Crafting on Designing Virtual Worlds

Manufacture

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s how a simple real-world manufacturing process works:

Raw materials are grown, dug from the ground, or captured. Examples: wheat, ore, cows.
The raw materials are refined to get rid of the useless bits. Examples: grain, copper, milk.
The refined materials are made into components or finished goods. Examples: bread, wire, cheese.
Components are combined with other components to make new components or finished goods. Examples: sandwiches, circuit boards, pizzas.

Recipes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

My house is within five miles of four large supermarkets. The bread in the first one is too doughy; the bread in the second is too crusty; the bread in the third is too soft; the bread in the fourth is perfect (a shame the rest of the stuff they sell is so rubbish). Bread has been manufactured for thousands of years, but even today bakers use different recipes.

To make crafting more palatable to non-socializers, some virtual worlds have introduced explorative or competitive elements to it. One favored technique is to have multiple recipes for the same basic object (or, commonly, spell—this can be applied to more than just manufacture), some of which will endow the resulting creation with different properties than others. A recipe typically consists of a set of ingredients; these will often have to be explicitly arranged in some (usually linear) sequence, but in some implementations the “use recipe” action will do it implicitly.

Beyond the Virtual World

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

So, I want to bake a loaf of bread. I get the ingredients, I mix them up, I stick them in the oven, then—I wait? What if I’m not baking bread but am manufacturing swords? I get the metal together, heat it, beat it, rapidly cool it, heat it, beat it, rapidly cool it, heat it—for how long? Do I actually have to do this? My character has the skills, not me—why should I have to be present while it happens?