. This seems like a lot, however, the recipes are not guaranteed to be unique or even good. I would consider 40% of my discoveries to have been useful, and all of these were additional ingredients and not otherwise usable items. For example, I have recently discovered 3 ways in tinkering to make a single Caltrop.
Now for the real numbers, add in crafting modifiers like schematics, and multiply the previous result by that. I've come across 5 different modifiers thus far, which means the total number of permutations I had to investigate was 6,720, requiring 174,175 cards, 3,350 card packs, and 290 hours to pull cards out of them. To me this feels a little extreme, but ultimately workable.
Now, it is likely that one would discover usable recipes without needing to explore 100% of this line of permutations, but based on my previous success rate of getting nothing useful except for more ingredients, I cannot make any reasonable estimates here. However, this should give people an idea of what delving into the crafting system is like, and why suggestions like 5gp base crafting items might seem reasonable, but ultimately are not.
In a crafting system that is entirely random, with little to no logic to be found in terms of actual recipe structure, the only way to find recipes is via trial and error. With the amount of possible permutations we are dealing with, a light-weight, acceptably priced fodder item is the only way to make reasonable progress.