[Idea] Crafting System

[philipbenr]

That looks really impressive BobbyBonsaimind. I will give that thing a test as soon as I get back home...

[Gerald]

This could be the solution to the problem of incomplete crafts. If you want to craft a stair and only have 5 stones. This is not a serious problem but sometimes annoying.

[ABJ]

A BIG thumbs up I must say!!!
I did also think of this kind of thing sometime, but without much interest.
But now that someone actually POSTED about it, I'm really interested.
Yes I think this is a must!

[Minetestforfun]

Your work is pretty good !
At the finality of the concept/mod, please, can you make it compatible with unified_inventory and/or inventory+ ?

[BobbyBonsaimind]

I've been brushing it up in the last time and now it is quite usable. Though, there is still a lot todo, for example there can be stuff place in the output inventory which will be lost. But for that I first need to read up how detached inventories work exactly.

@Minetestforfun: By the way how it works, unified_inventory would need to be compatible with Artisanry, the other way round is not possible as receipts are registered at Artisanry and not Minetest.

[Dragonop]

+1

[Samson1]

Really good idea!

[Wuzzy]

Why do people always want to change the basic principles of the game?

In this case, because the crafting system sucks. The current crafting system is just horrible:

• Crafting is inefficient: You have to click many many times and waste a lot of time using it. If you forgot the recipe, you have to look it up, wasting even more time
• It does not fucking scale: Crafting recipes can't use more items than slots in the crafting grid—making really expensive crafting recipes impossible. Want a recipe using >100 items? (for instance, 100 pebbles to craft a stone) Forget it, you would need 100 slots. You can also forget really large crafting grids, because the larger the crafting grids, the more inefficient they become to use (remember you have to click at least 2 times to put each item).
• Crafting recipes which use the “replace” functionality (i.e. lava bucket becoming empty bucket) are unable to be mass-crafted; you have to move the items after each single craft.
• The whole “shape”-based approach is flawed and requires god-like memory to use. You either know all those recipes, or you don't. It is impossible to play Minetest Game without consulting the wiki first or installing a new mod. The fact that we even *need* crafting guides should show how stupid the “shape”-based approach really is.
• It is not general enough. Crafting recipes need to be aware of the size of the payer's crafting grid. This is only half-true for shapeless recipes, but they also stop working if such a recipe uses more items than crafting slots. In practice, most crafting recipes just assume a size of 3×3.
• Collisions: There is always the small chance of recipe collision between mods. Those collisions are only possible in the first place because of the shape-based approach.
• Not debuggable: There are no warnings at all about: Recipe collisions, crafting recipes using non-existant items

The proposed crafting system is not much better IMO. .-(

[rubenwardy]

I like terraria's system of simply listing the things you can make from the items in your inventory, and any near by nodes (Eg: furnace).

[Wuzzy]

Terraria's system indeed is a very good source of inspiration. It solves all of the problems listed above, except for the debugging problem.

[rubenwardy]

Terraria's system indeed is a very good source of inspiration. It solves all of the problems listed above, except for the debugging problem.

This could help: viewtopic.php?id=5831

It doesn't check for collisions, but then again there would be no collisions in a terraria-like system.

[firefox]

i remember that the circular saw from the moreblocks mod had something like this.
you put an item in the input slot and then take any form you want from the various output slots.
no reciepes needed, no changing if you need multiple different forms. just take what you want.

making more blocks like the table saw (anvil, workbench, kitchen stove, whatever) would add the feature you want without changing the basic crafting.
and if you think that would make it too easy, use complex recipes for those blocks.
for example the workbench from the castle mod (actually it is an auto-crafter) uses a full crafting grid with 2 trunks, 2 planks and 4 iron ingots.

[Sokomine]

It really depends a lot. On a desktop, common receipes that are used frequently can be faster to craft with the craft grid than looking them up even with unified_inventory. The more complex receipes get, the more you wish for something better. Homedecor has many items by now and got the problem that creating new craft receipes for them is tricky. As far as Homedecor goes, a trader selling the items might be the most practical solution. Or a special machine. Technic is another matter. It does have quite complex and partly expensive crafting receipes.

[mahfoud x]

wow :-p

[Ferk]

I hear constantly that Minetest is first and foremost an engine and the whole point is creating a framework for mods.

Well, this is one feature that actually would be very helpful for mods if it was included in vanilla. So I'd assume that things like this should be welcome.

The UI could adapt seamlessly so that if there's only 1 recipe the UI would be the same as we have now. As soon as there are 2 or more recipes that match the materials only then the arrows would be displayed to let you cycle through the recipes.

Maybe the UI could morph as well to allow more than 1 produced item when the selected recipe requires it.

This way vanilla Minetest would remain exactly as it is, unaffected, but it would allow modpacks to have less conflicts and more freedom.

I've played a modpack where reeds produced sugar (as in sugar cane), but vanilla uses them for paper (as in paper reeds). This might result in incompatibilities and confusions as long as there isn't something like this implemented.

[BobbyBonsaimind]

I'd like to chime in and note that Artisanry is coming along nicely and has been working now for months. There are still quite a few features that I want to get into it, but for the "basic" stuff it is already working great.

If you want to see it in action, you can check out the Australopithecus tech demo, which uses Artisanry to allow you yo choose between the outputs. Just dig up some dirt and place it in the crafting grid.