Project Eternity Post-funding Update #58: Crafting

Assuming you survive the sight of the photoshopped image at the beginning of the latest post-funding update for Project Eternity, you’ll be treated to a write-up on the nitty-gritty of Obsidian’s implementation of crafting and item durability in the title. We already knew that the game would feature crafting from the Kickstarter stretch goals, but this is the first time we hear about having to repair items:

When you use the central object at these locations, such as the anvil at the forge, you will enter a crafting interface that displays all of your forge recipes, broken down into categories such as armor, weapons, boots, helmets, rings, etc. You pick a category and can see all of the recipes you know for that category. Each recipe has a set of ingredients needed to make its item (or items, as some recipes will make batches of items). Some recipes will have additional prerequisites, including requiring you or a companion to have a certain talent or ability or even skill at an appropriate level. Higher level recipes have more prerequisites and need rarer ingredients.

You may be wondering where you get recipes. You get a few automatically when you level up your crafting skill, and you can also buy them from vendors. Sometimes you will find recipes in the world, as loot on creatures or as rewards for finishing quests. There will be a lot of recipes in Project Eternity for you to find, so make sure you explore every nook and cranny of this world, especially the crannies.

Crafting doesn’t take any time. If you have everything the recipe needs and are at the appropriate crafting location, then you can make the item instantly. Usually the ingredients are used up, but sometimes they are reusable. And for recipes like enchantments, the main ingredient is not used up but is instead improved by the addition of a new bonus. For example, you might have a sword with high accuracy and a Flaming Sword recipe that adds fire damage to any sword. If you use that sword with that recipe, you will have the same sword with a high accuracy bonus but also with additional fire damage! Win win!

Crafting can also be used to repair items, but first we should talk about item durability in Project Eternity.

Item Durability

Most items don’t degrade over time. This means that boots, rings, helmets, gloves, amulets, cloaks, and belts are not worn down by use. However, weapons, shields, and armor (that is, chest armor) do have durability values and are worn down by use. Specifically, every attack with a weapon degrades that weapon by one unit, and armor and shields are similarly degraded when the wearer is attacked.

Items have lots of units of durability, and they do not suffer any negative effects until those units are completely gone. When an item has reached 25% of its maximum durability, it will become (worn) and appear that way in your inventory, but it will not behave any differently until the last unit of durability is lost. At that point, the item is (damaged) and the following effects will happen:

• Weapons damaged weapons do less damage and have less accuracy
• Armor damaged armor has lower damage thresholds and the wearer’s attack speed is slower
• Shields damaged shields lose part of their defense bonuses

Items can never become worse than (damaged). They will not break or become more damaged. They just stay damaged until you have them fixed.