Now that gathering skills are in a better place, I turned my attention to the core crafting skills. I want them to be familiar and consistent, but unique in their own ways. For example, Cooking is more focused on experimentation and recipe discovery, while Smithing focuses more on creating items from concrete schematics, then upgrading those items into new ones.

Cooking

Cooking is mostly the same, but I simplified the process a bit by cutting the concept of differently sized cookware items affecting the number of ingredient slots available. You still need either a Pot or a Pan, but either will give you 4 ingredient slots to work with. The quality of the used ingredients affects the quality of the final dish, which affects the amount of health restored by eating it. Better ingredients equals better food.

Smithing

Smithing (previously called Gearcrafting) required a good bit of bugfixes and UI improvements. You can now queue up more than one of an item, just like you can with Cooking. There is also a new recipe panel so the interface is more consistent with that of Cooking. Of course, material quality now affects the quality of the final product - which affects its maximum durability.

Ore still needs to be processed into Ingots at a Furnace before they can be used for Smithing. Not too much has changed there.

Next Steps

There are more crafting skills to be added in the future, but to keep things simple for now I won't add them until there is more gameplay for them to actually support. You may have also noticed that the character model looks a bit different now. I hope to write more about that soon!

Thanks for reading.

- Declan (@dooskington)