To start off. i havent played that many games, but for the ones i did i found that crafting usually has 3 categories:

-gear making (ie: blacksmithing) focused on creating armor and weapons, and generally items that have passive/ulimited uses.

-gear improvement (ie: enchanting) improving the properties of an item, adding stats or some effect

-consumable making (ie: alchemy) creating single use items with several purposes

Now, could you think of different crafting types (for this matter extracting profession which are only to obtain materials do not count)

Also all games ive seen the skill in this crafts is improved only by crafting. With few exceptions, like in Skyrim you can readbooks that increase a bit your skill in some of the crafts.

This leads to the materials being the only limiting factor for craft skill improvement, if you have the materials. you can raise the skill in little time.

The exception to this one is Eve Online (i dont know if there are others) in which you learn the skills from items or something, and it takes a lot of time (even months) to get those skill levels, but it does it on its own, you dont even have to play to gain the skill.

Also ive seen a lot of item obsoletization. I mean, the first items you make are very weak, and useless for higher levels. How about a system in whcih no item is absolutely better than other, but its usefulness depends on the situation, like the units on a well balanced RTS. So yo would start out with some few recipes and as your skill grows you get acces to greater variety and specialized items.

Any feedback appreciated. Thanks.

What if you craft yourself an inventory expansion - that's not gear, since it's permanent, nor a consumable even though it is a 1-time use.

Similarly, what if you craft yourself a house, a piece of furniture, or an appliance which unlocks new crafting methods?

What if you breed a mount or pet, are they gear? Same for if you build a vehicle?

You could go play the free trial of WurmOnline or A Tale In The Desert (assuming its still running) and see a different paradigm of crafting. There's also a free single-player game called Stranded II which has similar crafting.

What if you craft yourself an inventory expansion

Do you mean make a bag/backpack?

Similarly, what if you craft yourself a house, a piece of furniture, or an appliance which unlocks new crafting methods?

What if you breed a mount or pet, are they gear? Same for if you build a vehicle?

Minecraft. I think they're working on horses now.

Crafting can include anything of a physical nature: vehicles, clothing, tools, parts, food, drink, furniture, buildings, containers, devices, weapons, books, toys, decorations, etc. So to answer your original post, I would add these categories to crafting:

Buildings

Vehicles

Decorations

Vanity Items (No practical use)

(I guess sunandshadow already mentioned these.)

I point to Star Wars Galaxies for what I think was the most interesting and versatile crafting system I've ever encountered.

• The vanity items could be a really cool thing, like attaching sprites together in a 2d sprite game, or attaching models and patches you find in a more 3d game.
• Monkey Island series had funny crafting as a central piece of the game experience.

What if you craft yourself an inventory expansion

Do you mean make a bag/backpack?

>>>Similarly, what if you craft yourself a house, a piece of furniture, or an appliance which unlocks new crafting methods?

What if you breed a mount or pet, are they gear? Same for if you build a vehicle?

Minecraft. I think they're working on horses now.

No I did not mean a backpack because those are not permanent. Perfect World, for example, gives you a recipe by which you can permanently expand your bank (or you can buy the cash item equivalent, which is a magic stone). So what you are crafting is a non-tradable item of which you can only make and use one per character. Normally a magic stone which gets used up would be classified as a consumable, except consumable items' benefits wear off or get used up and this doesn't. They could have said you were building a shelf that could not afterward be removed and it would have functioned the same, and probably made more sense in context.

Dofus is one of a few MMOs that already have pet crafting. First you have to capture a male and female wild pet. The cannot be ridden, ever. You have to breed them to get a ridable pet. Breeding them requires improving their mood with food, water, petting, etc. until they are really happy. Then the result of the breeding is a baby which must be raised to level 5 (adult) by carrying it around while fighting. (Dofus' system of mount breeding is actually pretty terrible, and you have to be level 60 to even attempt it, last I knew, so don't anybody rush off to try it from reading this description. The 'how' they chose for pet interaction is awful and the economics of breeding them are also awful. If you aren't the first person on the server to do it you will lose large amounts of money at it.)

'Vanity item' isn't a parallel class to consumable and gear, it would be more parallel to a category like 'temporary buff' (for example a scroll that doubles XP earned for one hour or a scroll that cancels penalties for one death) and another category like 'materials' (items which have no direct use but instead must be processed into something else, like ore, wood, cotton, bone, leather, etc.) Most vanity items are gear or appearance mods for gear, especially if mounts are also considered gear. Things like tattoos and hair styles and mount recolors can be implemented as gear if they are removable, and optionally reusable or saleable. If they aren't removable, then they go in the same category as permanent inventory expansions and permanent housing acquisitions and expansions.

BTW we've had some good discussions of crafting in this forum in the past. We're sort of reinventing the wheel in this thread. I don't have time today, but someone might want to save us all effort by locating past good threads about crafting and linking them here.

If your(any?) game is focused only on battling, then the only items you will be crafting will be the ones having to do with battles.

Other then that crafting can be divided into a whole range of different skills(categories?) as much as the developer wants.

I don't think i 've seen many games without items that are mainly good in a certain situation(although situation often involves being level X)

most games try to balance it out a lot, though, with good implementation and not overdoing it, a few less usefull items can be fun to have in a game as well.

Now, could you think of different crafting types (for this matter extracting profession which are only to obtain materials do not count)

once you have inventory items, vehicles, and buildings, you've covered most everything.

Also all games ive seen the skill in this crafts is improved only by crafting.

in CAVEMAN, everything is crafted. crafting skills can be researched, taught, or learned from others, as well as increasing with crafting activities.

Also ive seen a lot of item obsoletization. I mean, the first items you make are very weak, and useless for higher levels. How about a system in whcih no item is absolutely better than other, but its usefulness depends on the situation, like the units on a well balanced RTS.

this is more a question of game balance with respect to items in the game. crafting is simply a way to obtain such items.

unfortunately, obsolescence is a fact of life. superior technologies will always make inferior older technologies obsolete. so learning smithing and making metal armor will always make your old leather armor obsolete.

to avoid this, as you mention, instead of crafting items that perform the same function at different levels of efficiency, you craft items with unique capabilities. the trick is not the crafting. its the balancing of the items in the game so they are unique, don't make each other obsolete, and the whole thing doesn't seem artificial and contrived. thats the tricky part. once you've figured that out, adding the mechanics of crafting those items is (relatively) trivial (grunt work coding, and maybe some crafting animations).

Actually leather armor is still used with metal armor. Lots of armor involved leather base with rings or plates and some armor had plates between leather and all sorts of other examples. The cheapness of leather or of metal and leather vs pure metal made it usable all the way to the high and late middle ages. Furthermore there are also some mobility bonuses to leather and leather/metal armor.

I suppose it depends on the kind of game you are playing. Games of whatever genre with a low number of units on the player's side may be less amenable to the trade offs of different materials.

crafting can also be a way of raising money (converting raw materials into higher value) selling it and using procedes to obtail somthing your character would never have skill to generate themselves..

In some games it expands the simple 'loot and sell' pattern into "loot/harvest - manufacture-sell" and can give players a few more activities to do (and possibly additional goals to pursue).