Crafting
This was also one of the hardest areas to design. I started with the idea of players not crafting anything, cause it couldn't be fitted to the theme of the game.
I thought abut the Pirates of the Burning Sea idea of player buying crafting units, but that would have been copying, which I dont like to do. So, instead
of copying PotBS directly, I took parts of that idea, combined it with few ideas from other games and added some of my own ideas. Here's what I came up with:
Like I said, players don't do the crafting, instead, there are NPC corporations that manufacture the items and your job is to provide the blueprints, maybe collect
some rare materials and make a contract with them.
First, you have skills that affect the contarct, both Train-over-time and Learn-by-Doing skills (check the Skills and abilities section). These include skills
like negotiation, diplomacy and such.
Second, by doing missions to that corporation, you can raise your reputation among them to get better contracts.
Third, you can use your mission points to get better contracts.
Fourth, some corporations are linked, so by doing business with corporation A, you also get better reputation with corporations B and C, but worse reputation among
corporations D and E, cause those are the competitors of A, B and C.
Fifth, if you do a lot of business with low-grade manufacturing corporation, you might get contacted by representative from some bigger corporation, asking you to
do future manufacturing business with them.
Sixth, by doing lots of business with some corporation, you may even get exclusive deals.
Thing I haven't yet figured out is, how to get blueprints, maybe either looting them or by reverse engineering.
And last but not least, there are no identical items in game. There is the basic item, for example .50 cal MG, but depending on your reputation with the manufacturing
corporation, the level of the contract made and the overall quality of the manufacturing corporation, results may vary.
It's also possible to create basically useless items. Badly manufactured weapons may stop working after 1 bullet fired, badly built rockets may explode mid flight etc.