Hate Crafting - what am I missing?

So I've been playing Dredmor for many many hours. I still suck at it for the most part, but I'm always having fun. I often get distracted and start a new character before taking one all the way to his doom Dredmor.
I pretty much never use crafting. I've tried, especially when I roll random and one of them pops up. I just can't learn to use it effectively and it feels like a waste of a skill. Here are some things that frustrate me about crafting:

• Inventory Space - taking even one crafting skill seems to fill my inventory to capacity because I have to collect parts, often for things I'm not even able to craft until much later. I'm told that keeping a stash can mitigate the inventory pressure, but this adds the chore of relocating and/or trekking back to my stash regularly
• time spent learning recipes/researching craftables - when I see items, I never know if there's a recipe that they fit with. I have to check through all the recipes I have and see if I can build up to something good. Since I don't use the skills much I'm very unfamiliar with what turns into what so its hard to know what's worth keeping. The new sorting options for the crafting menu have improved this, but I still have to do some research to know if keeping this plastic ingot will let me combine it with some other ingot that then let's me build a certain kind of armor that I can combine 3 copies of with a certain gem to turn it into a secret recipe I haven't found yet. How do you keep track of it all?!
• quality of craftable items - by the time I figure out what to keep in order to build my ultimate equipment, I usually find something stronger from a chest of evil or a quest/monster zoo reward. If I knew that the piece I was able to craft would be superior to random finds then the skill might be worth it. As is, I trust the RNG enough to gift me something worthy without crafting (This is probably foolish, I know. The RNG can be a fickle mistress.)
• missed money + time to clear a floor - neither of these is actually that important to me so they only count as one together. I almost NEVER spend the zorkmids I've hoarded, but it's the principle of the matter. I'm missing a chance to sell those items I'm toting around and worse still, I'm sacrificing space that could hold other worthy items to sell to Brax. Also, it takes considerably more time to clear a floor when I'm looking for lots of crafting components and trying to combine them in every which way before I actually choose what to craft.

So, my question for you guys is what am I missing? People rave about crafting and often say they never build without at least one. Clearly there's some epic advantage to crafting that I've neglected. Fill me in.

 

Crafting is underpowered. The only real exceptions are alchemy for booze and tinkering for arrows and trap affinity. Wand Lore is next to useless and Smithing is not much better. If you roll a crafting skill, unless you have some devious way to take advantage of it it is probably best not to buy more than one level of it (Wandcrafting level 2 at least lets you craft flame wands, which are useful. Smithing 2 gives you a point of trap affinity and lets you make throwing stars and basic weapons).

Alchemy should be taken at least to level 2. Then you can craft more health potions in a batch, along with some better booze.

Tinkering can hold its own without any other skills supporting it. You'll have so many traps and arrows that you'll be able to kite most everything except for hordes.

Also, if you're a warrior, you might buy all of smithing eventually to get yourself better armor. You can get full plate armor long before it shows up in game if you really work on it.

 

Other then going for achievements I personally only find Alchemy to be useful in terms of reward vs. inventory space taken. Even on melee characters I take Alchemy. You can buy booze pretty cheap in dispensers and convert to Aqua Vitae and simply carry some rust and iron ingots and you're set for HP Potions. At any given time my melee characters usually have 50-100 HP Potions for those close call moments.

Smithing - Recipes are random and you won't always get what you want. Much cheaper then buying from Brax, but Smithing can quickly take up most of your inventory in anticipation of recipe x.

Tinkering - I usually can find/steal enough thrown items and bolts to not bother with yet more inventory space dedicated to multiple items piling up in anticipation.

 

I think crafting items that do not have a use outside of crafting should be treated like statistics. You pick them up and they add a number to those stats. They should not be something you ever see again lest they force the inventory hell we all know and hate.

Those items that are crafting components AND have a separate use outside should have a special flag so you know what skill they rely upon. A potion that is usable (And *Useful*, not aqua vitae and such.) by itself but also able to be combined with a recipe for tinkering something or other should have a "Tinker Component" flag. And there should be such flags for every category. Items with multiple skills should have each applicable skill type flag added. This way you can decide if you want the item or not based upon how valuable it may be to you as a crafting component. (Even if you lack the recipe to see what it makes, if you lack the skill, you may decide to readily dispose of stuff once you see you will not be able to ever use it.)

