Crafting Guide

The crafting system is the way player characters are allowed to create in-game objects such as armor, weapons, decorative clothes, furniture and consumable objects. Any character may spend xp to acquire the appropriate crafting skills in character generation or afterwards, but noble characters risk a loss of prestige if their peers perceive them to be engaging in a trade for profit rather than artistic merit or religious devotion to Jayus.

To craft an item, a character must possess the skill used by their crafting profession (which is listed under a character's abilities), they must learn a recipe for the item they intend to create, acquire the materials for the recipe, and succeed in crafting it using their crafting skill and the 'craft' command. (see 'help craft').

To learn a crafting profession, a character must possess a crafting skill (sewing, smithing, tanning, alchemy, or woodworking) and then train in a related trade (listed as tailor, weaponsmith, armorsmith, leatherworker, apothecary, carpenter, or jeweler) under Abilities, using the 'xp' command (see 'help xp'). The first trade a character trains is their default specialty, and the only Crafting Ability they may raise to a rank of 6, allowing the creation of special items unavailable to non-specialists.

Each crafting rank under Abilities grants access to new recipes, using the 'recipes' command (see 'help recipes'). The lower rank recipes can be learned for free or a small cost with the 'recipes/learn' command, while the higher rank abilities are more expensive to self-teach or can be taught freely by player characters with access to the recipe.

Once a recipe is acquired, the item can be created with the 'craft' command once the player character possesses the required materials, which may be purchased from the market in the City Center (the central grid square in Arx, marked as 'CC' on the @map). Crafting materials purchased from the market are considered to be in a crafter's storage in an abstracted way, so characters are not forced to physically carry around massive amounts of crafting materials. See 'help market' for commands on buying and selling.

When a player character starts crafting with the 'craft' command, they can then create the name of the new object with craft/name (and use whatever ansi or xterm colors you like, but please don't maul our eyes), and write the description of the object with craft/desc. Names cannot contain strange unicode characters - only letters, numbers, spaces, dashes, hyphens, and ansi color codes. Additional gemstones or materials not required by the recipe can be added with craft/adorn, such adding gemstones to the hilt of a sword to increase its worth and prestige. Please note that the description and name should fit thematically with the fantasy aesthetic of the world and avoid anachronisms, and also should not contain references to materials that aren't included in the crafting process or replaced through forgery. At any time during the crafting process, a player character can use craft/abandon to abort without a loss of any money or materials.

When satisfied with the description and name of an item, a player character can attempt to finish the item with craft/finish, which will then check a character's applicable crafting skill (such as smithing) versus the difficulty of the recipe to determine the final quality of the item. A player character can opt to invest additional money in the craft/finish command to lower the difficulty of the attempt for better results, and further after the item is complete they may attempt to attempt to craft/refine the item in a bid to improve its quality for an additional cost.

Do not hesitate to ask on the Info channel if the syntax should prove confusing, since it can take quite a bit of getting used to.