Every crafting system requires raw materials to transform into goods and there are plenty of ways to give your players these materials. Materials could come through gathering nodes, drops from enemies, achievements, quests, vendors, or any other method you can think of. Today I'll be looking at a number of these methods for material acquisition as well as how diversity of materials can affect the overall enjoyment of the crafting system.

Nodes

Many RPGs and MMOs use resource nodes throughout the world which players with appropriate skill level can harvest. Ores, herbs, and lumber are typical resources which can be gathered in this method. Nodes add an extra layer of intractability to the world and can help it feel more alive. They also provide a reason for player’s to wander off main paths and explore.

Often nodes will be spawned up to a maximum number and will respawn after a given time when a player harvests them. For multiplayer games, deciding whether nodes are user based or world based can have a huge impact on player behaviour. World of Warcraft uses world based nodes which creates competition between players. Nodes can be the catalyst for open world PvP. Guild Wars 2 takes the opposite approach and allows nodes to be harvested by anyone who finds them. This encourages cooperation such as telling the rest of the players on your map if you’ve found a rare node.

I’ve noticed through playing WoW, GW2, and The Witcher 3 that each game tends to balance resource node harvesting requirements very closely to player level. If a player starts leveling a profession as soon as it’s available (and levels at a reasonable pace) they should have enough materials to progress to the next crafting tier very close to the time they would naturally progress to the next area. When leveling rates are not well-balanced the player may be frustrated at having to farm resources from a zone they’ve mostly finished or exploring a new area in which they can’t harvest anything.

Both WoW and GW2 have rich versions of their nodes which provide more than the usual number of resources. These occasionally spawn in place of a regular node and are rare enough that they feel like a bonus, not an expectation.

The Witcher 3’s nodes are much more common than in WoW or GW2 and require no gather time. I find this system much more compelling as a player as in each of these games gathering is not the main gameplay. By allowing players to pick up resources with little time investment you can make travelling rewarding without overly distracting them from their main goal.

Another great use for nodes is as a reward for finding secret areas. A number of areas in Guild Wars 2 have farms set up in hard to reach areas. As an example there is a strawberry farm inside a damaged old sewer system that the player much jump through without a clear path to access. They can see indicators on the mini map to tell them a bunch of resources are nearby, but not how to get them.

Overall nodes are a great way to let your players acquire resources. They add flavour to the world and provide incentive to explore. Balancing node availability with player level is important in making node gathering fun. I personally tend to favor games that allow for gathering without impacting player movement.

Mob drops

Witcher 3 does materials from mob drops very well. Common monsters have their own unique materials (Drowners drop drowner brains, etc.) as well as generic materials (monster fang). The unique materials drop regularly to reduce the need to farm one specific mob type while the generic materials are able to be less common as the player has a chance to get them from each enemy they kill. Rare monsters also have unique components which are guaranteed to drop. This system encourages exploration through common drops from specific monster types while also rewarding slaying otherwise un-useful monsters via the generic rare drops.

In contrast many of WoW’s mob drops can be overly rare and frustrating to acquire. This issue is most pronounced when going back to earlier expansions where the mobs provide no challenge to the player. I recently crafted myself a pair of spider silk boots for vanity which required some spider silk. This silk only drops from low level spiders and has a low drop chance. I had to run around 1-shotting spiders for half an hour before I had enough silk to finish the item.

For me the key takeaway here is that the number of mobs that drop a given material should be inversely proportional to the drop chance of that item.

Diversity of Materials

I personally like crafting systems with a lot of diversity in material requirements. More diversity translates into a more interesting crafting system but also one that requires more player investment. While leveling your skill up in many games you repeat the same process with the same materials over and over again. Strictly speaking the materials change each tier, but really if you gather copper, iron, and mithril in exactly the same manner it may as well be the same resource, just with increasing cost. For example to level from 1-400 in almost all professions in Guild Wars 2 the process is the same each tier. Buy some number of the base material for that tier (ore, wood, cloth, etc.), craft x boots, x gloves, x pants, etc., repeat. 1-50 is exactly the same as 350-400 but with mithril ore instead of copper ore.

At max level they remedy this issue with very diverse requirements for legendary weapons and ascended armor. There are 25 item types needed to craft the legendary staff which are gained from such sources as: 100% world completion, badges from the World vs World game mode, karma from various events around the world, rare drops from mobs, and tokens from dungeons. Crafting one takes you to all different game modes and is very rewarding to complete (with the exception of one ludicrously rare requirement which is being addressed in the upcoming expansion).

World of Warcraft has taken a different approach with end game recipes being created almost exclusively from a single material per profession which are time gated. I find WoW’s new system extremely dull and have completely stopped participating for the time being. It doesn’t feel like you’re accomplishing anything by logging in daily and crafting 10 miscellaneous cogs which somehow create a gun when you duct tape 100 of them together.

Another system which both GW2 and Witcher 3 use is salvaging. Player are able to convert unwanted items into their base components for a fee. This allows for more variety in item drops without causing unneeded bloat in the crafting system. For example in The Witcher you can find goat, cow, and sheep hides on your adventures - all of which break down into leather. This adds some flavour to the world while still maintaining that all leather items are made from basic leather. The system could be more complex by having cow leather give extra vitality and goat leather giving extra strength but it wouldn’t necessarily add any value by doing so.

I feel that a low number of mats and lower overall crafting complexity makes sense while the player is learning the system but as the player improves, the system should improve with them.

Summary

The main things I’ve taken away from this thought exercise are:

• Gathering nodes add a lot of value to games
• When a player reaches a new area they should already be of the correct crafting level to harvest the newly available resources (given regular gameplay)
• I prefer when gathering can be done without inhibiting player movement
• Specialized mob drops should be common, generic mob drops can be rarer
• Material diversity and recipe complexity should expand along with the player’s mastery of the system

Next up I’ll be looking at how players improve their crafting ability and gating mechanics.

Next - Skill Improvement & Gating Mechanics