Recipes
The most important thing in a system is its recipes. Recipes define what you can make, and what you need to make it.
Recipes have 3 important properties:
- Ingredients: Components the recipe consumes
- Catalysts: Components that must be present to craft the recipe, but which are not consumed
- Essences: Essences required from amongst available components to craft the recipe, in addition to any ingredients and catalysts. Extracting essences from Ingredients consumes them
- Results: The components the recipe produces
Options
The simpler a recipe is, the easier it will be to use. However, you might encounter a situation that requires you to offer multiple options for the requirements for, or results of, a single recipe.
For example, imagine that you want to create a system for repairing worn and broken gear. In that system, let’s say that we have 3 levels of condition for a shield as separate items:
- Shiny shield
- Dull shield
- Broken shield
We can create a single recipe for shield repair, with two requirement options, and one result option:
1 x Dull Shield + 1 x Polish -> Shiny Shield, or1 x Broken Shield + 1 x Iron + 1 x Wood -> Shiny Shield
Recipes can have one or more options for their requirements (ingredients and catalysts) as well as having options for their results.
Upgrade paths
As recipes produce components, you can set up multiple recipes in a chain to create upgrade paths for items. E.g:
"Healing Root" -> "Healing Potion""Healing Potion" + "Pixie Dust" -> "Better Healing Potion"