Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Easy solution to a big problem

So Crafting.

Love it to death, but with the inventory how it is, finding my kitchen knife, then scrolling around to find my potatoes couldn't be more annoying.

Same with using a "tool" on any ingredients really. Hammers, Knifes, Identification Glass, Repair Hammer, etc.

A big issue here is that I can't use my "consumables" tab when I want to cut potatoes because my knife isn't there. What if I want to add a mushroom to a potion? Again, different tabs so I have to use the "all my items" category. Which is horrific.

Why not give us another hotbar for crafting? If I have a hotbar that I can drag my knife, repair tool, mortar and pestle, etc, into, all I have to find is the item I want to modify and I can hotbar it from there.

As it stands now, I can drag the tools into the hotbar, but most of them disappear from the hotbar upon being used once. This should be a really fast and simple code change and I think would give us a TON of convenience.

Also, consider me joined in the chorus of "OH GOD WE NEED AN AUTO SORT BUTTON"

Maybe not a hotbar exactly, but I agree, crafting needs a separate window/pane for you to move items into to perform the craft. In-inventory is okay for things in the same tab, but when it comes to items between tabs, it's too inconvenient.

The Identification Glasses and Repair Hammers shouldn't really be inventory items. Once you pick one up, you can use the same one all game long. Therefore, there's no reason to make them items in your inventory. They should each just be a button you have on your equipment tab of the inventory that you click on to enter repair or identify mode.

I agree that something needs to be done with crafting tools and ingridients. Maybe tag tools as ingridients as well? That way everything can be one tab. But it's not a very good solution for weapons like knives, axes etc. which are used both in combat and as a crafting tool.

The other, more elegant option, but one that requires much work is to ditch manual combining of items and go with items list:
-There should be a separate window, which contains all the items you can create. It can be a reworked Recipes tab.
-This window fills up as you collect recipes.
-The items that have enough ingridients to create them and sufficient crafting level are colored green, for example.
-The items that don't have enough ingridiens and sufficient crafting level are marked red.
-Beside each item should be shown required crafting level, amount and type of ingridients needed to create an item.

This system has been done in many games and is quite convenient - you don't have to rummage through inventory at all and can easily see what you can craft. Crafting itself is done with just one click of a button.
In short, I'm talking about a crafting system similar to TES: Skyrim:

That would be great, but so close to release, is it feasable?

With more than 6 weeks to go, I think it's doable. If not they'll improve it with a update patch post launch.

That's not the best solution because potions, scrolls, clothing and armour can also be ingredients in crafting, so you'll just end up with an ingredients tab nearly as big as the "All" tab, which defests the point.

I don't really like the Skyrim-way. It would make crafting trivial and boring if everything is already there. Maybe a bit better: the craftable item would only appear in the list if we find and 'learn' the recipe.

I didn't play much with the actual version so not sure how it works now, but it could be also ok to have a different little container with 9 or 12 slots where we could drag and drop everything we want and than click a 'craft' or 'empty' button. If we just close the tool, the items would simply stay in the container and we would find them when we open it again.

I already played a game with similar crafting, no idea which one. Maybe Morrowind or Oblivion? Or Skyrim alchemy was that?
Or the Diablo 2 cube was something like this..

That's one of my suggestion points. The list fills up as you collect recipes,