Scardrac
Felsummer
Hello everyone! This post is a lengthy one. There will be an index just below where you can fast-forward to sections you care about, but I encourage you to give the whole thing a read at some point soon, as this post contains information important to everyone. First, I wanted to extend my sympathy to anyone whose 2020 was just as bad as mine and many others, and I want to say that I hope your 2021 is much better than last year. Without further ado, let’s talk HollowWorld 2021.
Over the past few months, you have heard through whispered sneak peeks and general, band-aid level coverage just what is coming next on the server. Today, we’re going to go in-depth into HollowCrafting, HollowWorld’s next big step forward. We’re extremely excited to put this into the server for everyone to enjoy, and we simply couldn’t keep it behind closed doors any longer - hence the long and, hopefully, interesting beta. HollowCrafting’s launch from beta is just a short month away, but we hope that this post provides you with a little treat to pass the time, while you plan out accordingly just how you and your character are going to progress through this brand-new system.
HollowCrafting will release early February.
Index:
Part I: Comparing HollowCrafting and its broader changes to the present and the past.
Section Ia, Quantifying Skill
Section Ic, Grandfathering and You
Section Id, Experimentation
Part II, The Plugin Itself
Section IIa, The Professions and Specializations
Section IIb, Progression:
Section IIc New Materials, Flora, and Fauna, and How to Get Them
Section IId, Masterworks, and How Your Items are Unique
Part III: A sneak-peek at Magic
Part IV: What's Next for lore team?
Glossary:
Profession - One of the three professions: Smithing, Tailoring, and Carving.
Specialization - A specific alteration of the original profession, able to create specific crafts that others without the specialization cannot.
Innate Abilities - The specific traits and abilities tied to specific materials. Any item made by a certain material inherits the innate abilities of the material.
Additional Abilities - The traits specific to one item or character, such as craft quality, damage state, signature, and masterwork qualities. In rare cases where an individual applies any additional traits to their craft, these are 'additional abilities'.
Craft Quality - The level of quality in the item itself. Metal is shinier, edges are sharper. These qualities range from [Poor] [Decent] [Average] [Excellent] [Exceptional], to [Masterwork]. These qualities are what DMs will take into account when an item either succeeds or fails at its task, as well as how badly an item may be damaged
Damage State - The range of structural integrity of any given item. These states range from [Damaged] [Broken], to [Ruined]. These states do not progress naturally, Event DMs must manually change them.
Signature - The name of the character who made the item.
Introduction
HollowCrafting is a plugin designed by Lannis from the ground up, meant to vastly improve the way people play characters with skills and professions that pertain to crafting. This short description doesn’t do it justice, due to the fact that the way we play our characters, whether or not they are crafters themselves. Almost every character is a consumer, using armor, clothing, weapons, jewelry, and much more. Additionally, HollowCrafting will introduce well over a hundred new materials, flora, and fauna into the setting for people to discover and interact with over the next year. Simply put, Crafting as a whole is going to have a much more important place in the world, similarly to how Magic and Divine have in the past - with support for post launch content and tweaks to existing materials in the world to maintain balancing.
Part I, Comparing HollowCrafting and its broader changes to the present and the past.
Section Ia, Quantifying Skill
In the past, characters had no true way of quantifying their skill in any given profession. From the beginning of their time here, players who wanted to play a character with a specific profession had no clear, tangible way to progress their character’s skill. Some took to documenting their character’s progress on the forums, listing each product they created, oftentimes in great detail. But, there were no guidelines on how to define a character’s skill beyond general, community rules of thumb.
Going forward, a character’s skill in any given profession will be represented by a rank calculated purely by the HollowCrafting plugin. This rank is represented by player agency, as in, how often they use the plugin to create items utilized by their chosen profession. Now, players have an official method to train their characters’ skill in their profession, and document their total level of skill.
Section Ib, Items in Roleplay
When players join the server for the first time, they are told that they can begin their characters with “low quality” gear and equipment, without any true way of quantifying the quality of any given item in-character. They were also told that they could only obtain new gear from in-character crafters, and since those crafters did not have any way to quantify their skill at the time, there was no true way to tell just how good one piece of equipment is to another, outside of community rules of thumb.
