Bag of Crafting vs it's own limitations (+ rework ideas)

[Ninja ZombieYoshi]

Okay, let me preface this by saying that an item that lets you craft items from pickups is very interesting. The idea that crafting gives you different items based on what you put into it is a very smart way to get many Isaac items craftable without going through too much effort.
That said, there are two things about this item that... bug me. And I feel like reworking the item just a bit would help make the Bag of Crafting go from mere gimmick to run changer.

The first I feel I mentioned at some point, but I'll mention it here so it's here: the recipes for each item feel totally random.
It doesn't feel like "I'm definitely crafting a bomb item with these bombs, but I don't really know the exact bomb item I'll get" so much as it feels like "Oh gee whiz what random pile of junk will I get from this?" I mean, the recipe for Fast Bombs isn't 7 bombs and a battery? Somewhat confusing. You actually craft it with 8 KEYS? Baffling!
I feel like this can be solved by adding in more "Junk pickups" that Bag of Crafting would let spawn when you have it held, like adding in pebbles from rocks, or flesh and bones from larger enemies and especially bosses. Maybe a tinted pebble would be a good ingredient to craft with? These shouldn't be TOO common, even with the bag on hand, but just having them would let certain ingredients more easily craft things like it, like actually having bombs give a slightly higher chance of crafting bombs! Maybe using only bone hearts and enemy bones would give a really high chance of a bone item? Maybe poops have a small chance to drop the Tainted ??? pickup, and you can use those to craft poop items. Heck, put some of these in chests! And if you find a way to reuse these "Junk pickups" for other items, that's a good bonus!
Basically, the more types of things to craft with, the more opportunity you have to make crafting more intuitive. (also why not let T.???'s poop pickups be a crafting ingredient?)

The second issue is more to do with the way you pick up ingredients with the Bag of Crafting. Simply put, it makes me SCARED of accidentally obliterating pickups when I use it, and that bugs me. Yeah, the crafting makes enough sense, put 8 pickups and then craft an item, but... getting pickups to craft with? Sucks. You can't just willy nilly go vacuum up everything you plan to craft with and then sort it out later, you have to very carefully plan EVERY little pickup you grab with it... which sucks!
I got a complicated solution for this. It wouldn't affect any recipes, but it would affect the item so greatly it may be considered a slight reworking. The basic idea? Instead of having the pickups go straight into the crafting grid, you first put them in a more simple "Crafting inventory", and this inventory allows, lets say 6 of every type of pickup. (So you can hold only 6 pennies, but you can have those 6 pennies with 6 lucky pennies and 6 dimes.) You hold down the item button to go into a crafting menu, which allows you to place pickups into the grid, which works pretty much like how it does already: Once it's in the crafting grid, it either is used to craft something or it's wasted when it's replaced. Finally, pickups in the crafting grid don't count for the inventory limit of 6 of every pickup.
...Oh, and change T. Cain's birthright so it increases your inventory size to 9 of every pickup or something.
The main difference this would bring is control. At it's most optimal, you still have the basic "8 pickups = 1 item" equation, but you would be able to not only keep enough ingredients for multiple recipes at once, but also choose exactly WHEN to use your high-quality pickups instead of either going through several floors not crafting to actually get a high-quality item or using that precious eternal heart with junk to get something that sucks. If this system was in, you would be able to pick up a dime, and craft junk until you find more high-quality ingredients to use the dime with! And the inventory limit prevents you from just holding on to everything forever, you would be encouraged to keep crafting SOMETHING.

Combine the "Junk Pickup" idea with the "BoC Inventory" idea and all of a sudden you would have SO much control over your crafting! And if this feels like a really big game changer, yeah duh! The idea is that the ability to craft would change the way you approach your run, much like how money=power changes how you approach using money, only on a bigger scale because we're working with CRAFTING! At it's best, being able to turn basically everything into ingredients should change how you approach every object in the game, even slightly.
So... yeah! Rework idea! Thought I would throw this idea out there. Anyone agree with what I feel are issues with Bag of Crafting? Anyone feel like my rework ideas are interesting? Feel free to comment.

[HeraldOfOpera]

For the record, they feel random because they are random. There are a zillion different combinations of pickups and nobody sane could set all of that manually. (We're going to politely ignore whether the people making the game qualify). Furthermore, the way the randomness works means that recipe books stop working if any mods alter the item pools it draws from but the game doesn't break.

[Ninja ZombieYoshi]

Originally posted by HeraldOfOpera:

For the record, they feel random because they are random. There are a zillion different combinations of pickups and nobody sane could set all of that manually. (We're going to politely ignore whether the people making the game qualify). Furthermore, the way the randomness works means that recipe books stop working if any mods alter the item pools it draws from but the game doesn't break.

I'm aware they are mostly random, but there's a few pickups that influence what type of items you get. To a player that doesn't memorize both the few pickups that do this and/or what recipes give what, it can seem like there's not even a smudge of rhyme or reason to anything. I mean, come on, how do you figure out that runes gives an extra chance for a planetarium if there's no pennies, bombs, keys, or red hearts? Who guesses that bombs and keys have no influence on bomb-type items and key-type items appearing? Who guesses that certain types of hearts gives a bigger chance for devil/angel/secret room items when so many items just don't influence things in ways that make sense?

The main point I'm trying to get across is that it's not very intuitive. Figuring out how to craft the right items can feel impossible when you don't know how it works, and I myself got completely stumped on how to use the Bag of Crafting for anything other than guide-assisted gamebreaks. I don't think it's too hard to add more item pools (or just tags for items) for the sole purpose of having crafting be more intuitive. If I was unclear in the main post I may edit it to get the point across quicker.

In addition, I've heard they planned (or at least considered) making every run's seed affect the crafting recipes. This completely destroys guides, and I seriously question how fun T. Cain would be when you can't even use previous runs info as a crutch, nevermind using crafting guides as a bigger one.

[HeraldOfOpera]

To put it bluntly, most of your proposal would take far more work when they're already ludicrously behind schedule... although the Key Master and Bomb Bum pools already exist as a proxy for "this is key-based" and "this is bomb-based" respectively. That bit, at least, is something a mod could probably hack together.

Additionally, remember when I mentioned that crafting guides and mods don't play nicely together? That's why they planned adding your seed to the formula. The fact that mods are enabled again is a strike against it ever happening, but they also proposed a compromise of having at least one hardcoded recipe for each item to sort of have your cake and eat it too.

[Ninja ZombieYoshi]

Originally posted by HeraldOfOpera:

To put it bluntly, most of your proposal would take far more work when they're already ludicrously behind schedule... although the Key Master and Bomb Bum pools already exist as a proxy for "this is key-based" and "this is bomb-based" respectively. That bit, at least, is something a mod could probably hack together.

Yeah, I'm very aware of how much work it would take. Nevertheless, I felt like sharing these ideas because I thought it would be interesting to consider at some point or another.
Totally forgot about the key master and bomb bum pools. Yeah, that would work well enough.