I was thinking of some new things to enhance our experience on Tempus.

1. Harvesting Corpses

This is a universal skill (similar to electronics, being taught at a school to improve) that could be used to harvest corpses. If successful, it would yield a raw material from the corpse.

The usage would be:

example:

skin Kobold

You successfully remove and save a kobold paw.

or

You failed to the harvest the corpse, which quickly decays.

The raw material could then:

1. Be sold for gold to a player or NPC tannery, taxidermist, chemist, or potion maker. This would also be great and fun for new players to get some extra cash (as long as the NPCs carry enough gold/cash).

It also gives the new player a task to focus on and master along with combat and leveling.

The new player could also use harvesting as a way to gather up money for remorting.

1. Be used in combination with other raw materials to create useful items.

These items could be: a. Potions with specific effects. This could be a class specific skill (maybe upgrade Mercenary remort skill chemistry to do this? Or it could be a brand new skill for another class) or it could be done at an NPC for a price.

example:

You combine a Kobold paw, Halfling ear, and rabbit foot to create a Health Vial!

Another fun way new players could gather and load up items.

1. Combine the raw materials to an existing item to add an affect (non stackable) by an NPC.

Example

You give a Mystical Sapphire Dagger and Freddie Fail's Brain to the Master Blacksmith.

You receive +2 int on the Mystical Sapphire Dagger

1. You combine a rare combination of items and raw materials to create a unique item.

Example:

You give the Heart of the Tarrasque, Zhengi's liver, Learander's rib, Graz'zt's jawbone, Tiamet's eye, and Dispater's skull to the Master Blacksmith.

He returns hands you the Legendary Excalibur!

To balance the load rates, unique mobs will have a lower success rate for harvesting.

This will give higher level players an opportunity to test out recipes for new items and to upgrade current equipment with unique abilities.

It also allows for future updates on new recipes.

Let me know what you think about these ideas.

I think harvesting corpses is a great idea. It's even pretty easy to code up.

What's much harder is building all the ingredients and recipes. That can be pretty time intensive.

It's definitely on the todo list. :)

Shops that require items to build things are the coolest thing in the mud IMO. If I could ever find my way back to the EPOS shop guy I'd be thrilled.

Are the items, skin and ears and such, going to expire? "The kobold skin you are holding has rotten away."

Thanks Azi! I am looking forward to gutting some corpses.

Tower, that is a great question. Since it is organic, and taken from the corpse, it should decay. That makes it much harder to gather all the materials at one time to get a legendary item.

Perhaps we can have a person in the future that can cryo preserve it. Similar to how parents can cryo preserve their children's umbilical cord and bank it for the future.

Another idea is to have a person in the past that can process certain items. For example, the Kobald skin can be taken to the tanner, who processes the skin into leather. That way it can last for a while, and be used in shields or cloaks.

The raw item can be more powerful in what it imbues into items (and legendary item recipes require fresh raw materials).

Then the processed items could be used for base magical properties.

An example is:

If you use a processed Kobold Skin (Leather) you get +3 ac apply to the item (only one material can be used on items).

If you use a raw one, since it has fur, it gives the +3 ac apply and endure cold.

I agree that it will take a significant amount of time to get the ingredients, recipes, and most importantly balancing it.

I see the ingredients and recipes being update in patches.

The first will start with having the mobs harvestable (a lot of work to just set up what can be harvested from what!)

Then set up a mob shop so the harvested items could be sold for extra gold (hopefully the mob that buys them will not get sick of buying them and have enough gold. Nothing is worse for a newbie to spend time collecting halfling mail and swords, and Blacksteel tells you he can't afford it).

Not all items will have special properties when added to items, but they could still be sold for extra gold!

Then future updates, we could slowy add some recipes, and put some recipe scrolls in the world, on some mob that is looking to create the legendary items. We can then slowly build up with each update a few items.

It would be cool to find a mob, like Dante Aligheri in Hell, searching for an ingredient, but died, and he was holding a scrolll with the recipe for a special item. Or Merlin travelling to the future to find the raw materials for Excalibur, and he is holding a magical scroll with the recipe.

Classes with leatherworking should be able to preserve animal parts.

That is a good idea Merriam! Welcome back. Good to see you.

Sounds fun to me :-)