November 2010 Crafting Changes

Overview

We've been hard at work preparing for the next update and we can hardly wait to share all of the latest crafting goodness with you! This update brings a completely redesigned craft panel, new LOTRO Store items for faster, more convenient crafting, profession improvements for Farmers, and a host of new recipes.

Read on for the full scoop!

New Crafting Panel

The most obvious new feature for crafting in this update is also one of the best: The crafting panel has been completely redesigned! We'll go over the details below, but first, take a gander at this:

Behold the new crafting panel!

Improvements

The size of the panel has been greatly increased, allowing for a larger recipe list on the left and a complete recipe information panel on the right.

The Proficiency and Mastery pages have been combined. We now display all important details for the selected recipe in one location.

The Select Output option (formerly the Multi-output button) now displays your current choice and allows you to navigate both forward and backward through all available choices.

 

New Additions

Searching for a particular recipe? The “Get Recipes” button opens the LOTRO Store to the Crafting Recipes section, listing all available recipes for the currently-selected crafting profession.

Want to earn more crafting experience? The “Increase Craft XP” button opens the LOTRO Store to the Enhancements/Boosts section, where you will find Scrolls of Craft Acceleration that increase the amount of craft XP earned for many recipes (more on Craft Acceleration Scrolls below).

Looking for ingredients? The “Get Ingredients” button opens the LOTRO Store to the Crafting Ingredients section, where you will find Ingredient Packs that can be used in place of normal craft materials for the currently-selected recipe (more on Ingredient Packs below).

Crafting Acceleration Scrolls

New to the LOTRO Store in this update, Scrolls of Craft Acceleration can be used to temporarily increase the amount of crafting XP earned for completing recipes. Scrolls of Lesser Craft Acceleration increase the amount of earned craft XP by 25%, while Scrolls of Greater Craft Acceleration provide a substantial 50% bonus.

Scrolls of Craft Acceleration

In the following example, the 50% bonus for a Scroll of Greater Craft Acceleration is in effect, causing the Rough Cloth Armor recipe to provide 9 craft XP instead of 6. Note that the total amount of craft XP earned for a given recipe is displayed in green text when the craft accelerator effect is active:

Crafting panel displaying a 50% bonus to craft XP for this recipe

Ingredient Packs

Also new to the LOTRO Store in this update are Ingredient Packs. These items can be used in place of normal crafting materials to produce an enormous variety of items for any character on your account.

Ingredient Packs

Recipes that can use ingredient Packs display the Use Ingredient Packs checkbox in the ingredients portion of the crafting panel. Clicking this box will change the required ingredients for the recipe to use Ingredient Packs instead of normal crafting materials.

A recipe with 'Use Ingredient Packs' selected

With Ingredient Packs in your inventory, the crafting panel also displays the number of times you can use a particular recipe (accompanied by a red backpack icon).

It is very important to note that all items crafted with Ingredient Packs are bound to your account on creation! These items can be given to other characters on your account, but they cannot be traded or sold in the Auction Hall to other players.

Additionally, if the crafted item is set to Bind on Equip the item will become bound to the first character who equips the item.

Armour crafted with an ingredient pack

 

Farmer Profession Improvements

Being a Farmer isn't easy. It takes a special sort of someone: A person with dedication, integrity, patience, and...inventory space? Yes, lots of inventory space!

Well, we've made some changes to the profession to help alleviate the burden of item management, as well as a major adjustment in the process of producing crops that will help all Farmers produce bigger harvests more quickly.

Seed Changes

We've simplified the many different types of seeds used by Farmers. For example, the Expert Farmer recipes for Cauliflower Field and Green Onion Field now both share a common seed ingredient, the Expert Crop Seed.

Simplified crop seeds for Farmers

Most Flower and Pipe-weed Field recipes also share seeds as well. This should help to reduce the variety of recipe ingredients used by Farmers to a more manageable level.

Field Recipe Changes

We've made two significant adjustments to all Farmer field recipes.

First, we've reduced the number of seeds for all field recipes from 5 to 1, which greatly reduces the number of seeds needed to use these recipes. We've adjusted the value of the new seeds to compensate for this change, so seed prices will stay roughly the same as before.

Green Onion Field recipe with new required ingredients

Second, we've changed the output for all field recipes to produce only good crops. Previously, poor crops made by field recipes could be used to produce more seed, leaving the Farmer with another stack of items, as well as consuming additional time to process the crops.

Farmers take note: The recipes for poor crops have been removed from the recipe list as they are no longer used.

Hybrid Pipe-weed Changes

Hybrid pipe-weed field recipes continue to use unique seeds; however the methods for obtaining these seeds have changed. All Apprentice Farmer pipe-weed field recipes now have a chance to produce Journeyman-tier hybrid pipe-weed seeds. Similarly, Journeyman pipe-weed fields have a chance to produce Expert-tier hybrid seeds as well as an increased chance for additional Journeyman-tier hybrid seeds

Wait, There's More?

Cook

• Pet food recipes (Lore-master)

Jeweller

• Talisman recipes (Lore-master)

Metalsmith

• Chisel recipes (Rune-keeper)

Scholar

• New dye recipes
• Battle Tonic recipes (Captain)
• Potion of Fervour recipes (Champion)
• Overpower Tactics recipes (Guardian)
• Potion of Focus recipes (Hunter)
• Sheet Music recipes (Minstrel)

Tailor

• Armaments recipes (Captain)

Weaponsmith

• Throwing Axe recipes (Burglar)
• Serrated Knife recipes (Burglar)

Woodworker

• Blazoned Crest recipes (Captain)
• Infused Parchment recipes (Rune-keeper)
• Hymn recipes (Warden)

We hope you enjoy the changes to crafting in the November 2010 Update! Have fun!



http://www.lotro.com/gameinfo/devdiaries/894-developer-diary-november-2010-update-crafting-changes