What does everyone else think of this? Nicholas? Next RC this would be nice to have. (I know, you have too many things to do as is.)

 

I've only tried smithing so far. It did help in getting good armors early but it sure did take a lot of inventory space, especially before I found out which of the recipes were actually worth making.

I'd even go so far as to treat the actual tools (smithing kit, ingot press, alchemy box etc.) as flags instead of actual inventory items. If you've found the smithing kit, you can use the crafting menu smithing tab without having to have the smithing kit constantly taking up space in the inventory.

 

A breakdown of crafting skills:

Smithing: Smithing helps you survive the first 6-7 floors. Even without mods its very possible to have Full Plate by the end of DL3. Add some decent iron weapons and you can just breeze your way down. Evil Chests on the first 4 floors are generally not as good as stuff you make for yourself. Remember this is a warrior skill. It's going to give the most benefit to people who fight in melee. The heavy armor you can make with this skill is an incredible early game lifesaver. With full steel gear (knight's helm, gorget, girdle, armor, pants and gloves) not even big blues can hammer you. In the late game, high is much more powerful than one or two points of resistances, as it halves any exotic damage when it kicks in, protecting you from more damage types and more damage period than enchanted armor that gives two or three points of resistance. Sure, Boilerplate gear is better than stuff you can craft, but you have to survive to get it for it to matter. Smithed weapons let you keep your skill tree bonuses. They're not as good as Evil Chest gear, but the other bonuses from your skill tree can make up for that. But even if you don't have a weapon skill, Smithing is still good for its armor, most of which is not hidden from view. And the ability to make throwing weapons is nice for a melee fighter.

Alchemy: Health potions, man. Health potions. And brimstone flasks or mosilov cocktails. But mostly health potions.

Tinkering: Useful for both its clockwork gear (particularly the powerlimbs and gauntlets) if you're a melee fighter. If you have no melee power, the crossbows and huge stacks of bolts are nice too. Of course, there's the trap skill as well, although without a Fisking box that actually contributes to inventory clutter...

Wand Crafting: It gives you ! And ! Yeah, you should probably avoid this skill for now....

 

Crafting is extremely useful, but the system is complicated and requires that the player memorize or at least reference all the possible combinations to figure out what he should be doing. It's very difficult for new players to figure out the ins and outs of the crafting system. This is one of the reasons i want to completely revamp everything.

 

This. I've tried (and tried, and tried) all the other crafting skills, and some even have a few perks, but generally they're not worth the massive amounts of time and inventory management (read: more time) you have to sink into them, typically to get infrequent, sub-par results.

The exception is, of course, Alchemy - if you memorize the recipes for your favorite Potion(s), you can get by with 10-12 inventory slots used up instead of a third of your damn backpack all the time, and still get a steady stream of Booze and Potions out of it.

I still rarely take any crafting skill, even Alchemy. I prefer to get my Health Potions as a Healing Spell or Skill instead.

 

Haha, I always forget that you guys actually read these forums and take our feedback seriously, and here I am ragging on Crafting like it's the worst thing since un-sliced bread.

It's not quite as bad as I make it sound, but generally the question you have to ask yourself is: "Am I willing to play Inventory Management Sim 2011 for a leg up on the initial floors and pray to the Random Number God for help in giving me recipes and reagents so that I can craft things that are helpful on the later floors, as well?"

 

Un-sliced bread can be pretty delicious I'll have you know.

 

I've put a lot of hours into dungeons of dredmor (and still haven't beaten it yet, so I'm no expert), and I think crafting skills are far over improved beyond how they were originally implemented. It could be better, but now I actually enjoy taking smithing or alchemy, whereas the original incarnation was just too esoteric for me to ever bother with.

More filters, or ingredient bags/something for reducing component clutter would be a godsend though.

 

Well, I don't think anyone has convinced me that the crafting skills are something I'm going to get into. I just don't have the patience/attention to learn the recipes or always look them up. And the inventory management is hell. A separate crafting inventory would definitely be helpful. I see where the utility comes from for some of the crafting skills, but it just isn't enough to seem worth it to me.

