Is the new crafting system actually good?

[Big Dividend Goth Modulo]

I'm being serious; I haven't been able to really play with it too much because everything is gated behind levels, tools, schematics, or some random bit or baub I never thought to collect. Is it worth the effort to grind up, or do I even need to grind to get access to some basic utilities?

[Armagenesis]

Since the idea is to allow players for wilderness-only survival, I'd say no.

According to some people, the bottlenecks come from the maintenance skill blocking a lot of essential tools, the fact that you still need nails, and yes, that some important recipes are locked behind magazines.

I think for the nail's case, it should be able to be solved by allowing us to carve makeshift nails using wood. Or just allow us to you stakes as replacement for nails. Or you know, instead of trying to nail everything down, you should be allowed to use rope to tie the construction up together when it makes sense.

[AriGryphon]

I'd say if you want to test it, use debug and spawn the things and force the skills up to check out the system. It's very much unfinished. I don't know that it is worth the gameplay grind for its own sake at this point - there's a lot of logical things missing that make funcitonality limited. It's not ready for just build everything from scratch, for sure. You need to loot and survive the old modern apocalypse way primarily. The only thing you can do with milk is drink it or make butter. By the time you are secure enough to set up smithing you are not likely to actually need it. As a gameplay addition to survival in the apocalypse, it's not really integrated or ready to be useful. Definitely worth playing around with, but skip to it so you can. That's how you test systems like this for their own sake, when the way to access them isn't really worked out properly yet.

[Big Dividend Goth Modulo]

Originally posted by AriGryphon:

I'd say if you want to test it, use debug and spawn the things and force the skills up to check out the system. It's very much unfinished. I don't know that it is worth the gameplay grind for its own sake at this point - there's a lot of logical things missing that make funcitonality limited. It's not ready for just build everything from scratch, for sure. You need to loot and survive the old modern apocalypse way primarily. The only thing you can do with milk is drink it or make butter. By the time you are secure enough to set up smithing you are not likely to actually need it. As a gameplay addition to survival in the apocalypse, it's not really integrated or ready to be useful. Definitely worth playing around with, but skip to it so you can. That's how you test systems like this for their own sake, when the way to access them isn't really worked out properly yet.

I don't want to eat the pudding until I eat the meat. Getting access to the crafting system is going to be part of the normal gameplay loop, therefore it's just as much a part of the blacksmithing experience as doing the actual blacksmithing stuff. If I have to cheat and it's still lackluster, then it's... kind of a letdown.

Originally posted by Armagenesis:

Since the idea is to allow players for wilderness-only survival, I'd say no.

According to some people, the bottlenecks come from the maintenance skill blocking a lot of essential tools, the fact that you still need nails, and yes, that some important recipes are locked behind magazines.

I think for the nail's case, it should be able to be solved by allowing us to carve makeshift nails using wood. Or just allow us to you stakes as replacement for nails. Or you know, instead of trying to nail everything down, you should be allowed to use rope to tie the construction up together when it makes sense.

Yeah, odd for the bushcrafting update to require a lot of crap you can't make in the wild. I do like how the game encourages you to bounce between wilderness survival and urban scavenging now.

[Armagenesis]

Let's just wait for the 2nd half of b42 for now, I'd say. The advanced crafting hasn't dropped yet, so we might be missing something that comes with that. Hopefully.

[ld-airgrafix]

It can be annoying, for example double gates, you need all the ingredients on you to get an outline, so you know how much room to leave. Changing shapes, for example going from, wall frame, to finished wall, involves a lot more clicking.

[Ashley]

No. It's unfinished and some beginner barriers to me at least personally are too high. Hard to get anything done cause tools are rare and making them requires high skills in somethings

Only have one playthrough so far but it could be because I started in Echo Creek and the loot there is absolute garbage. The only reason to start there is ease of access to farms.

[Lokaror]

Its really not great right now. Its not really even worth trying to get to grips with because of how much is missing.

[Foster]

Originally posted by Red Luigi:

Yeah, odd for the bushcrafting update to require a lot of crap you can't make in the wild. I do like how the game encourages you to bounce between wilderness survival and urban scavenging now.

