First: Thanks for that fine gadget!

Situation:
When editing or creating a recipe, there is only one dropdown-listbox that contains the ingridents.

Now imagine ..
.. you'd be editing Hoben Boots and want to add clothing. There'd be 4 categorized lists instead of one:

• "Quality" containing "Basic" to "Supreme"
• "Ecosys" containing "Desert" to "Prime Roots"
• "Kind" containing "Fiber", "Skin" and "Generic"
• and "Detail" containing Anete, Shu, .. .. Raspal, Shalah .. and Raw Material. All sorted first by type (foraged, quartered, etc) and then alphabetically.

With purified names, i.e. "Fragment of", "Portion of", "Tuft of" etc. removed.
I think that would ease the use.

(Above category names are descriptive only and no real suggestion; you'd take whatever name that fits nicely.)

Pro's

• The one-box-design is quite uncomfortable, since it contains a whole bunch of items, sometimes sorted sort of weird.
• I don't know the english and french versions in detail, but in the german one there additionally is no consequently followed naming scheme, which also makes it harder to find a specific resource. For example:
  "Fragment einer Wüsten-Rendor-Haut (Vorzügliche Qualität)"
  "Vorzügliche Urwurzel Gubani Haut" ..
  That could be eased.

Con's

• I'm aware that without (client-side) plausibility-checking it would allow users to insert items like Supreme Generic Shalah Fiber. But I don't see the responsibility to prevent users from creating senseless recipes on the dev-side.
• I assume it'd surely imply database table changes, which is the reason why I declared this thread as comment, not as suggestion. I just wanted to put it to discussion before the book gets heavily used and changes become difficult.

An additional spinbox / spinbutton for easy adjusting the ingrident's count seems to be nice, but AFAIK it unfortunately requires JS for a proper implementation. So typing it in, like it is now, will surely be the better and easier way.

Keep on, best regards
Talya

Was my first thought, too. Talya. About the drop-down (would be nice, if they where seperate) ..but i think the data is read from an array or something, where the data is in this format. To seperate it, they need to split every string in the array and make new arrays or something...

Yes,

it seems the item name list has directly been built from an ingame string table. One would need to hack together a little "parser" that splits up every complete name and feeds 4 new lists with it. Could surely be done in little time..

Even the Database wouldn't necessarily need an update (from one field to 4) - though it would be of more elegance than the following.
The choices of all 4 lists could be concatenated into a comma-seperated string when saving, and afterwards .split(',') when reading.

Another (rather it-related) benefit would be the fact that the new 4 string tables will be non-redundant. Every word is only saved once, which makes the memory, database and transmission footprint smaller.

At the end it seems to be a matter of how the devs assess the benefits opposed to the work that has to be done to archieve it.

Thank you for commenting on it, Purg.
Best Regards,
Talya

For heavy armor, add a category for the craft of marauder armor.
And too much category in craft section ! We don't need the name of all piece of armor.

best would be a filtering option similar to the market window. right now its an eye killer. Filtering of armour and mat: quality and location. maybe just a bunch of check boxes.

Also some reason scrolling up don't work in the dropdowns for me.

Additional Suggestion:

For another (out of game) receipe book i wrote a script to detect receipes from plain text receipe notes.

For example you provide as text:
6x fine shu
6x exe oath
15x exe hash bernstein

The script will detect automatically:
- fine shu must be fine shu fiber
- exe oath must be excellent oath bark (of randomly picked origin)
- exe hash bernstein must be excellent hash amber
- That can be a MQ Amp only

Technically the script does a full text search on all three localized material descriptions and checks which pattern can hold all selected materials. There are only a few ambigous patterns (i.e. long axe / long sword).

A similar option in the new ingame receipe book would make it very easy to add all your existing receipes.

Another useful addition would be to calculate preview stats from the receipes. There is very little spoiling in that (preview stats - not final item stats), eases receipe creation and creates value beyond a text note.

#
I have to disagree with the spoling, coming from the precraft to the postcraft stats is easy and most people know exactly the outcome. But getting from the mats to the precraft/preview stats, this is where all the spoiling happens. Because if this is really implemented you don't have a recipe book but a working crafting simulator.

Who prevents you from entering recipes you have never seen / tested just to check the preview outcome? It will be a major spoiler this way.

Umm, I agree with you.
This recipe book would reveal too many stats too easy.

well, ok. you actually need to get the materials to see which effect they have on the preview stats. Just thought about material stats, which are likely to be public knowlegde after all this time (homins are interested in their environment and capable of writing).

The other point is how to get your receipes into the receipe book. I personally dont like clicking through multiple comboboxes to enter one existing receipe.

What would really make the Craft book useful is if it recorded end craft stats as well. much of precraft can lie, and most often I am asked what is this stat or that stat of thinks I craft. If it recorded actual item stats then I can tell people without hunting for my notes on it. Currently Notepad is still more useful in this manner. I am not advocating that the book takes mats and tells you the stats, but rather the stats I enter myself are those of the item I crafted.

Drega, i agree. But i enter the "end-stats" in the "note" line below. works for me...

still would be fine if we could enter them like the preview stats.

@Arcueid: i think many crafter know how to calculate preview stats as well, but i agree ...if you'll do it manually it's much to calc and an automated process will turn the book in a simulator.

Yes, no doubt, some homins have gathered an insane amount of craft konwledge. But we are talking about an application available to everyone, also the freshly started player. I really don't want to see an app like a sim spoiling all the fun for the new players, we old peeps had with crafting and recipes.

Of course people don't HAVE to use it, but we all know it, once something is available people will use and abuse it. I'm talking about situations where someone with zero knowledge just pushes a button and gets a craft recipe delivered. A recipe which took months to come up with for a normal crafter.

Yes, why stop there with the sim? If you think this further, so much can be done. But I doubt it is healthy for the unique crafting experience this game offers. If you remove all the secrets, what you get is the craft system of every other generic mmo out there. Predefined recipes you just fill out with the mats. Is this fun? Not to me.

arc

I second Arc's feelings i have collected a lot of mats and i go play with mix and match see what i come up with and a sim would take away that fun and may be i might find a recipy no one else has you never know :)

Arceuid, my feelings exactly.
And I sure hope more of us do feel this way.

CU
Acridiel

Thank you, Arcueid,

thats exactly what I told someone per PM yesterday.
I generally think spoilers that offer too much information too easy for too many people will do harm to the game.
This also applys to spot maps like the ones you find at BM's site. If this was intended by the game creators, there would be an ingame spot map with detailed information.

It's not about *if* someone has maps or a craft-sim, it's about who has access to it. I don't mind if someone who is able to write a sim by only using his experience, writes one for his personal usage.
I also don't mind if someone makes a personal spot map by sweeping through the country.
Everyone tends to try to establish an advantage over the others - thats natural and okay, as long as he really *works* and spends time on it and doesn't use illegal methods ..

As long as only a minority has "earned" their advantage, there is enough motivation for a player to try to archieve a similar goal. But as soon as someone goes to public with his "secrets", he renders the other players earnings futile and cuts away an essential part of the often-mentioned "end-content" of this game. ..which sadly is kinda "sparse" anyways.

Tried to keep it as short as possible :) ..
Best regards
Talya