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Crafting, or If I had a Hammer

Crafting is a part of all modern MMOs to some extent or other, part of the concept behind ATF is that the players are part of the reconstruction process in the galaxy, so in ATF crafting plays a major role in gameplay and the galactic economy, players will be able to manufacture virtually everything in the game, collect all the raw materials refine them, and manufacture the final items. The chain starts with Mining

Mining

The whole process starts with the mining of raw materials from asteroids and planets, you need to take the mining suplimentary skills to start mining, and then you’ll need to negotiate a deal with the mineral rights holder (NPC or PC), once you have the rights to mine you can place a mining installation on the asteroid/planet, these are automated units that will keep mining until they are full or have exhausted the resource they’re placed on. Resources are based on a resource map of the asteroid/planet, the miners are indiscriminate and pull up everything they find beneath them, these resources will be in raw form and will need refining before they can be used.

Refining

After you have the raw materials you need to feed them into a refinary to get them into a usable form, refining is also covered in the mining skills, the quality of refinary being determined by your skill. Once refined you then go onto the next stage, processing.

Processing

Processing turns the individual elements that you refined out of the raw resources and combines them to make alloys and compounds, the player has the ability to play around with the mixture to change stats on the finished alloy, these stats are important if you want to make the best items in the final assembly stages.

Assembly

The final stages, assembly, every item you can craft has a blueprint, this describes which elements, alloys, compounds and components are required to make the item, each component in the blueprint has a set of ideal values/ranges for various stats on the items, the closer to the ideal your components are the better the overall quality of the finished item will be, some components can be tinkered with the try to improve quality, but you cannot turn a pigs ear into a silk purse (in other words if you use crap materials you’ll get a crap item).

Balancing Starters and Masters
The other feature is that early easy items have easy to achieve ranges, while harder items have much more specific requirements and higher quality fall off, a starting crafter can make the easy items as well as a master crafter, but a master crafter can make more complex items. This means that both master crafters cant lock beginners out of the process and every item made at every level will be useful to someone.