Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-26863727-20151222034851

This idea has been stewing in my brain until my hermitage finally caved.

I suggest the implementation of a new system for improving equipment without enchanting tables or some other magic brouhaha. It would require the following, in this order.

1. A forge: the existing "forges", are not forges but smelters. They would be renamed as such. To start, you must craft a forge of the faction whose items you wish to upgrade. The recipe is that faction's stone in a leggings formation, with a new item called a burner closing the circle. This is crafted with smooth stone filling the bottom row with coal (not charcoal) filling the middle row. Dunland, Gundabad, and the Shire lack forges.

2. Oil: created by surrounding a bucket with animal fat, obtained by killing any animal, in any crafting table, giving you a  bucket of fat and then cooking that in a furnace, this would give you a bucket of oil (no idea whether or not this is realistic XD). You will need one to 10 of these depending on the weapon or piece of equipment.

3. Patience for mining.

4. A vat: made on any table out of copper ingots in a upside down leggings configuration. Simply right click on it with a bucket of oil and it will fill. To create larger vats place regular vats on top of each other. A small vat(daggers, spears, pikes and helmets) is filled with one bucket of oil, a medium vat(swords, axes, picks, battleaxes, warhammers) is five buckets, and a large one(armor other than helmets) is ten.

5. Smithing tool: purchased from a blacksmith or crafted with iron and sticks like so (I= iron, S= stick, X= nothing)

I X I

X I X

S X S

5. One item of your choice, the corresponding faction's forge, and the vat you need.

6. First, place the item and the smithing tool in a crafting table of any type. This takes away one durability on the tool and gives you a disassembled [weapon]. You put this in the forge with some sort of fuel source. With armor you skip this step.

7. After the weapon has "cooked", you get a heated {disassembled}  [item]. Right click the vat with this and you will get a "cooled" version of the disassembled item. Now, you can reassemble the item by placing it back in the crafting table with the tool, but you will find it has become a "brittle" variant of the item, and the durability is worse than gold. This is because the rapid cooling has weakened the metal. Drastically.

8. In order to fix this and temper the weapon, you must take the cooled pieces and put them in another slot pair in the forge with the appropriate ingot. This will produce the level one tempering of that item after the process is complete. The first level adds one damage and increases durability by five hundred. Each consecutive improvement alternatively adds 0.5 damage or 50 durability. Each level adds a prefix to the item's name, but you may name it instead if you so choose. The prefixes are as follows, from weakest to strongest, with the upgrade value. Upgrade #2 requires five ingots, #3 needs ten, and so on.

Fine(1 damage/protection and 500 durability)

Superior(1.5 damage/protection, 550 durability)

Exquisite(2 damage/protection, 600 durability)

Flawless(2.5 damage/protection, 650 durability)

Masterwork(3 damage/protection, 700 durability)

Legendary(3.5 damage/protection, 700 durability)

Upgrade nuances

Mithril cannot be upgraded.

In order to reach Legendary, the forge must be placed between two Mithril ingots on a workbench, giving a Mithril variant of that forge.

Making an item legendary gives an achievement called "A smith to rival Telchar..."

If armor reaches one armor bar below Mithril it does not gain additional protection after that.

NPCs can sometimes spawn with upgraded weapons that have random names if dropped.

I am willing to take suggestions for improvement on the suggestion as long as the message doesn't also contain you moaning about how this would be OP for some reason. 