Your personal lab for crafting items

[davidec]

Hi everyone, this is my first post.

 

I am no modder but recently while playing Awakening I've had this idea, thought I could post it here if someone wants to pick the challenge.

 

It is not just my opinion that the process of item creation in DAO is clunky, particularly when it comes to the new runecrafting ability, which is the most ill-conceived ever. Creation recipes are scattered everywhere, reagents are sold by different merchants, and the items creation lists are an unsorted mess. It is hard to figure out how to make runes and how much raw materials you need to buy in order to get what you want.

Besides, I've always found hardly realistic that you can craft complex items just everywhere, in the middle of nowhere or even during combat. Yes, go ahead and try to create a paragon flame rune while a darkwspawn is chewing your butt... are you serious?!

 

Has anyone ever thought the PCs should have a well-equipped LAB to do all that? A place to create and manage all your craftable items, such as potions, traps, poisons and runes. The more I think about it the more it makes sense.

The lab should feature the following areas:

 

- A chemical lab to craft potions and poisons.

- An officine for building traps, maybe a testing ground with a dummy to try them out

- A lab for crafting runes and a special desk or machinery or assistant to enchant them right away

- A merchant that sells ALL reagents and novice runes with unlimited supplies, and also all the creation recipes, so you don't have to go insane looking for them. Please let this guy have NO annoying dialogue lines, just open the shop!

- A storage area with multiple chests to store all the items you create. Or you could simply distribute storage chests in the various lab areas.

- In the best case, a well-structured lab inventory that lists all the items and reagents you currently have in storage.

 

If possible we should also have a new, improved user interface where items are sortable by tier or alphabetic order. Runes in particular should be ordered in a tree from novice to paragon, showing how many you have and how many you need to buy. An important feature would be enabling you to input a number of items you want crafted instead of clicking 40 times the "Craft Item" button. Say, you want 15 lyrium potions? You type in "15" and click "Craft", and it's done!

The mod should show ALL the items, even the ones you don't have a recipe for. Those ones should be highlighted in gray to tell you that you don't have the recipe yet for crafting that specific item.

The mod should also replace the descriptions of all items with more detailed information on what they do and which bonuses they grant.

 

As an option (and I think this will be a very arguable option), the mod should also allow the player to DISABLE the ability to craft items anywhere but in the lab. For a more realistic gameplay, players should prepare and store the items before they go on a mission. That means if you need more supplies you need to go back for them, so you need to plan missions ahead and stock up in advance.

 

The mod should work like this: a character with a crafting skill enters the lab and interacts with the proper desk in order to bring up the item creation interface. Then the items go to the inventory. For example, I want to create runes? I buy the materials from the merchant, then go to the rune creation desk and interact with it, and when I'm done I go and have them cast on my equipment. Simple.

 

A nice function to implent would be discounts for buying large stocks. The cost of creating high-tier items can be prohibitive otherwise. It would be better if the merchant applies a discount if you by 20, 50, 100 reagents or more!

 

OK these are just my ideas so let me know what you think about it and if this mod could actually be made.