Alchemy, was Re: [CF-Devel] Future crossfire changes/projects

[Mark Wedel]

On Thu, 17 May 2001, H. S. Teoh wrote:
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      >  I think some of the problem is that if you play honestly, you'll never find
     
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      > useful recipes either.  I think just having more information on what to make
     
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      > with alchemy may improve how often it is used.
     
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      Agreed. Currently, even low-level formulae are so rare that my level 110
     
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      character has yet to collect them all. High-level formulae are practically
     
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      impossible to find. I think the very least we can do is to increase the
     
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      chance for formula books.
     
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      If that turns out to be too unbalancing, perhaps we should think of a way
     
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      to make the Alchemist class playable.... i.e., Alchemist players get some
     
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      special way of learning formulae (perhaps a dedicated guild -- we can
     
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      implement this with race detectors AFAICT -- that hands out useful
     
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      formulae for players who advance in their level).
     
     
 So then would just increasing the frequency and usefulness of these
books helps?  This would not be hard to do - unfortunately, the current
alcehmical formulas do not have any difficulty chance.

 One thing that may help immediately is changing the title of books
to reflect the formula.  Ie, instead of just ' a recipe book',
have it be a 'recipe book of water of the wise' or the like.

 I know one problem is that while books currently appear in stores, your
not going to buy one only to find it is of a formula you already have.
Does anyone ever really buy books out of the shops?

The more I think about it, the more it would be nice for the formula
to have level/difficulty information.  That can be used for:

1) Chance of making item (if level of formula is higher than level of
   alchemy skill, chance of failure goes up).  Right now, I believe
   the code tries to derive a difficulty based on ingredients and so forth.
2) More difficult formula show up on more difficult maps.  So on that higher
   level map, your more likely to find a recipe for potions, and not how
   to make water of the wise.
3) Difficulty of the book.  More difficult the formula, higher the level
   in the book, and thus higher literacy skill needed.

 Unrelated, but still something I think would be nice is somehow record
what formula the player has learned.  This could be used:

1) Player could dump the alchemistry knowledge the character knows in case
   they have lost their notes.  This can also be more relevant if
   different servers have different formula (ie, did that note I copied
   down apply to this server or not)
2) Knowledge of the formula could be required or increase chances of
   actual creating products.  In this way, its still desirable for
   new characters to learn this information, even if the player has
   all the formula information (either by looking at file or just starting
   a new character)

 I think somewhat related to this is readable objects are just very rare in
 general.  You can go to the shops and maybe 10-15% of the spellbooks are
actually readable objects, and of that, some smaller portion actually related
to alchemy.  But in most dungeons, spellbooks are very rare, and thus
readables even rare.  So these things just do not turn up that often, even
ignoring the fact that you can't be sure what you'll get.