First Look

The "crafting" command will go live tonight. In addition to the base command (which lists the full set of sub-commands, a few of which have changed since the last blog entry), you'll initially have access to the "crafting score" sub-command to play with, as well as the "crafting appraise" sub-command (which won't tell you much about anything that's not a crafted item).

It looks small, but it's much huger than it looks - underneath the slow tease of the "crafting" command, the actual infrastructure for crafting 3.0 is being deployed onto live Nodeka for the first time! The toys are there, I just need to keep the chest locked a little longer while I polish, fix, and sand off the edges. =)

In addition, the "boons" command is now accessible as well. This lets you take a look at the boons and set bonuses that you (or another person) are receiving from gear. This of course ties into crafted items, but the boon/set functionality is a complete system of its own - if time permits I may toss out a few very minor, temporary example items onto live to show you what it all looks like while you wait for crafting. =)

Finally, I've updated the wounding algorithm as follows:

• An "upshift" has been added to the stat calculations for smaller players - weaker characters won't be penalized quite as heavily when applying/resisting wounds against larger players.
• The role of dexterity (for applying wounds) and constitution (for resisting wounds) has been strongly increased for larger players. These stats will now impact your wound interactions more effectively.
• NPCs are now harder to wound than before. (Note that if the mob's constitution is very low compared to your dexterity, the dex/con boost may mitigate or even overtake this effect.) However, their resistance to wounding damage has been reduced - they now suffer 75% of the normal bleed rather than 50%.

The overall effect should be to make wounding more viable for smaller characters and as a tool against certain NPCs.

Questions and comments are welcome as always - I'll continue to develop crafting in the meantime. We'll have a bit of a class balance discussion sometime in the near future as well - keep your eyes open!