Has anyone ever made an offline Recipe Generator?

[brash1963]

For those of us new and working on how to develop our own recipes, it seems like some brilliant person out there might know if it is possible to create a webbased or standalone "recipe maker" where you could experiment adding different resources etc to find combinations you like, then save those recipes, possibly to print out. That way we would know in advance also what resources to go out and dig, as opposed to just gathering and combining random materials.

I admit I am not a database person and I could be wildly underestimating how big of a challenge this would be -- or perhaps something like this is already made and either downloadable or usable from a website?

Brash Endeavors
http://brashendeavors.net

[50kal]

Heya Brash1963 & Welcome.

http://ballisticmystix.net/
http://ballisticmystix.net/?p=resources
http://ballisticmystix.net/?p=patterns

Has most of what you are asking for, but for a combination crafting experimentation, you will have to do that ingame, like the rest of us.

[acridiel]

I´m truly sorry, but I´m getting a strong urge to b**f when I read requests like these.
Getting what you want by looking for it on the net and "knowing in advance" what to look for 1. robs you of great part of gameplay
2. is unfair to others who DO work regularly

I know I´m a hopeless "romantic" when I propose to ignore such programs and sites and most people would rather have an "I Win Button" in most games that need a just the tiniest bit of effort on their own part, but I´m not such a person and I enjoy "buying" my stuff from crafters that earned their mastery the hard way over "looking it up" on some obscure website. Just as much as I enjoy good, prepared and cooked food over McDonalds.

Boooooo to all who think thats the way to play any game.

CU
Acridiel

[kitty157]

I´m truly sorry, but I´m getting a strong urge to b**f when I read requests like these.

b**f? You get an urge to bamf?

[acridiel]

b**f? You get an urge to bamf?

Yes, to bamf away those who propose such programs and sites.
Mind you, I admit to sometimes using one of the sites to reestablish a lost and not remembered Mat-Node and well, theres always the challange to actually GET to the spot in question. And yes, the "challange" to get the mats needed to produce the MV of other item is question is there too, but where´s the fun in just hitting a switch and knowing what to do?
Where´s the accomplishment and where´s the sense of fairness to those who spent countless hours figuring the recipe out by themselves?
I can not quite understand where there´s supposed to be the sense in spending hours upon hours to figure out how to beat the system and write the code for such a program, if you´d probably spent less hours, or at least just as much, trying to figure out the recipe anyway?

Yeah, yeah, I know all that crap about, "But if I allready HAVE the recipe I just need to figure out how to get the materials."
But why then not just go to an accomplished crafter and ask him to build one for you? That way you don´t even have to worry about figuring out anything?!

Staying "independent"? Yeah, staying independent by cheating in an MMORPG is such a great way to play and is so fair to others.

Have fun, but never at the cost of other players.

CU
Acridiel

P.S. Oh, and its NOT supposed to say "bamf". Go figure.

[brash1963]

Well, I apologize as this is clearly a very sensitive issue for veteran crafters here, and I perhaps should have explained it very differently.

I understand that the complexity of the crafting system is one of the game's most compelling and exciting features, and to strip that system of all of its mystery is to "dumb it down" into being just another easy-play MMO where everybody makes the exact same items by clapping their hands. I would be horrified if the game's crafting devolved into that.

What I actually have been looking for is a way to understand some concepts that I am just not 'getting' now. My original interest had started after I had put about 30+ hours into crafting, across a couple different characters and trying to figure it out on my own, and I decided to see what the best Q50 armor suit I could make was, applying everything I had learned up till then.

I had done many suits before, not cranking/grinding just to skill up but trying to make 'nice' ones, but this time I wanted to see what the very best I could manage was. I spent some of my savings on vendor mats that were much better than I could get on my own. literally spent over an hour adding mats carefully and subtracting them as I tried to figure out what affected what. I knew there was a lot of things I wasn't understanding because adding something did not always have the expected affect. I started over several times until I finally got the best suit I felt I could make from the mats on hand.

I was pretty durn proud of it.

I then decided to use up the rest of the leftover mats by just throwing them all in hodge-podge and making a "junk" suit. I was mortified to then discover my "random" junk suit, ended up with much better stats than the suit I spent an hour carefully micro-managing each single mat for. Clearly I not only was -not- understanding some basic concepts, but apparently a blind monkey randomly throwing mats together could do way better than my very best effort after several weeks of study. To say I felt discouraged was an understatement.