Going forward, any item that you claim to have in character that can be made through the crafting plugin must be represented by an item utilizing the HollowCrafting Plugin. Players will be given the option to choose from “Starter Kits” that provide them with items that fit their character’s play style. Additionally, the HollowCrafting plugin attempts to quantify the level of quality of any given item, both through an item’s innate abilities (i.e., the material the item is made of, and what abilities those materials have) and its additional abilities (i.e., character crafting passives applied to the craft, the general craft quality compared to items of identical material, and whether or not the weapon is a masterwork.) The plugin includes a way to link an item directly in the chat, so that the item is visible for everyone to see, so that people do not need to pass an item around each others’ inventories.
Section Ic, Grandfathering and You
We understand that people are expecting their characters’ efforts over the past years to be recognized. Rest assured, all skills and items will be grandfathered into the new plugin, with levels and props handed out manually by the staff team. We will provide a more in depth guide on how to grandfather your progress and your items in a later post, but also be rest assured that it won’t be a gated, exclusive progress. There will be plenty of new things for those who would start at the very peak to explore. While you wait for the grandfathering post, here is the template to apply.
-Character name
-Link to profile
-Specialization 1
-Approx. date started
-Specialization 2 (if relevant)
-Approx. date started
(Please do not post completed forms on this post.)
Section Id, Experimentation
When it comes to interacting with strange materials found in events and around the world, the go-to method has always been to contact the event staff that gave you the item, who would then introduce Lore into the conversation. After everyone was added to the forum conversation (or, more recently, support ticket), you would explain your experiment, and often wait weeks at a time before you got a result on whether or not your character’s attempts had worked.
Going forward, all items in the HollowCrafting plugin will have all of its intended and potential uses, combinations, and crafts coded into the material before it is ever given to a player. Players are encouraged to experiment with materials and crafts at their own liberty before consulting the staff team regarding their experiments. However, we understand that we cannot account for the sheer levels of creativity present in the playerbase, so tickets will of course be open to experiments that the plugin did not account for. A guide on how to use tickets for unique, uncoded crafts will be provided at a later date - creativity is a cornerstone of our community’s freeform nature and the plugin will change to reflect that over time, rather than being hard set and without flexibility.
Part II, The Plugin Itself
The plugin itself was designed to be a modular framework with straightforward rules; you get experience for crafting, there’s a level progression that unlocks more recipes and materials as you go, etc. The actual content of recipes and materials is read by the plugin, and can be easily adjusted or expanded without major changes to the code itself.
The crafting process boils down to being a way to combine pairs of ingredients in multiple stages to arrive at a final product.
The recipes are designed to be fairly generalized, i.e you craft a ‘generic long sword’ instead of an estoc, but can end up with whatever type of sword you intended through the ability to rename and add custom lore to a finished item. The recipes are effectively ‘templates,’ with the details filled in from the appropriate one.
The main design goal is to add a tangible course of character progression distinct to the traditional avenues of arcane or divine. There are no barriers to entry, any character interested can start crafting and make progress to eventually start playing with unique and fantastical materials.
Section IIa, The Professions and Specializations
Every player can choose a total of two separate specializations, from any of the three initial release professions. Specializations are based on your character card, so be sure to deck out your /card with the correct professions for that character. To gain a specialization in a profession, you must level up your profession at least once, at such time you will be prompted to choose a specialization. This choice is mostly irreversible, however staff will aid players if they accidentally chose the wrong specialization and have not made many crafts as a result. In addition to this, there will be in-character methods of changing specializations once a character has already had experience within the specialization. We will share the exact methods with you at a later date. Not all requests to clear a profession will be granted, so players are encouraged to reserve a specialization slot if they are interested in any of the upcoming professions that are not to release with the full plugin.
Profession: Smithing
Specializations: Armorsmithing, Bladesmithing, Goldsmithing, and Immortal Stewardship (Those who repair and modify the bodies of Immortal Constructs).
Profession: Carving
Specializations: Bowyer, Shipwright, Siege Engineer.
Profession: Tailoring
Specializations: Tanner, Weaver.
Three professions that are planned to arrive shortly after the release of HollowCrafting are...
Gemcutting
Alchemy
Cooking
Taming: Domestic Breeder, War Breeder, and Beastmaster.
Section IIb, Progression:
All crafting skills have 5 ranks: Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, Expert, and Master. Players gain experience by crafting full items of the relevant type. Experience requirements for each rank are estimated based on a player regularly crafting items using the best available material, and it should take around one year to advance from novice to master.
