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As the crafting system is being overhauled soon I'm hoping that items will be given traits to make Modding much easier to accomplish and maintain as well having an easier time adding new recipes and items for the developers. As a simple example: Hammer: 3 Hammering Quality 3 Nail Pulling Quality 2 Destruction Quality 1 Screw Driving Quality Metal Item These qualities allow the item to be used to pull nails out of furniture and boards with a reliable frequency. It can be used to construct advanced furniture and deconstruct them as well. It's destruction quality is high enough to hammer items to scrap them losing fine components, but not high enough to quickly destroy walls. Using the nail pulling part one *could* drive screws (Mostly Flat-heads and Phillips) but it would be slower and unsuitable for most advanced disassembly. Another: Screwdriver: 3 Screw driving Quality 1 Nail pulling Quality 1 Hammering Quality Metal Item The screwdriver is an excellent screwing tool. But as an aside it could be used to pry nails out of items, but would be likely to wreck the nails. The handle could be used to drive nails- though clearly it wouldn't work well. - These 'qualities' are used when determining the amount of time and likelihood of success during crafting and construction/mechanics. In crafting recipes there would be a recommended minimum quality. If under this quality there would be a higher chance of failure and the recipe would take much longer- some recipes would have a Minimum Quality required. As a benefit this would make adding new items much easier for both modders and staff. Once the qualities are in, adding a new tool would require no manual changes to recipes. At most a change to the math that factors in crafting, destruction, etc would be needed if the item changes the scale of the math. - Lets say we add a Jackhammer to the game as a higher tier of sledgehammer. In the game as is it would require a good amount of changing to the current destruction system to add the proper time reduction to the action and factor in fuel potency and amount. The sledgehammer: 3 Destruction Quality 2 Hammering Quality Metal Item It takes 10 Minutes to destroy a hole in a wall after math and skill is calculated (Example) The Jackhammer: 4 Destruction Quality 1 Hammering Quality It takes 1 Minute to punch a hole in a wall. - A very similar system is used in CDDA, PZ's sister from other misters. And through this system, modding would be much easier and FAR less likely to have compatibility issues. As a clear example most popular mods have their own crafting tree. Why? Because changing a vanilla recipe could easily break hundreds of players games due to a mod conflict that relies on that recipe. So to avoid it they make their own recipes from scratch. This means that two items with the same name from different mods CAN'T be used for their recipes because... they simply can't. The item Id's don't match what the recipe looks for and the mod creator can't make a patch for everything. However with recipes only looking for Qualities then the tools from any mod could be used with any other mod as long as they share the correct Quality.. Even vanilla tools could be used without fear of conflict due to the recipes ignoring any uneeded trait. So if I give a cooking pot a Chemical Synthesis Trait it won't suddenly be unable to be used to make a soup because the recipe only looks for the 'Soup Making' Quality. - As well once the math is in place the system will be easy to understand and use. Most of what needs to be done is defining the timescale and how each level of quality affects that equation. Then it is very similar to determining time in normal crafting with it's base time scale modified by tool qualities and skill. Lets say I want to make something that requires Screw-driving 3 but I only have a Screw-driving 1 tool. Now the recipe is 3 times more likely to fail and takes 3 times as long. But if I have something with Quality 5 it will be more likely to succeed and faster. (This example disregards skill to make it easier to understand/read) Now the developers have talked about item qualities- but it seems they are more talking about base materials (poor, Common, uncommon, rare, superior) rather than tools individual traits. I believe that this system would make both development and modding go forward easier and smoother- which would help with multiplayer server compatibility greatly. Edit: This may be able to apply both to medical and Cooking as well with Qualities such as: Food: Savory, Sweet, Hot, Cold, Spicy, Mellow, etc Medicine: Anesthetic, Pain Relief, Clotting, Calming, Depressive, Stimulant etc along with interactions when mixing certain qualities like certain calming medications could interact poorly with Anesthetic medications