Make Generic Crafting Materials Explicit

[Murklak]

I've been watching new players and they sometimes get confused by which crafting materials are needed. They'll see that something says 'granite stone' or 'board (redwood)' and assume they need that specific material when all they need is a stone or board of any type, or perhaps any from a small set of options. It would help if when the material was hovered it didn't say that materials name but instead described the requirement for the recipe. So, it might say 'any stone' or 'board (any)'. They can see what that material looks like and will then infer that any item that looks like that will qualify. In instances where not every option will qualify, instead list each of the options that will qualify in the hover window.

Edited August 5, 2025 by Murklak

[Echo Weaver]

+100

I made this mistake early on and went hunting for meteoric-friggin'-iron to make a chisel when I just needed a generic chisel.

But I also made the reverse mistake several times, assuming when I saw a bunch of options flashing by that any material will do. Mining bags require specific metals (bronze?) and I made copper plates. Recurve bows must be made with hardwood, and I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working with pine until I looked it up on the wiki.

[Deaderpan]

i think the solution to this is just give more control over the crafting guide, at the moment it cycles through all the combinations by itself and (iirc) pauses when you mouse over it, but for some items such as cloth and leather, it can take a while cycling through all the many combinations, if two arrows where added you could click so that you could cycle through and read recopies at your own pace, then i feel most of the confusion will be removed

[LexicalAnomaly]

This was a huge issue for me when I first started as well. A clearer system would be great. 

[hstone32]

How about a pop-up window upon mouseover that lists the elligible materials

[Echo Weaver]

Listing eligible materials seems important, but this stuff is never random. The wiki usually states what material category we're talking about, such as hardwood or any type of bronze. That text should be in the handbook.

[Krougal]

If you mouse over the stuff and scroll, you can see what is acceptable.

Granted, I agree, it could still be clearer.

 

[Echo Weaver]

1 minute ago, Krougal said:

If you mouse over the stuff and scroll, you can see what is acceptable.

Granted, I agree, it could still be clearer.

 

I had no idea you could mouse-over and scroll. If you must mouse over, the material presented in the crafting grid stops cycling.

[Thorfinn]

Meh. Being able to populate the Handbook is vastly more important. If both can be accomplished simultaneously, fine, but if not, I'm more that happy with hovering over a recipe for a while.

[Echo Weaver]

14 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Meh. Being able to populate the Handbook is vastly more important. If both can be accomplished simultaneously, fine, but if not, I'm more that happy with hovering over a recipe for a while.

I'm not sure I follow. Which parts of the thread do you think are low-priority and which parts of the handbook are high-priority?

[Thorfinn]

@Echo Weaver, something similar came up a while back and one of the OGs said it was populated at runtime after all the code, including mods, had been loaded. This makes it possible to include modded recipes in the handbook. Honestly, I never looked to confirm, but it makes sense. If so, that means it does not populate the handbook from the JSONs, where you could make an intelligent generalization from wildcards like "knife-*" or from "allowedVariant"s. 

I believe at present, the rule for bowstaves and querns, hardwood and hard stone, could not be divined, because those key/values are not a part of the blocktype. Would not be hard at all to add, though it means that every time you load the game it would have to play, "Three of these things are like the others," yadda yadda.

Getting a full list would be pretty quick, but Knife (any)  considerably more involved, particularly if you are committed to supporting mods, and anything with "allowedVariant"s difficult without a serious rewrite.

[EDIT]

What I'm saying is @hstone32 suggests is reasonably easy to do, though in some cases it might be quite a long list.

[EDIT2]

It also occurs to me that would be a change from typical hover behavior, which is, "Tell me what this thing is." Depending on where that is coded, it might not be as easy as it seems at first blush. It would be a special hover that applies only(?) in the handbook.

 

Edited August 7, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Krougal]

Oh, my bad on the scroll wheel; that is a mod feature.

https://mods.vintagestory.at/improvedhandbookrecipes#tab-description

Honestly, this is another one of those major QOL mods that should be vanilla.

It still works in RC3 by the way.

 

[Echo Weaver]

55 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

@Echo Weaver, something similar came up a while back and one of the OGs said it was populated at runtime after all the code, including mods, had been loaded. This makes it possible to include modded recipes in the handbook. Honestly, I never looked to confirm, but it makes sense. If so, that means it does not populate the handbook from the JSONs, where you could make an intelligent generalization from wildcards like "knife-*" or from "allowedVariant"s. 

I believe at present, the rule for bowstaves and querns, hardwood and hard stone, could not be divined, because those key/values are not a part of the blocktype. Would not be hard at all to add, though it means that every time you load the game it would have to play, "Three of these things are like the others," yadda yadda.

Getting a full list would be pretty quick, but Knife (any)  considerably more involved, particularly if you are committed to supporting mods, and anything with "allowedVariant"s difficult without a serious rewrite.

[EDIT]

What I'm saying is @hstone32 suggests is reasonably easy to do, though in some cases it might be quite a long list.

 

Oh, that makes a lot of things clearer. The very places where the current handbook handling of recipes is most troublesome are the ones hardest to fix. I should have guessed

I agree that mod integration into the handbook is a bigger deal than the confusing cycling of ingredient variants, which doesn't mean that the confusion is no big deal.

It does seem like the recipes based on criteria not part of the blocktype could be reduced. Quern and bowstave are harder to approach, but I've also butted up against recipes that require any form of bronze. Bronze is special in that it has three subvariants, but that really SHOULD be recorded in the blocktype. Moreover, I'll buy that the tuning spear needs to be bronze, but I don't buy that the mining bag needs plates that are bronze or better (and brass, I guess, since that's the example in the wiki). It's just not a powerful enough item for the extra gating over just any metal.

Edited August 7, 2025 by Echo Weaver

[Thorfinn]

28 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

Bronze is special in that it has three subvariants, but that really SHOULD be recorded in the blocktype.

That is a real headscratcher. Seems to me that had Tyron gone with the naming schema he had in place, you would not have *-tinbronze, *-bismuthbronze and *-blackbronze, but rather *-bronze with -tin, -bismuth, and -black variants. Similar with iron and meteoric.