All right, so I've been playing this game for about 5 days now and I have to say that I LOVE IT! However, I've recently made a smithing character and discovered that the crafting system is extremely clunky. I've compiled some suggestions which may be very beneficial to making crafting less of a pain. First, I'd like to start with the crafting items: Each item should have a description when moused over which briefly shows what it is useful for (kind of like the text that appears for special weapons before their flavor text). Example:Rearden ingot:encrusting; Steel ingot:encrusting, weapons, armor, shields etc. citrineotions, encrusts, etc. Also, these should only be displayed for what you can use them for. If it is useless for your current build (something used in smithing when you're an alchemist, it wouldn't display anything). It should still display if it goes into something with a required skill of 0, or a Tinkering skill of 1 (because of Tinkerer's goggles). This would make it a lot easier to tell what you want to sell and what you want to keep in term of crafting items, and would make it harder to accidentally sell that wizard's robe that you might have wanted to use or to keep that platinum ingot that doesn't really help you in any way. Next, some way of filtering things in the recipe section would help a lot, and would reduce the (painfully long) time you have to search for a certain recipe. Filters could include:body armour, leg armour, weapons, amulets, shields, throwables etc. and even for weapon classes (axes, polearms, swords etc.), with the possibility of enable multiple filters at once. Also, the pages could use some sorting options, namely by type or by crafting level. Now, you can see armor next to an axe next to a sword next to another axe next to a bomb. It's painfully difficult to search for anything specific! Adding an option to sort by type (putting all axes together, all armors together etc.) would be very beneficial. Another sorting option could be by crafting level, which is also scrambled now. Last, I'd like to suggest a "marking" option. Once you mark a recipe, it will always show up at the top of the list in a golden frame. This would make it a lot easier to know what items to search for and not accidentally sell without having to note the recipe on a piece of paper or search aeons for it in the list. All right. That's all for now. If you have any further suggestions, feedback or anything, feel free to post.
Other than the "add descriptions" one (it's not a problem after one or two runs, you just learn what you want to use and what is junk for you, and no amount of descriptions will change that, not to mention problems with some things only being used in hidden recipes - you could either write that they are used in recipes and spoil the fact that they are hidden, or not write that and... well, I guess you get the point), I like these ideas.
I don't see how it spoils them. They are available from the wiki anyways, so it's not really that much of a problem (they're very easy to find too), and since you can't craft said item without the recipe, I don't think this could do much harm. Though if the "marking" option would be used, I agree, there wouldn't be too much need of descriptions.
Listing every item that some of these items are useful for making would badly clutter their descriptions. It would, however, be useful to see something like "This item can be used for wandcrafting " or "This item can be used for tinkering and smithing" or whatever appended to the descriptions of items that are used in recipes from those skills. EDIT: Also, items not used in any recipes would possibly also be labeled "This item cannot be used for crafting"
And it would fail completely if someone decided to add a mod that used one of the ingredients for something it wasn't used for originally...
No no no. it would be procedurally appended to the ends of the descriptions just like the ends of the monster descriptions (ie. "...This monster is bleeding. This monster is trying to kill you.")
That would require them to redo item descriptions, ergo "you can dream" (because they aren't likely to make any purely aesthetic changes that involve serious coding).