Section IIc New Materials, Flora, and Fauna, and How to Get Them
The world of Altera is soon to be filled with never seen before materials, creatures, and plants. In addition, old materials and lore has been refurbished to allow for our preexisting setting to satisfy the fantasy of the crafting plugin. These changes and additions will be narratively explained through the subject’s lore page, events, or through canon stories on the forums. Keep an eye out for those going forward to explain the origins of the material in question, but the general rule of thumb is: If it is posted on the forums, you can use that material in-character. All brand new materials will have the extent of their lore explained on their own forum page.
The vast majority of these new materials and flora can be found whilst exploring the minecraft game world, by finding ‘nodes’. These ‘nodes’ are material-specific spots in the world that are randomly generated and regenerated, signalled by a [!] floating above the node itself. More on harvesting can be found [Here]
Higher level materials become costly, rarer, as the resources needed to craft with them become sparsely available. The most practical and sought after of these materials will often be locked behind events only.
Section IId, Masterworks, and How Your Items are Unique
Every single item crafted by the HollowCrafting plugin is unique, with its own custom description, craft quality, damage state, and signature. In addition to these qualities, masters in their respective professions can craft masterworks. Masterworks are items created with great care and attention; they are the epitome of an individual’s talent and skill. These special crafts carry special qualities, objectively superior to their non-masterwork counterparts. These qualities rely on the craft itself, as well as what the material is made of, as some materials have additional qualities that are unlocked by creating a masterwork of an item made of that material. However, creating a masterwork is a lengthy task; The cooldown for masterworks is measured in months, not days.
(Note: The exact cooldown for masterworks is not yet decided, and this cooldown is not the same as your general crafting cooldown. You can still make regular items after making a masterwork.)
Part III: A sneak-peek at Magic
Many of you have seen this: https://hollowworld.co.uk/threads/ignore-this-grimoire-test.50853/
I wanted to take a short moment to show the function of this forum post. Many of you have not seen how this post adds on to the idea of Magic in any way. Well, after a short edit to the post itself, we can showcase the function of the Magic Plugin:
(Please pardon the physically contradicting spell description; this is only an example to showcase the link between the book and the forums.)
Yes, a book will be able to read the forums and allow us to edit spells without the need to contact each and every mage. This book will be the heart of each mage. As they cast spells using the plugin, the book will track the mage’s SP, and link the spell or cantrip in the in-game chat so that the effects are available to everyone in the RP, verbatim.
Part IV: What's Next For Lore Team?
HollowCrafting and the Magic plugin are the two main things that have occupied the lore team for the past few months, since my personal undertaking as head of the lore team. The pressure of releasing both things is immense; we want this to be the best it can be, and for it to be worthy of the standards we set for ourselves when releasing content for people to enjoy here on the server. That being said, the work on HollowCrafting will never end, with new materials and professions to chase as time goes on. With the availability to add on to the HollowCrafting plugin as a core design principle, Lore Team's focus will then shift from creating this system from the ground up, to utilizing it as a tool to refine the narrative experience for all players on the server. The purpose of Lore Team is not just to write fancy descriptions for rocks and flowers. While this is critically important to the setting as a whole, no writer will tell you that it's their favorite part of worldbuilding. We have grand ambitions for 2021, and we have a particular goal for this year: To tell the best story we have ever told.
The game of Minecraft is one of gaming's most expansive and detailed sandboxes for its relative ease of use. It is astonishing the things people can make and express is unparalleled unless you make your own game from scratch. Over the years, we feel that HollowWorld has not used Minecraft to it's fullest potential. While there have been impressive builds, skins, and scripted events in the past, it has become difficult to create such things, especially with the weight of obligation making it a tedious task. While our main focuses are to implement and add on to Hollowcrafting with periodic, small additions with events or event chains tied to them, an even grander ambition is set for the later half of the year. Keep your eyes peeled, because the world of Altera has hardly experienced its most daunting story yet. Utilizing the in depth plugin that is HollowCrafting, and the expansive creativity that Minecraft allows, we hope to bring the world of Altera alive, and make it the best place for a collective, narrative experience we can make it.
Thank you everyone for reading. I want to close this out with a personal outreach to you readers: We are working hard, our hardest, to make sure these plugins are as good as they can be. This post in particular has been a draft for months, and I only ask that you pardon any contradictory statements that may come up, as well as the common typo. Please, please, please ask questions if you have any. No question is off limits, no question is a stupid question. Thank you, and have a wonderful year.
-Scardrac
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