A way to cause more conflict and RP around Crafting

[Egon the Monkey]

Crafting is a lonely boring thing these days
The current state of Crafting is a bit lonesome. Because with only one exception so far, every crafting area I've seen has only featured a single sort of bench. Almost all of which are Alchemy. And unlike in V5, there aren't high-bonus benches popping up in easy to find explorables either. What this means is that there is very little reason to run into anyone else while doing crafting. Especially if you're an Astronomer and can do all of it in your mum's Q'tolip's basement.

In V5, I was going through some moderate-traffic areas to get to benches, and was always prepared to run into someone who was curious or nasty. I semi-regularly ran into other crafters as there weren't many benches but they were all close to town. Now, there's more than enough Alchemy benches but the Herbalism one is in a well-known danger zone that nobody takes detours in and few people go to solo. So you're never going to bump into other PCs there.

What about more reasons to bump into PCs?
So my suggestion is this. Stick the two other sorts of Bench into every room that currently just has an Alchemy Bench in it. I've played for several months and found one herbalism bench, one tinkering bench and five alchemy benches, plus the Astronomer ones. That's more labs than there are prominent alchemists! And little reason for any alchemist to encounter another.

If there were more sorts of lab in one place, it would increase the chance that you'd run into someone else doing another sort of crafting. Leading to the tension of "Do I trust this person not to blow us all up with a dangerous experiment" or just "do I trust this person not to mug me while I'm Doing Science". And it would let you run group expeditions to do crafting stuff, rather than just one lone wizard doing buffed up crafting in a cave.