For starters, a new idea about everyone's favorite underpowered crafting skill! So I was playing a tinker mage the other day (and today, and hopefully for a few days in the future) when I had a thought. The game already allows for the same recipe to produce multiple items depending on skill level. This is how we get different kinds of bolts from a single recipe. One bronze ingot can create all kinds of bolts (OK, OK not "all kinds" but you know what I mean.) Why not crush all the basic sword/axe/mace recipes into one as well? Thus, two iron ingots makes me a crude iron sword at 0, a rough sword at 1, a normal sword at 2 and a fine sword at 3. The same could be done with the other weapon recipes. Steal weapons would require one higher to make. Why do such a thing? Because currently all the nice steel weapons are so difficult to make that, unless you get lucky, by the time you have enough steel to make them they've been overtaken by weapons you can't make. Adding recipes for those weapons just exacerbates the problem, as they'd still probably be based on one of the resource hogging base weapons (probably a fine steel weapon of the appropriate type.) With the abundance of crafting materials freed by doing this more challenging recipes could be added. With less clutter in the starting recipe list, some of the current hidden recipes could be added to Blacksmithing's starting list, so that useful recipes for the other crafting skills won't become any rare with the addition of numerous new blacksmithing recipes. In this way both warriors and mages will have something to look forward to when they walk up to that bookshelf. Which brings me to suggestion number two: Mimic Bookshelves. Imagine: An Alchemist/Wandcrafting/Tinkerer approaches a bookshelf intent on finding a new recipe to add to his already monstrous library. He casually reaches out to claim his prize and- CHOMP! I feel this idea needs no further explanation. Thoughts?
While it would need some fine-tuning, and would be better off as a mod, I do agree that it has potential. A rather high one, since that would decrease the amount of recipes while simultaneously increasing the number of possible outcomes. And mimic bookshelves would only be bad for the beginners, as most characters have the ability to smite the air around them if they are in danger of being chomped by a mimic. But it would probably be fun because of the randomness factor.
Given my incredibly high ignorance of XML, I wasn't really sure if doing this in a mod was possible or if it would require deeper tinkering with the game. If it can be modded someone should feel free to do it, that's not my forte so I wouldn't feel offended. But then, if they've got better things to do with their time, I understand. Which reminds me... I need to work on tomorrows fanfic...
It would require us to edit game files, but it's not like it hadn't been done before (Essence's CSR does that already). And other than actually making sure that there are enough versions of items, it doesn't really take that much time to edit the crafting recipes. Oh well, but it still takes time, and actually editing the item list is time-consuming.
