Shroud of the Avatar Kickstarter Update: Crafting!
In yet another update to the Shroud of the Avatar Kickstarter campaign, the game’s crafting system sees some much-needed explanation:
We’ve split the large category of “Crafting” skills into two major categories of resource production and crafting. While we haven’t revealed much information on the skill system just yet, players who prefer to split their time between crafting and adventuring will be happy to hear that the crafting skill trees and adventurer skill trees are completely separated and do not share skill advancement points in any way. In other words, working on crafting skills will not hinder your combat or magic skills in anyway other than the time you lose to crafting!
Each of the five categories for the resource production is split into a gathering skill section and a refining skill section. For instance, for mining, there is one skill tree dedicated to the collection of ore and gems, and another for the refining of those into final forms for use by the crafting skills. This same idea is mirrored for the other four categories of hunter(skinning/tanning), forager(herb collection/preparation), woodsman(lumber collection/lumber cutting and planing), fishing(fish catching, fish cleaning).
Skill trees for each of the above categories has branches for faster collection/refining, more output from each collection/refining, higher quality collection/refining, and greater tool endurance for collection/refining.
The output from the above sets of skill result in the majority of the input for what most people think of as crafting. The major categories for crafting are Blacksmithing, Cooking, Tailoring, Alchemy, and Carpentry. The outputs from crafting are any of dozens of various recipes but the the outputs tend to fall into the categories of consumables, wearables, and decorations. They also generally fall into one of three categories for durability which are hard goods (never breaks), soft goods (wears out through use and needs maintenance), and consumables (use it is gone).
Farming, however, is going to be a bit different from standard crafting:
The general process is that players would find, buy, or earn a seed of some sort. They would plant the seed, in their garden or the community garden(for those without a house) and possibly add other elements with the seed to help it grow better or differently. The other elements could be things from gathering skills(fish, granite, straight stick, manure, etc) or from adventuring. Some additions make the resulting plant create more seeds, some make it grow faster, some make the output more effective, some seeds simply won’t grow without additional elements, and some have other more mysterious effects! While many of these garden recipes can be learned from talking to local villagers, many will only be found through experimentation!
At some point, I’m going to have to put all of this into our fledgling Game Guide, but for now why not click on through to the Kickstarter campaign to read up on all the details. Or, watch this video featuring Shroud of the Avatar tech director Chris Spears:
