Tiered Item Refinement.

Snagged from my post on minecraft:

This is something I saw in a game called Windborne, who’s development seams to have died. This had quite the potential I tried to point out but, well there is no development going on so I’ll explain here.The basic idea is though that all the wood, stone, wool, meat, veggies, what have you that you collect are raw and need to be refined. They only had two stations for this in the other game but this unlocks a very good option for tiered crafting. Now how it works is basickly this:

You have say a wood cutting block, you lock a copper axe into it and that copper axe has a durability bar for uses, then you stack wood into it and cut them into planks of wood. However the planks do not all come out the same, and it works out something like this:

1 raw wood has a chance of becoming: crude wood planks at a rate of 50%; wood planks at 35%; fine wood planks at 15%; suburb wood planks at 9%; pristine wood planks at 1%; and no chance of producing any immaculate wood planks

BC_Programming adds that making a ratio that if you refine so many blocks with out getting a particular rarity or above, you will automatically get it when that ratio is meet.

Also to note that various forms of refinement could also produce byproducts and have room for attachments of sorts to extract items that you normally wouldn’t get. There are all sorts of possibilities here. Some good examples are getting coal or gem dust from ore/stone/gemstone refinement, getting sap or sawdust from wood refinement, and flint from ore…. lots of possibilities.

Now this is fine for the start of the game but high end items will need suburb or better and your going to be wasting a lot of wood like this! So what do you do? Well you could replace the copper axe with a steel or diamond axe, and it would move the %’s up to higher qualities, but that’s only a temporary solution. You however have ore refined to enough a quality to make saw blades, and you saved quality wood enough to make a wood cutter. So you build and replace your old cutting block with the table and lock the saw blade in….. now you don’t even make curde wood planks anymore and always have a chance of making immaculate wood planks (all be it probably low).

On a side note, something that only needs crude wood (like burning it for fuel) can use any higher quality, or putting a quality of refined material back in the refinement object produces two or so of the refinement bellow it. Ether way there should be a way to use the higher quality goods on less quality productions.

This goes on in say 3 ~ 5 tiers of refinement station, each with various quality refinement tools to use in them (that like the axe and saw blade can be used for other things), Each type of material has it’s own station: Wood, cloth, stone, gems, ore, weapon parts, paper, glass, chemicals (for alchemy), food. Likely a few more I’m not thinking of.

That or you could just combine a few together… like stone, gems, and wood…. all requiring cutting and cupping away at, and glass and ore… both melting.

This can make something as simple as being able to craft a window with silk drapes make you feel good, knowing all the work that went into getting the refinement stations that let you produce the quality of glass and silk to do it. Also it means some one can’t just give you a diamond axe and say go at it little buddy, and your into end game stuff. They would have to go through some trouble to help you out, needing to produce a few crafting stations for you and make the tools they need. Then continue to supply those tools until you can make them yourself. Or they could just let you use there stuff till they can make it on there own. Ether way, helping some one out isn’t as easy as giving them some gear and sending them off…. you have to actually put effort into helping them.

Finally with using this adding a general rarity system to the game for organizations sake and being able to tell the quality at a glance is a good idea. Different colored names aren’t really necessary, just the boarder around the item and the now standard RPG rarity system works fine: crude – gray / standard – white / fine – green / suburb – blue / pristine – purple / immaculate – orange

Another use for the refinement idea is to have a catch-all item or items that can produce various results. An exsample:

In the game this is from you can find gemstones blocks that can be refined producing rubies, sapphires, diamonds, emeralds, and the like all at diffrent %’s and rarities.

Or you could say use it in the Dino mod where currently you brake various fossils into sets of DNA samples. Instead you could crush the samples up and put them in a centrifudge or something like that for a refinement process.