Expedition Crafting

Expedition Crafting is a deterministic crafting system that allows players to incrementally upgrade, refine, and customise their gear by interacting with Expedition NPCs. Each NPC specialises in specific item types and uses unique Expedition Artifacts as currency.

Overview

Expedition Crafting provides players with a step-by-step process to shape items through various actions such as adding, upgrading, rerolling, or removing modifiers. This system is designed to reduce randomness, offering greater control over item improvements compared to other crafting methods.

Players interact with Expedition NPCs during Expedition encounters, where they use Expedition Artifacts as the primary currency for crafting. Each NPC specialises in a unique set of item types and crafting options.

NPC Specialisations

Expedition Crafting revolves around four NPCs, each offering unique services tailored to different gear types.

• Gwennen — Specialises in crafting weapons (one-handed and two-handed), foci, and quivers. Uses Broken Circle Artifacts.
• Tujen — Focuses on crafting jewellery (rings and amulets) and belts. Uses Black Scythe Artifacts.
• Rog — Provides crafting for armour and shields. Uses Order Artifacts.
• Dannig — Does not craft directly but allows the exchange of Sun Artifacts for other types of Expedition Artifacts.

Mechanics

Expedition Crafting offers players incremental improvements to gear through a deterministic crafting system. Each NPC presents a base item of different rarities (normal, magic, rare) for purchase or crafting, followed by a series of actions that can be accepted or declined.

Crafting Actions

Players can perform the following actions during Expedition Crafting:

• Add a Modifier: Introduces a new random modifier to the item.
• Upgrade Modifiers: Improves the tier of an existing modifier.
• Reroll Modifiers: Replaces one or more modifiers with new random ones.
• Remove Modifiers: Eliminates specific modifiers (e.g., all prefixes or suffixes).

Crafting progresses through offers proposed by the NPC, with players choosing to either accept or decline each step. Declining an offer skips it permanently, but further offers are not affected.

Examples with Screenshots

Tujen: Crafting a Belt

Example: Adding a New Modifier to a Belt

Purchase

Before Reroll: Orange values will be rerolled

After Reroll: New stats are visible

After Reroll: New suffix is added for ```Life Regeneration```

Skipping the first step of rerolling single value, then rerolling the suffix modifiers followed by adding a new one had a reasonable outcome, as you can see. However this is not always the case.

Rog: Crafting Armour

Example: Crafting a Magic Chestpiece In this example, Rog is used to Craft a magic chest piece and re-roll the prefix modifiers. It's a gamble and sometimes you can end up worse off than when you started.

Screenshot: Before and After

Purchase

Before Reroll: Stats in orange are current and the ones to reroll

After Reroll: Stats in orange are the new values but could be rerolled again

The approach can have adverse affects and your stats could be far worse than what you start with, so read carefully and select accordingly as you can get some amazing gear but also ruin your item.

Currency

Expedition Crafting relies on the following Artifact types:

• Broken Circle Artifact — Used by Gwennen.
• Black Scythe Artifact — Used by Tujen.
• Order Artifact — Used by Rog.
• Sun Artifact — Used for exchanges via Dannig.

Artifacts are obtained by defeating Runic monsters and opening Excavated Chests during Expedition encounters. Players can also exchange Sun Artifacts for other types of Artifacts through Dannig.

Advantages and Limitations

Advantages:

• Deterministic crafting reduces randomness.
• Accessible for creating mid-tier gear, even early in the game.
• Unique interactions allow for creative item shaping.

Limitations:

• Restricted to specific item types per NPC.
• Requires Expedition Artifacts, which may be limited early on.
• Step-by-step nature can limit the pace of crafting progress.

Tips and Strategies

• Plan crafting goals based on your build's requirements and the NPC's specialisation.
• Prioritise actions that align with your desired outcomes and decline offers that risk diminishing the item's potential.
• Use Dannig to balance Artifact types for greater crafting flexibility.

Version history

Version	Changes
0.1.0	Introduced to the game.