It would nice to have a tutorial for encrusting. Encrusting uses many concepts that are not adequately explained in-game, such as this symbol: "" which doesn't even have a tooltip (all I know about it is that a higher number in some way corresponds to a higher chance of instability effects, but I couldn't tel you with any confidence how). (The whole set of Tutorials in general could do with expansion actually)
Encrusting: You put stuff in the craft kits according to the recipe, and then you put a relevant item in the box at the end of the Encrust arrow. You click the button. percent of the time, Bad Things Happen and you end up with an instability on your encrust. You won't know what it does until you first get hit by it unless you've had it before and remember the name. When you encrust the same item multiple times, the of each successive encrust is MULTIPLED by the of the previous encrusts. So if you have a 5 encrust and a 4 encrust, your "encrust multiplier" is already 20, and adding another encrust with a of 5 or more is guaranteed to give you an instability. Instabilities come in various strengths that indicate how likely they are to go off when you attack/are attacked in combat. Uhh...that's all I got right now.
Wow, it's multiplicative? So in general, you've got to be pretty lucky to get 3-4 encrusts on the same item with it remaining stable? I guess that makes sense from my experience, though it makes me think twice about the 40 Rearden encrust from smithing that gives the midas touch proc.
You see, this isn't right. I know because I've done more extensive encrusts than this without getting instability (albeit I had to attempt it several times to do so)
One other point I meant to raise was that if there is a tutorial set up, I would recommend letting people know that once they do encrust their item, they need to select the item in the encrust window and either move it to their inventory or equip it; there have been a couple of occasions where I left my shiny new encrusted item in the crafting window and thought I had accidentally deleted it or lost it or something, only to find it a few minutes later when looking through the encrust list
I thought it was additive for different encrusts, and exponential for the same crust? So you only get exponential increase if you're putting the same crust on over and over.
Ah, that may well be the case, though i thought it was multiplicative, not exponential. If it was exponential, you'd never get to put two copies of the same 5 encrust on the same item without instability (5^5 being 3125 and all.)
I do know the information is about additive/multiplicative is available here, because I remember reading about it here when the system first came in. I've slept more than once since then, though, so I have no idea where the original posts are. The additive for different crusts/multiplicative for like crusts is truth as far as I know. If it's an item I can't replace, I don't go over 2 encrusts topping at 15-20 combined, but the Rearden encrust is valuable as a reliable source of even if you can't fit much else (or anything else) on it safely. More to the point, I doubt a tutorial will be forthcoming in-game. A short guide on the wiki or officially stickied in General is far more likely to happen.
In theory you could modify encrustDB to add positive side effects, but right now they're all negative (and intended to be.)
Well, twitchiness can be positive depending on your build (ie if you have a really flimsy pure wizard character)
I once used all my lutefisk on some Parachute Pants, something like 200 lutefisk. It lagged a bit, then I exploded/blinked/tentacled/exploded again/turned green/destroyed everything around me. Then I died. Back to topic: Expierence says it's not multiplicative on different encrusts, and I'm not sure for the same... I've enchanted stuff with triple- and quad-cheese and had no problems, but maybe that's just luck.
I have put two 24 on a single item without hitting instability so I don't think they are multiplicative. What we need is a chart listing all the crusts.
I'll try looking for it, but I believe the devs had a post explaining a bit of encrusting. The first encrust always work because you have zero instability to start with. Your second encrust would then have a chance of instability based on that first encrust only. So putting on a 10 instability crust will never cause instability at first. If you put on the exact same encrust, you only have a 10% chance of getting an instability, but you then gain 10*10 instability, for a total of 110 instability. So anything after that is guaranteed instability.
Just a thought, but alternately, if the devs don't want to put together a tutorial a help screen or help file would also work (that's what we really need; a comprehensive help file. Nothing has those anymore, I don't understand why)
My guess is, impermanence of design. Old games came on a disk/disks/disc and once you got it, that was it. No patches for you. Now, look how far Dredmor has come since launch. Crafting system overhaul, new and reworked skill mechanics wizardlands... From a developer standpoint you can either make a document that will be outdated, update said doc during design (guaranteed to catch all changes... takes time and may include bad data), or update it when a patch rolls out (what did we change? Was that diggle wank animation put in? This patch or next?). It'd be easier for community members to maintain that (hence the wiki, community skill guide, and etc.) without costing needless dev hours and frustration on their parts.
