Rethinking Crafting

Good Morning Friends! You are about to embark upon a very mathy blog post. If you are as allergic to math as I happen to be, you might need to skip this one. However I have been mulling something over in my head for awhile, and this morning I finally broke down these thoughts and confirmed my theories. Essentially crafting in New World is extremely painful once you pass the level 100 line, pretty much regardless of whatever crafting profession you are doing. For me, I have chosen to focus on Engineering and Furnishing, two extremely grindy professions but ones that can make sure I am supplied in the best harvesting tools as well as the best storage options for my houses.

I have a whole slew of crafting professions and at some point I would love to level all of them. However right now I have two goals in mind. Firstly I want to be able to craft Orichalcum tools which will require 150 Engineering and I am presently sitting at 143. The other goal is to be able to craft Starmetal Storage Boxes… because at some point in my travels I picked up that crafting schematic. In order to craft these I will need to be 145 Furnishing and am currently sitting at 112. So when I started New World I brought with me a lot of assumptions about crafting that were gained through other MMORPGs. One of these assumptions is that crafting the most resource efficient higher tier item is going to be a better option than creating lower tier items. This comes from games like World of Warcraft that eventually “grey out” items so that their crafting rewards no experience. This assumption I made was completely false but we will get into that a bit later.

As a result of my assumptions however I have been crafting the items that I can in theory use currently. It seemed more efficient to craft Mining Picks as opposed to the other items that I could craft based on the experience gained per item, and as a result until recently I had been going through this entire process of running a Starmetal Route to gather a cache of Starmetal and then running a number of Iron Routes to slowly convert said Starmetal into bars.

The first thing that you need to understand is that in order to craft a Starmetal Pick you can use almost any wood and almost any leather, and if you are crafting a pick for yourself you want to use the highest quality item you can make of each of these to increase the chances of getting a high item level pick. However for grinding purposes you want to use the cheapest and most readily available materials because quality of material has zero factor on the experience gained per craft. Additionally there is a chance of getting bonus materials when you refine, but that doesn’t happen every time so we are going to assume you got zero bonus materials. So with all of that in mind if I break down a single Starmetal Mining Pick into the most simple version I can craft you get the following raw materials list:

• Starmetal Ore – 84
• Iron Ore – 336
• Green Wood – 404 (needed both for timber and charcoal)
• Sand Flux (or better) – 98
• Rawhide – 8

One of the challenges that we have with New World is that the game does not do a great job of giving us access to all of the necessarily information to make decisions. For example I can see that I have 9658 Experience left before I hit level 144, but there is no real clear indication of how much experience I have gained currently. So for the sake of estimating I view that progress bar as a little less than 1/6th of the way full which based on my fuzzy math would make me guess that there are something in the neighborhood of 12,000 experience points needed to get from level 143 to 144 in Engineering. This is the assumption we are going to go with, but admittedly this is a flawed assumption. However with that as our base… in order to get this level I would need to craft 9 Starmetal Pick Axes at 1425 Experience gained per craft. If you extrapolate that out to total pool of materials… this single level is going to cost me:

• Starmetal Ore – 756
• Iron Ore – 3024
• Green Wood – 3636
• Sand Flux – 882
• Rawhide – 72

That is a staggering amount of resources and it includes two things that are HIGHLY contested in game. Essentially Wood and Leather are enough of a renewable resource and come from enough different sources that you as the player can always reliably find an endless amount of them available to you. Metal and Cloth however are highly contested resources that only appear in specific areas of the map, and as a result players tend to run reliable routes in order to gather up enough resources to make it worth their while. Cloth is considerably easier to find than metal, and my best Iron route usually gets me about 1500 to 2000 Iron ore in 20-30 minutes of running around depending on how contested the route is at that moment.

Similarly there is the problem of what the game refers to as “resources” which are the materials needed to convert one material into another. For example if you want to make anything higher than an Iron Bar you are going to need a constant supply of Sand Flux or one of the later variants. These come exclusively from looting supply chests out in the wild. During the very brief crafting summer of love when they were dropping 20 or more at a time and the market for them crashed. However after some nerfs they are dropping more slowly which means I have run out of sand flux at numerous times along this journey.

It was this drought of resources that lead me to start exploring other alternatives, namely looking for something that does not require Iron ore. However more than that it got me to start assessing the value of each item crafted based on the experience gained from it. One of the curious things I noticed about New World is that items never really become “trival” or stop giving you experience per craft. That means over time crafting enough of a low level item will gain you the levels needed to push through to higher tiers. With that in mind I tried to identify the cheapest item that I could craft with the most sustainable materials I could find. The end result is the humble “Treated Wood Bow” which rewards 204 Engineering experience per craft. A single bow requires the following:

• Green Wood – 48
• Rawhide – 12
• Fibers – 8

All items that are relatively easy to get within a short distance of any newbie town. While that is a lot fewer resources, it is also a significant chunk less experience. So I was trying to come up with a way to determine some sort of index to value the item crafted. While this is imperfect, the best idea I coudl come up with is to simply add all of the resources needed and divide it by the experience gained per craft. So for example a single Starmetal Pick requires a total of 930 gathered resources for an experience gain of roughly 1.5 xp per item needed. This humble bow however has a total item footprint of 68 items and gives 3 xp per item required to craft it.

The core problem with bows however is the sheer number that I would need to craft in order to get a level. If we take the same 12,000 xp needed to hit 144 and divide out the experience gained per bow you end up needing to craft 59 bows per level. However for sake of comparison lets do the same thing we did earlier for Starmetal Picks and create a list of the total resources needed to gain a level crafting these bows.

• Green Wood – 2832
• Rawhide – 708
• Fibers – 472

I think ultimately where my mind is at is that in order to craft Orichalcum items, I am going to need a ton of Starmetal as well as a ton of Iron. I would rather sit on the stockpile of what I have gathered so far and gather up the significantly easier to find list of items above. In truth I can probably gather all of that multiple times over in the amount of time it it would take me to find the Flux and Metal needed to make a single levels worth of Pick Axes. In fact I have been doing this recently and have made faster progress in Engineering than I had in the previous weeks. Basically… I think in New World we need to unlearn what we have learned from other MMORPGs and approach these systems with somewhat fresh eyes. I absolutely thought wrong of how best to level crafting in this game, and I am wondering what other systems I might have failed to grasp as well. From now on when I approach new crafts, I am going to Math out my path rather than just making what “feels right” to make.

[EDIT] So apparently Thalen was trying to tell me this during the podcast on Saturday. I did not fully grok what he was saying at the time. I thought he was talking about crafting bows in general not literally the lowest bow possible. However I got there eventually so thanks to Thalen for trying to send me down this path and bad for me being too dense to understand it at the time.