FAILED CRAFTS
Crafting attempts that can fail — consuming materials for nothing, producing an inferior item, or even backfiring — usually with failure odds tied to skill, recipe difficulty, or missing tools.
- SOLO-DEV COST LOW
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN MMO · RPG · SURVIVAL · SANDBOX
Classic MMOs like Ultima Online and early Final Fantasy XIV made failure central to crafting professions (XIV even built a minigame where quality and success are played for), survival games gate advanced recipes behind stations to soft-implement failure, and roguelikes make unidentified crafting a gamble. Designers add failure to give crafting a skill curve and an economy: if every attempt succeeds, crafting is a vending machine, but with failure odds, materials become stakes, skill levels mean something, and master crafters earn real market value in player economies. Failure also prices ambition — attempting recipes above your level is a calculated risk. Key decisions: what failure costs (all materials, some, or just time — full loss is brutal with rare inputs), whether failure grants skill experience (softening the sting into progress), and whether players can spend resources to insure attempts. Pitfall: failure as pure RNG taxation — when a max-skill crafter still loses rare materials to a dice roll they cannot influence, failure stops teaching and starts insulting; the odds need player-facing levers.
SEEN IN
- FINAL FANTASY XIV
- ULTIMA ONLINE
- KENSHI