Tradeskills in SWG

One of the things that fascinates me with modern MMORPGs is that since Ultima Online nearly all games offer the possibility to play a character that is crafting items. I was a tailor in UO, and tried several tradeskills in EQ and DAoC. Now I'm a "novice armorsmith" in Star Wars Galaxies. And up to now, SWG offers the best tradeskill experience of all the games I've played.

This is NOT due to the process of making items and gaining xp from doing so. I wish somebody would come up with a fun way to do so, but in all games I know the way to master crafter consists of repeatedly doing the same action for hours and hours. Some research showed that the best way to master armorsmith in SWG would be to create 1680 Mabari armor chest plates. I made about 200 now, and I'm already terribly bored.

The IDEA behind this sort of system is, that people have fun producing goods for other people, and gain xp while doing so. The fundamental flaw in that idea is, that even if I produced complete sets of armor instead of just the chest plates, I need to produce 720 complete sets to be master. And there is simply no market for 720 complete sets of medium quality armor. To make the best armor in the game in the best quality, I need to be, you guessed it, master armorsmith. So in SWG like in other games, a tradeskill consists of first "grinding" your way to master, and THEN being able to sell your wares.

So why am I doing it? I do it, because aside from the above mentioned fundamental flaw common to all games, crafting is a lot more fun in SWG than in the other games. And that is due to the way SWG handles resources. Resources in SWG are highly complicated, and therefore very interesting. First of all, there is a resource tree. For example under minerals you find ferrous metals, under which you find steel, under which you find neutronium steel, under which you find the individual resource. The individual resource has a randomly created name, like Quadragegis, a set of stats, and it can only be found on the server for about 1 week, and never again thereafter. The set of stats consists of 2 to 7 stats, ranging from overall quality, to shock resistance, conductivity, or unit toughness. Only materials that you would expect to be conductive, metals, have the conductivity stat, thats why not each resource has the same number of stats. Each stat ranges from 1 to 999, with higher being better.

Now whenever you make an item, you download a blueprint to your crafting tool, which tells you two things. WHAT resource you need, for example 6 units of metal and 4 units of wood, and which stats affect which quality of the final product. For example if you craft a heavy axe, the damage that this heavy axe does, depends on the shock resistance of the resources used. But if you craft a piece of armor, its encumbrance depends on the malleability stat of the resource. So the same metal that might be great for making axes could well be bad for making armor, as you rarely find a resource where all the stats are high.

The more complicated the item, the more specific is the resource requirement. Some basic items require just any mineral, then come items that require metal, items that require ferrous metal, items that require steel, and finally items that require Neutronium steel. As there are 8 different sorts of steel and only 2 to 4 per week on the server, it might well be that there is no Neutronium steel at all to be found in any given week, which makes crafting advanced items with these "rare resources" more complicated.

Except for bones, hides, and meat, which can be looted from killed animals, all other resources are found with a surveying tool. If you activate that tool, you get a list of all the resources currently available, you chose one, and you get a map of the concentration of this resource around your current position. Following that map to the highest concentration and surveying again will eventually lead you to the spot with the highest concentration in this vein of resource. There you can either sample the resource manually, or place a harvester to extract that resource. The fact that resources shift every week means that you have to shift your harvesters as well, and are continually busy to search the planet for the highest concentrations of the best materials.

Once you have good materials, you can further increase the quality of the items you produce with experimentation. You have a number of experimentation points, depending on your skill, and you can choose where you want to improve the item you want to make. Do you want to make your armor absorb more damage, or do you want it to be less encumbring, or do you want it to have higher durability?

The resource quality and experimentation leads to every item being different. Every beginner artisan can create the CDEF pistol which is the standard newbie pistol. But if you put some effort in it, you can make a CDEF pistol which deals twice as much damage as the starting weapon. And obviously the better the items are that you make, the better is your chance to be able to sell them, so it is worth the effort.

Lots of variety, good planning required to always have the resources you need, effort rewarded with high quality results, this is what makes SWG tradeskills such fun.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:45 PM Permanent Link