Crafting Stations - Replacing the Crafting Grid

[Erik]

This suggestion is largely inspired by the Minefantasy 2 mod.

 

Combination crafting:

This suggestion is largely based around crafting stations and at some point the player needs to craft his first crafting station. This is where combination crafting comes in.

The concept is pretty simple: Shapeless crafting in a crafting grid with two input and on output slot.

The crafting grid can be found in the inventory.

This very simple crafting method is only used for very simple things
at the beginning of the game like:

• Combining tool heads with sticks to make a tool.
• Creating your first crafting station.

This is literally all its needed for and it should be only useful in the first days of gameplay.

The crafting stations:

All crafting stations function the same way, the only difference is the
recipes they allow.

When clicking at the side of any crafting station, the GUI of that crafting station is opened. The GUI of each crafting station contains:

• Nine slots of storage, which are the input and output
• A recipe/output selector (like terraria or subnautica)
• A side configuration widget (explained further down)

    When a recipe has been selected and the ingredients have been put into the storage slots, the player needs to start crafting.

When looking at the top of the crafting station, a progress bar and icon for the required tool:

When the wrong tool is selected, the icon will turn red.

Right clicking will fill a bit of the progress bar. Holding right click will count as one click, spamming right click will not move the bar, but cause it to blink red.
The player should wait a bit after each right click and clicking in a specific rhythm will yield the best results. The time between the clicks is dependent on the tool and tool tier, a hammer is faster than a saw and a steel saw is faster than a copper saw. An empty hand is also a tool.

More complex recipes may require use of multiple tools. When enough progress with one tools has been made, the icon switches to another tool.

Examples: 

• For crafting a table, the player may saw five times and hit with a hammer twice.
• For crafting a clock, the player may use his hand two times, wrench two times, hammer one time, wrench five times and use his hand once.

This interactivity makes crafting take some time and feel like crafting and it also makes automation much more interesting, especially for complex recipes.

The crafted product usually goes into the storage of the crafting bench and when that is full, it will go into the players inventory and when that is full, it will drop onto the ground.

 

The side configuration widget or: Where did my firewood go?

If a player places a chest next to a crafting station, the crafting station will automatically draw ingredients from it. This solves a lot of storage problems and is a huge quantity of life feature.

But what about the output?

This is where the side configuration widget comes in, it lets the player configure, which of the three sides are inputs to draw ingredients from or outputs to put the items or both or none.

If the output can be stacked in the world, like firewood, it can also be output on an empty block to form and extend such a stack.

The front side of a crafting can't be configured an will not interact with inventories, because it needs to be a point of reference for configuring the other sides and a way to select a recipe.

The feature closely resembles the machine configuration of the Thermal Expansion mod:

 

Progression:

Having different crafting stations also allows for gating the progression and mods being introduced into the progression by their own crafting stations.

I image the vanilla progression with crafting stations to be somewhat like this:

1. Flint tool using knapping and combination crafting
2. Chopping station by combining an axe with a wood block
3. Firewood by chopping wood using the axe on the chopping station
4. Pottery and basic copper tools
5. Copper nains and wood used to create a carpentry station on the chopping station
6. Carpentry station for cutting wood with a saw and most other crafting
7. Stone working station for working with stone
8. Engineering station for mechanical power and automation

[Korhaka]

While I generally like the idea, I do not like the idea of having to hold the mouse button, even more keep clicking endlessly on a block. Instead perhaps craft while the block is selected. The quern is annoying as I have to just hold the RMB for ages to grind grains.