Crafting

Crafting turns the things you scavenge into the things you actually want: food, clothing, gear, ammunition, and the rest. You gather the inputs, stand somewhere with the right equipment, and put in the time. How well it comes out depends on how good you are at the relevant trade.

Crafting runs on the same engine as everything else risky you do, so a point spent in a crafting skill behaves the way a point spent in lockpicking or marksmanship does. The system is built so that anyone can attempt most recipes, but a skilled hand gets noticeably better results out of the same materials.

The short version:

It's a skill check. Your crafting skill plus a couple of supporting stats set your odds, and the recipe's difficulty pushes against you.
Gather first. A recipe lists the components it eats and the tools or stations it needs nearby. Type crafts to see what you can make and craft show <category> <#> to inspect one.
It takes time. A craft is broken into work steps you grind through; you're occupied the whole time and can't do other things until it finishes or you stop.
Quality is the real prize. Most recipes will complete; what your skill buys you is how good the result turns out — and for food and similar goods that difference is large.
Stop early and you lose nothing. Materials are only consumed when the work actually finishes.

The rest of this page is the detail behind those points.

The pipeline at a glance

flowchart TD A["Pick a recipe (crafts / craft show)"] --> B{"Have the components?"} B -->|no| Z["Can't start"] B -->|yes| C{"Required tools / station nearby?"} C -->|no| Z C -->|yes| D["Skill check rolled (your trade vs. difficulty)"] D --> E["Work the steps (timed, you're occupied)"] E --> F{"Interrupted, or lost a component?"} F -->|yes| Y["Stop cleanly, nothing consumed"] F -->|no| G["Components consumed, product produced"] G --> H{"Product takes refinement?"} H -->|yes| I["Finalize it (quality roll)"] H -->|no| J["Finished good"] I --> J

Knowing what you can make

Type crafts to list every recipe available to you, grouped by category and stamped with a difficulty number. craft show <category> <#> opens a single recipe and shows its difficulty, work time, the components it needs (with a check next to each so you can see what you're short on), any required tools, and what it produces.

For now, recipes are common knowledge — if a recipe exists and is craftable, it shows up in your list. The framework carries hooks for gating recipes behind a skill level or a discovery event, so the long-term intent is clearly that some recipes are meant to be learned or found rather than handed to everyone. Today that gate is open.

Components and tools

A recipe distinguishes between things it uses up and things it merely needs on hand.

Components are consumed. The recipe asks for a quantity of each input type, and the matching items must be in your inventory. Any item of the right kind counts toward the total, so it doesn't matter where a given piece came from.
Tools and stations are not consumed — they just have to be nearby, meaning either in your inventory or in the room with you. A workbench, a stove, a vice: you need access to it, not ownership of it. Some recipes accept one of several alternatives, so a near-enough substitute will do.

If you're missing components or aren't standing near the right equipment, the craft refuses to start and tells you exactly what's lacking.

The make: a timed skill check

When you commit to a recipe, the game rolls a single skill check for the job. As with every check, your relevant stats are blended into a target number, the situation collapses into one modifier, and the recipe's difficulty counts against you:

$$ m = \mathrm{clamp}\big(\text{bonus} - \text{penalty} - d,\; -30,\; +30\big) $$

$$ T_{\text{raw}} = \min\big(95,\; T_{\text{flat}} + m\big) $$

where $d$ is the recipe's difficulty and $T_{\text{flat}}$ is your weighted blend of crafting skill and supporting stats. That raw number bends through the usual logistic curve into a success chance, and the result comes back graded — a margin and degrees of success, not a bare pass/fail.

Different trades lean on different stats. Cooking, for instance, weights your cooking skill most heavily and rounds it out with ego and senses; garment work leans on tailoring with ego and moxie. The pattern is the same across disciplines: the trade skill does most of the lifting, with a stat or two flavoring it.

Then you put in the work. The recipe's total time is divided into fixed work steps of about 30 seconds each, so a typical job (around three minutes of work) is roughly six steps:

$$ \text{steps} = \max!\left(1,\; \frac{\text{work time}}{30\text{s}}\right) $$

You're set to crafting for the duration and stay occupied until the job finishes or you stop it. Each step prints a line of progress so you can see it coming along.

What completion costs — and what stopping doesn't

Components are consumed and the product is created only when the final step lands. That timing matters:

Stop early, lose nothing. If you abort, walk away, or hand off a needed component mid-job, the craft ends cleanly and your materials are untouched. The cost is your time, not your stock.
The recipe re-checks itself as it goes. If you no longer have the components or tools when a step resolves, the work simply stops rather than burning anything.

For straightforward recipe crafting, finishing the work yields the product, and the skill roll grades how well it went rather than whether you get something at all. A poor roll on a plain recipe still hands you the item; what suffers is its quality (below).

Shaping raw material is stricter. Some trades work differently: turning bulk material (bolts of cloth, sheets of stock) into a chosen shape charges a material cost up front and demands a minimum skill, with the shape's complexity and the material's stubbornness both stacked into the difficulty:

$$ m = -\big(\text{shape difficulty} + \text{material difficulty}\big) $$

Here failure has teeth:

A plain failure wastes a single unit of material.
A critical failure ruins the entire batch you committed.
Success consumes the material and produces the piece, ready to be customized and finalized.

This split is a sensible one: pulling pre-made components together from a recipe is forgiving, while cutting into a fresh bolt of expensive material is where a botch should actually hurt.

Quality

Success gets you the item. Quality decides whether it was worth making.

Goods that can be refined come out of the work in progress — you customize them and then finalize, and finalizing rolls a fresh skill check whose margin sets the item's crafting quality. (Margin is the gap between your success chance and your roll, the same $\text{margin} = P - \text{roll}$ from the skill check system.) The better you roll, the better the piece.

For consumables like food the effect is concrete. A positive margin adds to the dish's base quality at half rate, capped at the maximum:

$$ \text{quality} = \min!\big(100,\; \text{base quality} + 0.5 \cdot \max(0,\; \text{margin})\big) $$

Two things fall out of that formula. A clumsy roll (margin at or below zero) contributes nothing but never spoils the dish below its base — you can't make food worse by cooking it badly. And a strong roll is worth a lot: a decisive margin can push quality up by dozens of points.

%%{init: {"themeVariables": {"xyChart": {"plotColorPalette": "#9c36b5"}}}}%% xychart-beta title "Quality bonus vs. how well you rolled (margin)" x-axis "Roll margin" [0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90] y-axis "Quality added" 0 --> 50 line [0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45]

That quality then feeds the systems that use the item. A well-cooked meal restores more satiety than a sloppy one of the same recipe, because satiety scales directly with food quality. The real payoff of a high crafting skill is cumulative: across a stack of meals, every dish you make does more for you than a low-skill cook's would.

Getting better

Crafting trains the trade you're using. Finishing a recipe gives the relevant crafting skill a chance to improve, with the recipe's difficulty acting as the challenge rating — harder jobs teach you more, and easy work you've already mastered teaches you little. See Progression: Skills for how that improvement roll works.

The crafting skills span the obvious disciplines and a few specialist ones:

mindmap root((Crafting)) Provisioning Cooking Tailoring Fabrication Tech Electronics Cybernetics Bio Medic Surgery Genetics Esoteric Artistry Science

Because they're all crafting skills, they grade on the same curve and improve the same way — picking up a second trade behaves exactly like deepening your first.

FallMOO Wiki