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Rise of Isengard: Developer Diary: “Crafting in the Westfold”

 

 

“Crafting in the Westfold”

 

Overview

 
With the launch of The Rise of Isengard quickly approaching, we’re excited to talk about the additions and features for the crafting system coming in this expansion. The Westfold, an all-new crafting tier, is filled with valuable natural resources, sought-after ancient artifacts, rare recipes, and powerful crafted items! We also made some changes aimed at increasing the fun factor and reducing some of the more frustrating aspects of crafting in Middle-earth.
Let’s get started!
 

The Westfold Tier

 
A brand new tier for all crafting professions is here! The new crafting tier is unlocked and made accessible for every profession upon completion of Supreme proficiency (previous crafting tier).
 
 
All crafting professions begin the tier with a handful of recipes. Many more can be found as treasure or purchased from reputation and craft guild vendors. Some of the most powerful new recipes can even be quite dangerous to obtain (hint hint).

 

New Rank for Craft Guilds

 
Coupled with the new tier of crafting, all existing craft guilds now offer the ability to gain an additional rank of guild reputation. Visit your guild’s vendors to purchase new recipes that produce items to increase your reputation standing within the guild. Completing this rank provides access to powerful new legendary item guild recipes and other guild-only rewards.
 
 

New Recipe Scroll Cases

 
A lot of the new recipes can be gotten from treasure, and we’ve made some improvements in the way these are found. Recipe scrolls in treasure have traditionally been individual item drops, resulting in a lot of inventory space dedicated to single recipes.
 
 
For the new crafting tier, all treasure-generated recipe scrolls now come from scroll cases. One noticeable benefit of this is that unopened scroll cases of the same profession can be stacked, allowing for better inventory management when out in the field. The new recipe scroll cases are not bound to the player, providing new options for buying, selling, and trading recipes.
 

Equipment Recipe Changes

 
For Metalsmiths, Tailors, Weaponsmiths, and Woodworkers, we’ve eliminated component recipes for the new tier in an effort to reduce the amount of time spent crafting intermediate ingredients. New recipes for these professions now require only the processed ingots, wood, and leather made by Foresters and Prospectors.
 
 
 
Along with this change, we’ve increased the amount of craft experience awarded by most new recipes to offset the removal of component recipes.

 

Resource Gathering Changes

 
For Foresters, Prospectors, and Scholars, a lot of time is spent scouring the landscape in search of ore, wood, and artifacts. At times, the variety of base resource types can create a situation where simply finding the right kind of resource becomes more tedious than rewarding. Landscape resource nodes for the new tier of crafting come in only two varieties for each resource type, normal and rich. A normal resource node contains an average amount of resources with a lower chance of finding rare items, while a rich resource node contains a larger amount of resources with a higher chance of finding rare items.
 
Along with fewer base resource types for the new tier, we’ve added more options for processing those resources. For example, let’s take a look at Prospecting. The ore used in the new crafting tier can be fashioned into low, medium, or high quality ingots. The rare version of that same ore has multiple uses. It can be used to produce high quality ingots more efficiently than regular ore, or it can be broken-down to produce optional ingredients that can increase the chance for critical success in many recipes.
 
For Farmers, a lot of time is spent in fields and at the workbench so we’ve added new ways to increase harvest yields and improve production efficiency. All crop field recipes in the new tier allow farmers to choose from two types of fields, normal and hearty. A normal field produces an average number of crops with a lower chance of finding rare items, while a hearty field produces an increased number of crops with a higher chance of finding rare items.
 
Farmers also now have the choice of processing crops individually or in bulk. We’ve added new recipes that process multiple bushels of crops into a stack of usable ingredients, decreasing time spent laboring at workbenches.
 

Closing Comments

 
Thanks for reading! We hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about some of the new features and changes in store for crafters in The Rise of Isengard. We always love to hear your feedback, so let us know what you think!