Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Crafting book Journal

I really like the idea of having a section to retain information on crafting books you read. However could it be changed so it is listed in an alphabetic order? Otherwise it feels like a chore searching for the book you want to re-read, and knowing which number your missing <.<

Agreed. Maybe it would be good to sort receipes in armor, weapons, flasks and random stuff.

The journal is actually already listed in alphabetic order by the recipe book series (e.g. "Fun With Fluids - Volumes 1-X", "He Who Smelts It - Volumes 1-X", etc.). The only problem currently is that the volumes of "The Adventurer's Field Guide" are scattered throughout the list instead of listed together in one section of the list - which might be the reason why you're thinking the list is inconvenient right now. But I assume they'll fix that in an update.

I would prefer 2 tabs, one where the all the books are in their entirety, and one where only the recipes themselves are listed, even if that is just a blank page and I have to write them all down myself. Going through all the books to find a specific recipe is tedious.

As a matter of fact, another Journal tab where I can Free-form write like in Notepad would be great.

Totally agree, but I get the feeling Larian is only listing the complete text of each book on purpose to avoid too much "hand-holding." But again, I'd prefer they just extract the actual recipes and list only those in one place in the journal - I'm just going to have to search for them on the internet otherwise anyway.

Well then as I said, let me write those down myself. Being able to take notes in game would be great either way.

Ideally you could "create" pages or alter existing ones.

After that the Recipe Tab should be changed to include all written documents the player reads. Of course it would need to be Categorized a bit to avoid a massive clusterfuck, but it certainly doesn't seem like a very complex request.

"Too much hand-holding" is a bad excuse for bad or lacking design. If crafting and cooking just leads to frustration because it's too complicated and fuzzy and tedious it's just wasted programming. With too much hand-holding you maybe prevent exploring but with too little comfort you just make your game overly tedious and unwelcoming.

+1 for an option to show "clear receipes" in addition to the book texts

Still no argument here. Just trying to guess why this isn't already implemented based on Larian's usual MO.

My guess would be because it would be more work than just putting the entire book in there, and they just do not have the time atm.

I think the crafting journal could be done better if they condense the text in the books or have icons of the items that need to create the item but yet again it might not be useful when you have tons of items that have the same ingredients that are required to make that item though...

But in other words...

Who would like icons for crafting journal or just plain text?

Couldn't agree more.
However, time is of the essence.

I'd personally like to see any method that (after the related recipe book is read) explicitly displays in the journal the ingredients for each recipe - I'm just skeptical Larian will implement this. The reason I say this is that many recipe books are somewhat vague and don't explicitly state the ingredients themselves, so again (trying to guess Larian's intentions), the devs might think revealing the entire recipe would be too "easy." But as I already mentioned, I'm just going to go look the recipes up online anyway, so it's all pretty moot - i.e., they might as well just give us the option to see them in-game.

That said, Dragon Quest VIII had a pretty good system of listing recipes and related ingredients while accounting for the above issue: e.g. if you got a recipe that said "combine a branch with something small and sharp and see what you get," the resulting note in your journal wouldn't say "branch + dagger = spear," but instead, "branch + 'something small and sharp' = ?" Just throwing that out there.

I have another suggestion: how about making two receipes tabs?

The one which is already in placed and filled with receipes that can be found in books by raeding them should stay in place.

But as an addition there should be another tab which works as a log of everything you were able to craft/cook so far.

So if you managed to combine "mushroom X" + "empty flask Y" and got "potion Z" for example it would generate a new entry in that receipes log stating a clear and easy: "Potion Z: mushroom X + empty potion flask".

That way you wouldn't have to remember each and every receipe manually you found out on your own but easily could look it up for future use. And the nicely written books with more sophisticated receipes could stay in place, being more vague in what you need for certain crafted items.

+1 for LordCrash' solution for receipes not found in books

I agree with Lord Crash's idea as well.

Yep, gets my vote too.