Tradeskills!

Let’s talk about tradeskills!

We’ll have six tradeskills at launch, in two categories: Custom Design and Item Creation.

Tradeskills in the Custom Design category are Fashion, Cuisine, and Jewelry, while the Item Creation category has WeaponMods, ArmorMods, and ShipMods.

In the Custom Design tradeskills, you’ll be creating design patterns for clothing, food/drink, and jewelry that are completely custom, meaning that you’ll write all the descriptive text for them. Then, you’ll submit them for admin approval which must be granted before you can create items from those patterns. There’ll be a one-time cost in credits to buy a license to use these tradeskills, similar to some of other other games, due to the fact that the admin have to hand-approve your patterns. These are the tradeskills favored by those who enjoy and are good at descriptive and evocative writing.

On the other side, we have Item Creation, where tradeskills make items that aren’t customized in the same way. Typically, these are items that would be mass produced because they get used up a a lot. High-volume vs. custom creation. Our initial Item Creation tradeskills are all mods (modifications) for weapons, bodyarmor, and ships that grant bonuses or maluses of various kinds to those things.

However, you can’t just create one out of thin air – you need to earn the knowledge for each mod first, by finding and reverse-engineering mods that get dropped when hunting NPCs. Reverse-engineering them will provide you with some % of the knowledge needed to make that mod going forward, as well as some parts specific to that mod.

Once you have 100% knowledge of that mod, you can start crafting that mod, using the parts. (Important to note that, of course, crafted mods can’t be reverse-engineered. Only dropped mods can.) Once you run out of parts, you’ll need to obtain more, which is how we’ll enforce some scarcity in the system, so that everyone isn’t always running around with the best mods. Mods will also be used up regularly, creating opportunity for diligent crafters.

And that’s what we’ll have for crafting at launch!

Of course, we’ll be adding many more crafting skills post-launch, and have tossed around ideas from custom drug crafting (you too can be a space scumbag!) to crafting entire buildings for other players to use as housing. But, Starmourn will end up being far more expansive than what it is at launch, and what seems like a good idea now might not once we start getting feedback from people after we launch.