Lemmy has gone on record on the reddit in stating that this version of the crafting is absolutely not where they want it to be for the wilderness survival aspect, which is what the "extended crafting" is intended to fill in on the to-do list that came alongside the drop of the Unstable.
That's also something to keep in mind, it's the Unstable release so they don't have everything perfectly put together yet, they're gonna be working on it.

Don't worry about trying to do a pure bushcraft run right now, because it's simply not possible at the moment.
Maybe once they get some updates under their belt after the new year is clear in the rear view.

[Lemmings]

In my opinion the new building/crafting dialogue feels very clunky. Many recipes that were previously available by right-click are now hidden in the respective dialogue menues. There is no built-in function to see easily what a given item can be used for: you have to enter the crafting dialogue, enter the name of the item, change a dropdown and then you finally see something. Or not. A lot of items that look like meaningful at first glance, still have no use for crafting / building. I understand that crafting is not yet finished, but still it is frustrating to do all the steps without anything to gain. Some help regarding usability is available by mods ("What can I craft" etc.; hope that additional mods will overhaul the vanilla menu even more or that the developers consider a revamping of the interface).

From the perspective of usability / UX crafting as it is now is horrible and actually a step back from what was possible in B41 with mods. I love the content, but I am very disappointed by the presentation. I think that more testing and early feedback would have been a lot better than waiting for so long and developing without actual player feedback. Changing stuff now may feel like a lot of sunk cost for the devs and also may lead to frustration.

[Big Dividend Goth Modulo]

Originally posted by Armagenesis:

Let's just wait for the 2nd half of b42 for now, I'd say. The advanced crafting hasn't dropped yet, so we might be missing something that comes with that. Hopefully.

Ooh, okay. I wasn't aware that the crafting system just wasn't finished yet. I'd assumed that the whole point of publicly testing an unstable build is to get feedback about a system that's finished but unbalanced from the player base. In that case, I'm crossing my fingers and wishing on a star that we get something comparable to Neo Scavenger's crafting system.

[Neskess]

It's alright

[Animalman]

no

[Foster]

Originally posted by Lemmings:

In my opinion the new building/crafting dialogue feels very clunky. Many recipes that were previously available by right-click are now hidden in the respective dialogue menues. There is no built-in function to see easily what a given item can be used for: you have to enter the crafting dialogue, enter the name of the item, change a dropdown and then you finally see something. Or not. A lot of items that look like meaningful at first glance, still have no use for crafting / building. I understand that crafting is not yet finished, but still it is frustrating to do all the steps without anything to gain. Some help regarding usability is available by mods ("What can I craft" etc.; hope that additional mods will overhaul the vanilla menu even more or that the developers consider a revamping of the interface).

From the perspective of usability / UX crafting as it is now is horrible and actually a step back from what was possible in B41 with mods. I love the content, but I am very disappointed by the presentation. I think that more testing and early feedback would have been a lot better than waiting for so long and developing without actual player feedback. Changing stuff now may feel like a lot of sunk cost for the devs and also may lead to frustration.

Comparing the vanilla UI to modded B41 UI is rather bizarre, that wasn't what was implemented, that's what fans with unlimited time to focus all their development on an individual component were able to produce.
It's completely incomparable, it's not worth doing and can in many ways ring as disingenuous.

Now, individual mods that have been made available near instantly with B42 are a different beast because those are a lot more in-line with the development team's capabilities, a short turnover time for a small addition that can be implemented within a week at absolute most.
That being said, we need to give them the time to actually spin up production on development again because right now they're probably taking a bit of time off due to the new year and the unstable having JUST been dropped.

Regardless of that, many of the right click "simple" crafting options are 100% intended to still be a thing as showcased by there being many new ones, they just haven't been implemented again yet because they have to be reintroduced from scratch due to the entire crafting system being reproduced from the ground up.
Moreover, the UI and UX are explicitly unfinished, this is not what they intend for it to be like come the finished full release of the build, and part of the point of the Unstable is to get feedback on the current iteration of it so they can get some guidance from the playerbase on where to head with it as they reiterate upon it further.

Simply put, they already know these things and it's a waste of time to keep reiterating the same thing that has been said 5000 other times by other people, because they already know this exact couple of pain points and are already planning on working to improve upon them and alleviate them.