Items and Crafting

Weapons, shields, armour, helmets, jewellery, and body pieces must be equipped to provide their combat benefits. Paired pieces such as boots and gloves can occupy a left or right side.

Carried containers hold other items and reduce the weight contribution of their contents, making them valuable expedition gear.

A cursed equipped item cannot be removed until its curse is cleansed.

Any carried drink or potion carrying the bottled mark can be poured out through its context menu for one action point, destroying the liquid and retaining an Empty Bottle.

Item cards can be dragged instead of chosen from a menu. Drag a loose item into the Equipment tile to collect it, onto an empty compass space to move it, onto your character to equip or use it where possible, or into an open container to store it. Carried items and the contents of an open container can be dragged to the same places. A drag costs the same Action Points as the menu action it replaces, and storing a loose item straight into a container costs 1. A container still refuses what it has no room for. Every valid destination lights up while you drag, and Escape cancels.

Selected ingredients are consumed when a recipe succeeds. Their selection order does not matter.

Some recipes require a perk or a nearby object. These requirements enable the work but are not normally consumed as ingredients.

A recipe may call for a service such as forge, workshop, carpentry, or pottery. A workstation supplies its service wherever it is: carried, set down in the room, or installed in a claimed room. An installed one falls silent while its room is contested. Rooms named for their trade supply theirs across the whole claim, so a Forge, Smithy, or Blacksmith room serves every room you own, and an anvil found in a dungeon serves as a forge where it lies. Each craft wears the workstation that served it by one point. A recipe that accepts either of two services names both.

Fittings, bindings, thread, bricks, glass, and the workshop tools that shape them are made rather than found. They are never scattered loose through a dungeon and merchants do not stock them. A component is obtained by crafting it, by breaking apart something built from the same stock, by claiming a location reward that holds one, or from an installed workstation. Raw materials such as clay, salt, stone, ore, and plant fibre are still gathered from the world.

Every craft rolls quality from one to five and adds your Craftsmanship level. The Artisan perk adds one. High Patience adds one and very low Patience costs one. A well appointed workshop can add more. Quality peaks at ten, and a nine or ten is a masterwork worth recording. Quality and the materials you used together set the final properties of the result.

A craft made on the spot costs 1 Action Point, and so does an attempt that matches nothing or whose requirements you cannot meet. Larger work takes several turns (see Work Takes Time). The current recipe catalogue awards 10 to 50 experience in five-point steps according to ingredients, requirements, result type, level, and rarity. Crafting also advances your Craftsmanship.

Discarding an item can return part of what went into it. Each listed material rolls separately at even odds unless the item names its own chance, and every level of Craftsmanship adds ten points to the roll. A discarded Iron Ingot returns a Metal scrap nine times in ten, half of the two it is made from. Discarding an enchanted item returns a rune and restores your mana. Discarding a scroll refunds half its mana cost and sometimes leaves a parchment. Consumables return nothing. Salvage never returns everything a recipe consumed, so remaking a thing is never free.

Some improvements installed in a claimed room produce goods on their own. A pen, apiary, or clay bank yields its output every so many turns and wears a little each time it does. Production stops while the claim is contested or abandoned, or while the improvement is broken. A full room holds finished output until a slot frees up. Irrigation speeds every producer in the room and wears once per turn no matter how many it helped.

Tearing rags into bandages, lighting a fire, or cooking over one takes no time at all. Planks, rope, nails, a bowl, a simple bow, or a potion take 2 or 3 turns. Leather armour, boots, a chest, a door, an ingot, or a stone furnace take 4 to 6. Chain mail, plate, a great sword, an anvil, a kiln, or an animal pen take 8 or more, and a glassworks takes 12. Refitting or repairing something is quicker than making it from raw stock.

Beginning the work takes the ingredients out of your pack. They are held on the unfinished piece until it is done or abandoned, and they no longer count towards anything else. Tools and workplaces are needed for the work but are not held.

Each turn of work spends the rest of that turn. The world moves on as it does when you rest: hunger and thirst rise, the weather turns, and whatever wanders the dungeon keeps wandering. When the last turn is done the piece is finished, rolled for quality, and rewarded like any other craft.

Every turn of work needs the recipe's tools, workplace, perk, and knowledge, just as the first did. A piece begun at a forge can only be carried on at a forge. Work cannot begin or go on with an enemy in the room.

While you work, the day and night wheel turns with the hours and shows what your character is doing. Work stops when an enemy appears, when hunger or thirst grows severe, when heat or cold becomes unbearable, or when you choose Stop working.

A stopped piece waits at the top of the recipe list with its progress and the parts it holds. Resume it whenever you can meet its requirements again. You can keep up to four pieces of unfinished work.

Abandoning a piece costs 1 Action Point and returns every part it held, each a little worse: 1 durability lower, or 1 quality lower if it has no durability. Should you fall, the parts are found with the rest of your pack.

Now and then the work goes its own way. The grain splits, a seam tears, or the heat will not hold, and you choose what to do. Choices can add turns, take turns away, or raise or lower the finished quality, and each shows its effect beside it. Some offer to take a better part from an item you carry. That item is used in the work and returned only if you abandon it.

A campfire is crafted from simple fuel and stone, then lit with flame, a fire-making tool, or suitable magic.

A burning campfire enables many food recipes and can cook raw meat into safer provisions.

Dirty water can be boiled at a burning campfire, turning a risky drink into a dependable supply.