To me, crafting in Ryzom is a bit like a cook experimenting with spices in a kitchen, or an artist combining colors. Just as much an art as a science, and you have to try things to learn rather than just following someone else's pattern. But even a beginning cook usually learns from other cooks before them about concepts and how one thing can affect other things. Why adding heat is not just enough, but learning why sauteing has a different effect than boiling etc.

If I wanted "easy instant win" I would have simply asked for premade recipes and not something that would help me learn to make my own. What I am looking for is not a list of the best recipes, but an interactive learning tool that I can test on so that I can see some patterns that I simply am not seeing now, which will help me to then make my own recipes.

Anyway, I am new to the game and the crafting community here, and obviously I stumbled and hit an extremely sore spot. I apologize for making you want to barf.

I am trying to learn, I am not asking people to give me recipes or items or money because I like to learn to be self sufficient. I am trying to discover how to make better ones than I can make now. I am still not 'getting' it and finding out a random potluck of mats had a better result than my best efforts from several weeks of studying, was just a little disheartening.

In any case, I apologize and will try not to make people want to barf on me any more. It's very hard to clean up after.

[sidusar]

The ballisticmystix site has the stats for pretty much every material out there, and that's usually all you need to know. For the basic part the crafting is pretty straightforward from there; a material with higher durability and lower speed will give your crafted product higher durability and lower speed.

The only thing it doesn't tell you is the 'secondary effect' in crafting; that lowering some stats can sometimes raise other seemingly unrelated stats, and vice-versa, when according to the sum of the material stats alone, it shouldn't. I guess you've already met this effect.

It takes most crafters months to 'get a feel' for that secondary effect, and I think few if any understand it completely, so don't be discouraged you don't get it yet after only a few weeks. Starting crafters can usually get by fine with just the basics; that the stats of the item are approximately the sum of the stats of all the materials used in it. This is accurate enough about 80% of the time, the secondary effect is just to optimise the recipe.

What happened in your case just sounds like an extremely unlucky/unlikely coincedence, as even a beginning crafter should really be able to do better than a blind monkey randomly throwing mats together, unless the monkey just happens to be (un)lucky enough to stumble upon an exceptional recipee. Cases where your mats do something completely unexpected are exactly the ones that can teach you the most new insights though. Tried comparing this "junk" suit to the "best" suit, see what's different, and if any pattern can be gleaned from it?

But I can't really judge without proper details ofcourse, so feel free to provide them. While most crafters are loathe to give away recipees or reveal every big secret behind the crafting system all at once, they'll often gladly give hints about specific questions.

[chibiarc]

For those of us new and working on how to develop our own recipes, it seems like some brilliant person out there might know if it is possible to create a webbased or standalone "recipe maker" where you could experiment adding different resources etc to find combinations you like, then save those recipes, possibly to print out. That way we would know in advance also what resources to go out and dig, as opposed to just gathering and combining random materials.

I believe this is possible, I read about it on german forums. But as crafting + recipes play such a central role on Atys I doubt anyone would share this with you - even if it should exist.

Do it like everyone else, get a mek full with random crap and experiment, it's not that hard

[chibiarc]

It takes most crafters months to 'get a feel' for that secondary effect, and I think few if any understand it completely,

<-- I claim I do

[brash1963]

Thank you for a very friendly reply, sidusar I feel more encouraged now.

Yes, it was apparently the 'secondary' effect that zinged me. In addition another kind person explained some concepts about lowering qualities (ie, deliberately using Basic instead of Choice even for the same mat) in some components actually raising the impact even though it seems counter intuitive. I think on my 'best' suit I had overloaded "too good" of materials in certain places, while the leftover 'monkey suit' used poorer qualities (which made no sense to me at the time, heh).

What I tend to do now, since scraps and handwritten notes are difficult for me to manage and my mind doesn't handle 'paper notes' well, is to screenshot combinations that worked well for me, save those images in a "my recipes" folder and hope in time a visual concept pattern will emerge. All of us learn data different and for some reason paper notes cause some sort of internal confusion for me, so I have been trying out other ways to compare results. Since I am limited in the number of different types of mats I have on me at any time, I think it is simply going to be a much slower process and I will just have to accept in advance there will always be things I don't 'get'.

Thank you again for a very courteous, warm response that kept my new armor quite clean.