Crafting & Crystals

Today’s patch has made some significant changes to the game. Nothing earth shattering that will alter your day to day play so don’t panic But enough that I wanted to take a few minutes to explain a few parts.

First off ‘Crystal Crafting’ – The old way. Was poor at best. It worked on a handful of items and there were mostly aimed at the low level players with a few higher items thrown in for good measure. I’ll be the first to admit it wasn’t perfect and lacked scope for growth. It was added very early on in the game and became a bit of a pain in my proverbial.

As you no doubt have spotted we decided to change things around and have removed Crystal Crafting from the game.

Read THIS ISN For the first part of the Crystal Storyline
Read THIS ISN For the second part of the Crystal Storyline

So Crystals will now be collected from you and Traded in for Research Academy Points. These can then be spent in the Research Academy’s to launch projects to improve items.

So rather than a clunky Crystal crafting that affected a handful of items we now have a system that affects Thousands of items.

Over time we will release more and more of the game items to the RA system. This will allow you to RA almost any item (eventually) give me time as it takes a while to check each item for issues and exploits. This system of checking and releasing will be ongoing for the life of the game. Currently I have released 2,400+ items to be RA’d.

Other Changes
There have also been some cosmetic changes. These have been to ‘list format’ type pages where a items are displayed in lists. For instance we have MOVED the Submol option. It no longer resides on the main list screen. Hovering over the View Icon will display either ‘View’ or ‘View | Submol’.

You can still submol the same items its just the option to access this has been moved inside the view screen. This allowed for a slice of extra space in the main views. Allowing the actual name of an item to display properly and not look like its an after thought.

Crafting Drill Down
This next change is in a testing phase. We kinda liked it on Dev and the Staff thought it was well timed to be added now. It allows you to CLICK on the image of the modules and GO to that module schematic. Enabling you to drill down 1 by into a Schematic.

Because various modules are shared in numerous builds we could only offer you a ‘Show Initial Schematic’ to go back UP the tree. But never-the less this should save you a LOT of Time and guess work.

CAUTION: Whilst the Build screen and others will let you drill down and zap back up YOU MUST OWN the schematic in question to be able to actually craft the items. A Big Red bar and a stopping screen will WARN and Catch those who are unsure.

Notes :

Overall this change was about removing Crystal Crafting and adding a replacement that will eventually allow almost everything form Settlement Buildings to Shields to be ‘modded’. Rather than the handful previously available through Crystal Crafting.

There are over 11,000 crystals in play atm in players stores. So don’t expect to see the RAP value change much for a while. Meanwhile if you wish to carry on trading, selling submoling Crystals we wont stop you.

I’ve made changes to 177 pages of code this last two weeks – but this opens up a new facet to CE not seen before that will over time change many of the items you use on a daily basis

Lastly you can find the PRIMER for Research Academy’s OVER HERE

Coops