Every mushroom species, from the Fat Mushroom to the Blightcap and the Luminous Fungus, grows in five varieties. Each carries its own name, built from the species and a describing word, such as Golden Fat Mushroom or Moonlit Blightcap. No two species share a variety name.

A variety restores Health, Stamina or Mana, sates Hunger, or damages Health. Every species carries all five, one to a variety, so any species holds four worth eating and one worth avoiding.

Each variety wears its own colouring, and one variety of every species keeps the species' true colours. Colour marks a variety apart from its cousins. It is not a clue to what the variety does.

The five effects are dealt to each species separately. A Golden Fat Mushroom tells you nothing about a Moonlit Blightcap, and knowing one variety of a species tells you nothing about its other four.

An unlearned variety is named for its species alone, as Unknown Fat Mushroom, and its properties read as question marks. It can still be picked up, carried, traded, cooked and brewed.

Eating a mushroom names its variety and reveals what it does, for that species alone. Brewing, cooking or selling one teaches nothing. What a character learns stays learned for the rest of that character's life.

A character with the Forager perk knows every variety of every species on sight and never needs to risk a bite.

Every world deals the varieties afresh. A legend learned in one world is worth nothing in the next.

A mushroom carries its virtue into a brew, so a restoring variety strengthens a broth and a harmful one turns it bitter. An unknown mushroom in the pot is as much of a gamble as an unknown mushroom in the hand.

Mushrooms are foraged in damp and underground places, and a room under a Fungal Bloom can be harvested for them. A species that grows near a claim is worth learning early, since the same varieties will keep appearing for as long as that world lasts.

A Small metal pot is forged from Metal scrap and Metal Fittings at a forge with a hammer. It is carried like any container and can be set down and collected again.

Wherever an Empty Bottle can be filled, an empty pot can be filled too. A carried Water Bottle or Dirty Water Bottle can also be poured into an empty pot, keeping the bottle. Water from swamps, seepage, and ice fills the pot with murky water.

Set the filled pot down and drop ingredients onto it. Herbs, roots, mushrooms, food, and salt can be brewed. Anything else, such as metal, wood, bone, glass, or cloth, burns in the pot, ruins the brew, and damages the pot.

Drop a filled pot onto a Burning Campfire or a Burning Stone furnace to hang it over the flames. A fire holds one pot. Each turn over the fire strengthens the brew from weak through thin, mild, and strong to potent. Take the pot back through the fire's menu. A pot over a fire that goes out stays there and resumes brewing when the fire is relit.

After six turns a brew is stewed. It weakens, tastes bitter, and blackens the pot with soot. Left longer, the heat cracks the pot until it breaks and is lost in the fire. Plain water left boiling eventually boils away.

Murky water boiled for two turns is safe to drink. A brew made with murky water and taken off the fire sooner keeps a taint that costs Health.

Drink a brew or water straight from the pot, or pour it into an Empty Bottle to carry it. A brew drunk within three turns of leaving the fire is still hot and also warms you. Pouring out a pot returns any ingredients that have not yet been brewed. Each costs 1 Action Point.

A brew restores Health, Stamina, Mana, thirst, hunger, Comfort, or warmth, or grants a benefit lasting several turns such as regeneration, a quiet step, quick feet, a steady hand, or a ward against an element. Some brews sicken or poison. Brews are weaker than alchemy potions, and no brew permanently changes a character.

An ingredient's main virtue follows what it does when eaten, so a healing herb usually heals. Its second virtue is hidden and differs from world to world. Some pairs of ingredients strengthen the whole brew, and some clash and turn it sour. Salt sharpens a brew but leaves you thirstier. The same ingredients always make the same brew in the same world, in any order.

A brew smells of every ingredient steeped in it, more strongly as it grows stronger, and a pot over the fire fills the room with the scent. Pleasant herbs make a pleasant smell and add to Comfort nearby. A sickly sweet or sour smell warns of a poisonous or queasy brew, and a stewed or burnt pot reeks. The smell fades once the pot leaves the fire, and a bottled brew keeps only a trace of it.

A brew is named for its strength, its main ingredients, and its kind. Leaves make tea, roots make a decoction or extract, mushrooms make broth, salt makes brine, fruit makes an infusion, and a mixture makes a brew.

When no particular wound is chosen, medicine treats the worst injury it can help.

Each persistent wound has its own bleeding and recovery. One bandage stabilizes one suitable wound rather than clearing every Bleeding condition at once.

The body rules can recognize individual replacement limbs, but the current recipe catalogue does not contain prosthetic arms or legs.

Made from a Stick and a Pleasant Dream. While equipped it marks the exit leading towards the nearest room that offers water: drinking, drawing water into a bottle, or filling a bucket.

Made from a Stick and a Beautiful Dream. While equipped it marks the exit leading towards the nearest enchanted or otherwise special card, including one sealed inside a container.

The marked exit burns violet instead of its usual gold. When both rods point the same way, the divining colour shows.

Distance is counted through the rooms of the map, not in a straight line, so a rod may point down a passage you have never walked. A locked exit can be marked, since a locked door is still the way there. The rod never reaches past solid rock, and the room you are standing in is never the answer.

Each rod occupies a hand and can be swung, poorly. It wears like any other weapon, and a rod that has snapped still hangs from the hand but gives no answer.

Both rods can be held together, one in each hand, and each answers on its own. A single exit may carry both answers.