Crafting From Gathered Materials

Recipes join inputs to outputs. Gathering yields materials with tiers and locations, a recipe consumes set quantities, and skill, tools or a workstation may gate the result or determine its quality. Depth comes from the graph rather than the act: multi-stage chains where intermediate goods feed later ones turn a world's geography into a production problem, and make some regions worth visiting only for their raw materials.

Origin Systems included player crafting in Ultima Online in 1997 because a persistent world needs occupations that are not adventuring. Letting players smith, tailor and build gave the server an internal economy where goods came from labour rather than from monster drops, and it gave thousands of subscribers a role in a world that could not possibly hand every one of them a heroic quest.

Manufacturing supplies purpose for exploration, a sink for loot and a reason for trade, which is why it now appears in almost every genre. Fatigue is the standard complaint, since many implementations require materials nobody chooses to gather and hide upgrades behind counting, so the system becomes an inventory tax. Games that survive that usually make gathering pleasant in itself, or keep recipes rare and consequential.