Crafting ideas

Weapons and Armour!
To be fair, being to craft anything is pretty cool already, but I love the idea of creating your own weapons from scratch, though I must admit it's not a thing I've been doing much in other MUDs.

Calling Aramus. 

(all names of craft skills, types, ingredients used for example purposes only)

In my mind, Crafting in a MUD needs to resemble crafting in the Real World in the sense that components should be intermingled. Such as a metal being used in blacksmithing, jewelry, and building (player home furniture, etc). Plants should have application in cooking, brewing, apothecary, etc without having to have completely different material sets for each craft. Willowbark could do one thing for brewing, something else for apothecary, without having to have mutually exclusive ingredient lists by craft.

Furthermore, crafting skills themselves should somehow be overall linked. Someone who is adept in Apothecary might have an easier time picking up brewing than someone with no experience at all. Crafting skills themselves are ill-suited to a normal 0%-100% skill progression. On The Third Turning, there were multiple (11 maybe?) Ranks in a specific craft skill. In 3 years on that MUD I went from Untrained (base rank, no skill/experience) to Grandmaster in Perfumery (temporary timer, scent slot eq) but never achieved the last 2 ranks (Genius, Perfected), and that was crafting for HOURS a day. No one could pick the skill up and in a month be where I was. It took WORK, but the work paid off in being able to produce things no one else could make.

Each craft would net me a set amount of "craft xp" based on the difficulty of what I was making, the ingredients used (some were harder to work with), whether I was easing (taking longer) or rushing (crafting faster, higher chance of failure), success/failure (half xp for failing), etc. That craft xp would go into a stored variable on my pfile that I could see visually by an "xp bar" set up under a "crafts" command. That xp bar showed the progress to the next Craft Rank (Untrained, Apprentice, etc). Higher ranks gave more "craft points" which were a pool of points that represented basically your mental capacity with regards to that craft. You started with a small pool of craft points and each task/option that you added to what you were crafting would then cost a set amount of craft points. Adding more ingredients cost more points, easing (working slower, lowers difficulty, higher chance of success) cost points, rushing (working faster, higher difficulty, higher chance of failure) cost points, diluting (pulling specific scents/effects out to magnify/diminish) cost points, and so on. Higher ranks also opened new options like rushing, batches, diluting, and more that I never got a chance to unlock before we shuttered.

<might add more, at work, brain drained>