Crafting mechanics - 5 days until Early Access release!

Ahoooy! Cursed Crew releases in Early Access in 5 days!

Today’s dev blog covers the crafting mechanics in Cursed Crew. Early in development, there wasn’t a lot to do between combat encounters, and the next steps were to add crafting to make sure you had things to do and work on.

Crafting

We designed crafting with the philosophy that we wanted to make the survival experience outside of combat just as exciting as combat itself. We wanted to give the player plenty to do with crafting so there are a lot of strategic choices to make and things to work towards.

Start by building a crafting bench, this will allow you to craft ropes, bandages, reinforced planks, as well as weapons and bombs for combat. Next, you’ll want a smithy to let you build additional cannons and their cannonballs. And don’t forget your stove - your crew members can eat things raw, but they'd much prefer a delicious, homecooked meal. A stove lets you combine ingredients into fresh or hearty meals, or slop.

At the start of a run, you’ll only know a few recipes, and you must sail further to acquire schematics to learn new recipes for items. These schematics can be found through story events, from traders, and from ships you loot after a victorious battle.

New materials

Materials are your ingredients for crafting! During development, we reworked some old materials and added a couple of new ones.

• Wood: Used for fixing your ship’s deck when it’s damaged, crafting reinforced wood and certain weapons

• Metal: Used for repairing cannons, crafting refined metal and mechanical parts, as well as cannons and certain weapons

• Fabric: Used for repairing sails, crafting ropes and bandages, and building hammocks

• Ropes: Used for repairing damaged sails and crafting bombs and hammocks.

• Refined metal: Used for crafting more advanced weapons and cannons.

• Mechanical part: Used for crafting ranged weapons and cannons.

• Reinforced wood: Used for specific weapons, barriers, and fully repairing the deck.

Gunpowder and barriers

During development, we encountered a design problem around cannons. Previously, cannons worked magically when you loaded them with a cannonball - no gunpowder needed. We found that this wasn’t very immersive, but we were concerned that adding gunpowder would make cannon combat very tedious and micro-intensive. What we ended up doing is allowing the player to STORE up to 10 charges of gunpowder in a cannon, so you only have to refill the gunpowder every 10 shots. This means you can load your cannons up with gunpowder before a battle begins, instead of during a battle.

Gunpowder wouldn’t be gunpowder if it didn’t explode. We made sure that if a stray cannonball was to hit a gunpowder storage, it would result in a massive explosion, dealing damage to the ship and anyone that happened to be nearby! In order to protect your gunpowder storages, we added craftable barriers - these tough structures are made from reinforced metal to stop projectiles. Barriers can also be used by your crew members as cover during battle to protect them from gunfire.

Both gunpowder storages and barriers can spawn on enemy ships. They should be a lot of fun for you to shoot. :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1839760/Cursed_Crew/

There are only a few days remaining until release day, check back soon!

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Sincerely, Roel, Phil, & Oskar