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

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 02:03:07PM -0700, Mark Wedel wrote:
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      On Thu, 17 May 2001, H. S. Teoh wrote:
     
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       One thing that may help immediately is changing the title of books
     
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      to reflect the formula.  Ie, instead of just ' a recipe book',
     
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      have it be a 'recipe book of water of the wise' or the like.
     
     
Good idea. Although I do somewhat like the current semi-obscure method of
assigning titles to recipe books, I think the irritation value is a bit
too high.

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       I know one problem is that while books currently appear in stores, your
     
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      not going to buy one only to find it is of a formula you already have.
     
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      Does anyone ever really buy books out of the shops?
     
     
I do. And you know what -- it's almost useless to do so. You only ever get
very low level formulae, usually the highest is up to 3 ingredients. 4 or
5 ingredient formulae happen very very rarely, and I've yet to see any
higher than that.

[snip]
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      2) More difficult formula show up on more difficult maps.  So on that higher
     
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         level map, your more likely to find a recipe for potions, and not how
     
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         to make water of the wise.
     
     
VERY good idea.

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      3) Difficulty of the book.  More difficult the formula, higher the level
     
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         in the book, and thus higher literacy skill needed.
     
     
I think this is already implemented? Perhaps just needs a bit more
tweaking.

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

[snip]
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      2) Knowledge of the formula could be required or increase chances of
     
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         actual creating products.  In this way, its still desirable for
     
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         new characters to learn this information, even if the player has
     
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         all the formula information (either by looking at file or just starting
     
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         a new character)
     
     
I believe the Fire Temple already has the infrastructure for this in place
-- although you learn about the ingredients for making fire resistance
potions, it's not until the very end that you get a message telling you
that you finally learned the alchemical procedure. Now I'm not sure if
you're actually prevented from making fire resistance potions without
being marked in that last room first; but I'm sure that's the intention.

On that note, there should be a lot more quests for alchemical formulae.
If we can implement storing formulae in the player, then I'd volunteer to
make a quests for a few of the more interesting formulae.

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


T

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