 

You don't have to take them. Many people enjoy them because they reduce the overall randomness (a surefire sine of Spike tendencies) but there are plenty of other skills that fill the same niche without requiring the same level of familiarity with the crafting trees. Fungal Arts, for example, is a big plus. Frankly only about half my characters take crafting, and then only because I'm looking to minimax something or I want the stat boosts (I often take alchemy with mages for just that reason).

 

Honestly the only thing that drives me bugnuts about the current crafting system is that, in order to get the crafty achieves, I have to get -incredibly- lucky with recipe drops.

I admit that I'm something of an achievement nut, though. /grin

 

The worst one is the Deus Ex one. I got through the whole game and got the Chainaxe and Bow recipe and made them. OF course lower levels I came across an additional 4-8 Chainsaws and never once saw one of the rings nor the recipe. That one I'm just trying to buy all the items in shops if I'm lucky from now on. Won't be making a character specifically for it again for awhile.

 

LOL! That's great.

In short, crafting is not good in it's current form. For instance, Smithing can guarantee that you have an X damage weapon by level so-and-so, but you could have just taken an entirely different 7th skill. The abilities granted by that skill will probably help you survive better than Smithing would have. Plus, the items you find in the dungeon or in shops often completely trump what you can craft.

The only crafting skill I like is Tinkering, if you take the crossbow skill, or plan on relying on crossbows. The higher level bolts you craft are worth the skill points. But that's it! I would never take any other crafting skill. I've tried them all multiple times. After 200 hours of playtime, I've come to the conclusion that the rest just aren't worth it.

 

Love crafting because it makes the game play more complex. Usually trim down my inventory before going down a level and then quickly try to find a prime spot to make a new stash for all the ingots, usually the first teleporter that actually goes to more than next door.

Usually have a pile of crafting supplies (ingots mostly as my experience is with smithing and tinkering), a pile for stuff I want to keep for lower floors (diggle eggs prior to converting them to cheesy omelets, area affect weapons besides the few carried for the floor's zoo, purity potions if i have a zodiacal wand, etc), a pile of loot to sell before I find a store (items with less stars than the floor usually gets lutefisked), and a pile of uncooked steak until I run across a barbecue and cook it all at once

If you have crafting it should be the first skill you max because its main purpose is to give quality items early on. Since collecting ingots will eat a line of inventory, I have learned to be pretty free with lutefisking items of lower and medium importance. Without crafting I would keep some fungus, potions, and the odd danish around, but when my inventory dings with crafting that stuff gets lutefisked or eaten (assuming potions are worth less money than the floors average loot).

 

One thing that would help crafting immensely (and even Blizzard managed to figure this out with Diablo III) would be to have some way to craft an Artifact version of whatever you're making - say it takes extra materials, or a certain Skill requirement - +1 or +2? - over the standard version of the item.

Something needs to be done, IMHO. Being on Floor 9 and finally crafting that *moste uber weapon* only to have the nearest Evil Chest weapon dealing 2x its damage is what's basically killing crafting. Or finally crafting *moste uber armor* only to have the next Quest/Zoo drop blow it away.

And shops, for that matter. Why couldn't shops have a small % chance to spawn NON-RING, NON-AMULET Artifacts? They would cost a ton of Zorkmids of course, but really... I'm typically swimming in money once I hit RotDG content. I'm assuming any non-archaeology build will be at some point.

 

That is a good idea; they'd have to make a rather noticeable change to the crafting system for that (poor Nicholas), but it would work and it's a good way to make the skill trees useful (we could have tinkering add a minor bonus that we choose, or smithing add a slightly larger, but random, artefact bonus; that way, if we had enough materials, every equipment piece could be upgraded so the skills wouldn't be a waste of potential if RNG smiled at us).

Then again, weapons from evil chests usually have damage types that are heavily resisted by Dredmor, so being able to craft something for the final encounter that has a more "usual" damage type can be a benefit. And being able to make more throwables/bolts is also useful, though with the inventory clutter being a rather weighting downside, I do agree that this is not enough.

Probably lack of such items in the game. There are many more low-level weapons than high-level ones, so there is the possibility that there simply are no items you want.