And here's another CryoFall development blog! This time let's take a look at another important feature from the list of basic mechanics. That would obviously be crafting.

We evaluated a lot of possibilities for crafting implementation, especially in relation to requirements we set for the design and balancing of the game. One of the requirements was to allow people many ways to specialize their characters to make each player contributions valuable for the server. This necessitated the game to have branching tech tree and that in order determined our choice of crafting system.

Essentially crafting of new items can be accomplished in several different ways:

• Hand crafting - items can simply be crafted from inventory. This is obviously only possible for the most basic recipes which available to all players.
• Station crafting - essentially the same as above, but requires a specific crafting station. For example "workbench" would give you access to some more advanced recipes compared to what you can craft in your inventory.
• Manufacturing stations - This is a completely different type of crafting. When you start crafting here, the item will be added to the queue of the station itself, rather than your own personal crafting queue as in the two first options. Example of such manufacturing station would be an "assembler machine" that would manufacture different high-tech items.
• Auto-manufacturing stations - These are similar to the above, but they select the appropriate recipes automatically. Well, they function very similarly to "furnace" in minecraft. You just put some ore and fuel and boom - it will automatically start refining that ore for you. No additional hassle needed. Example of such stations include: grill, drying cabinet, well, furnace as mentioned above and a few others.

We have yet to decide on the actual terminology, specifically how to name these types of crafting stations, but the mechanics are there.

And here are some screenshots:

Above you can see an example of such crafting station. In this case it is a "chemical laboratory". You can craft different chemicals there. Number of recipes is still tiny, as we just added it into the game. Plus it doesn't even have categories. All of that will come later.

And that one is current implementation of the basic "furnace". Just place your ore and fuel in there - it will convert it to metal. With further player advancement in the game there will be more advanced mechanics for metal refining. Such as using different and more complex processes for that, including other chemicals to increase yield.

Another thing I want to mention - the UI in both examples above is obviously still mostly a placeholder and as the game progresses we will significantly improve the visuals.

Anyway, that would be it for today's blogpost! I hope you found it interesting. As always, don't forget to join us on the forums!