What Should Craftworks Make Next?

When I first wrote about Craftworks planning on November 1, the idea was to help players understand which crafts could support their quests, what ingredients they needed, and where those ingredients might compete.

As I worked through the design, I kept coming back to a question that information alone couldn't answer: what should I actually put in my Craftworks slots?

The Quest Tracker could tell me I needed more Salt. It could tell me what goes into Salt, too. But that didn't necessarily mean Salt was the best recipe to automate. Sometimes, using a slot for the Hammers that Salt consumes could save more manual work.

That became the direction for the Craftworks Planner planned for v0.6.0.

Using your quest queue, inventory, capacity, player stats, and available slots, the planner compares possible Craftworks setups, recommends a configuration, and explains what you'll still need to craft manually.

Getting there meant working through a few questions that weren't obvious from the original idea.

A shortage alone doesn't tell you what to automate

One of the first design decisions was figuring out what makes a recipe worth automating.

It might seem reasonable to recommend whichever items have the largest shortages. But the number of items you're missing doesn't necessarily reflect how much work they'll take to craft.

Take a plan that needs 1,000 Salt and 1,000 Gazebos. Both recipes use Hammers.

If I can make their 2,000 Hammers in one manual batch, leaving Hammer manual might make sense. But if those Hammers require repeated crafting and inventory refills, automating them becomes more useful.

That distinction shaped how the planner compares recommendations.

Rather than ranking recipes by shortage alone, it estimates the manual crafting work left by different combinations. It also considers which requirements are currently blocking your quest progress.

This matters because recipes don't always work independently. A Hammer slot might support several other crafts, while another recipe might be more useful to automate directly.

The question became less about which individual recipe looks most important and more about which combination leaves the least work for the player.

Planning around inventory limits

Another challenge was deciding how inventory capacity should affect the calculation.

The Quest Tracker already calculates what you'll need across your quest queue. But Craftworks planning asks a slightly different question: how much can you reasonably prepare right now?

For example, if I have 500 Salt and an inventory capacity of 3,000, I can prepare another 2,500 Salt before needing to free up space, assuming my quests require that much.

During development, we explored whether the planner could reuse the existing quest calculations and simply limit the results afterward.

Testing revealed a problem with that approach.

Expanding the full Salt shortage before applying the inventory limit could account for ingredients that should still be available for later quest requirements.

In one test, expanding the full requirement consumed all 3,000 available Hammers in the calculation. Applying the preparation limit beforehand left 500 Hammers available for a later requirement.

Simply trimming the final result wouldn't recover those ingredients.

That led to an important design decision: keep the existing Quest Tracker calculations intact and introduce a separate preparation calculation that applies inventory limits before expanding crafting dependencies.

The planner can now distinguish between your longer-term quest needs and the quantities you can prepare within your current inventory limits.

It also accounts for shared inventory and ingredients that may need replenishment. Intermediate ingredients can be produced in multiple batches, allowing the planner to consider crafting requirements beyond what you can hold at once.

Comparing Craftworks setups

Once the planner could estimate crafting requirements, the next question was how to choose between possible setups.

Looking at recipes individually wasn't enough. Some recipes work better together, particularly when one produces an ingredient consumed by another.

The planner therefore evaluates combinations of recipes within your available slots, including setups that leave some slots unused.

We also needed to decide how those combinations should be compared.

Both planning modes prioritize current quest requirements and estimated manual crafting effort. When those comparisons tie, they differ in what they favor next:

• Queue Order: Favors recipes supporting earlier quest requirements.
• Combined Shortfall: Favors recipes supporting more distinct quest requirements across your preparation window.

This gives players two ways to prioritize their crafting without changing how the Quest Tracker allocates inventory across quests.

There was also a practical limit to consider: the number of possible combinations grows as more recipes become candidates.

For smaller searches, the planner can evaluate every combination. For larger ones, it uses a limited search to keep the calculation manageable.

That introduces a trade-off. A limited search may find a useful setup without necessarily finding the best possible one.

Rather than hide that uncertainty, the planner warns when a better configuration might exist.

Explaining the recommendation

A recommendation isn't particularly helpful if you can't understand why it was chosen.

I didn't want the planner to simply return a list of recipes and leave players to figure out how they fit together.

Each recommended slot therefore shows its preparation target and the quests it supports.

The planner also explains remaining manual crafts, materials that still need to be acquired, and blockers or missing information that could affect the result.

Another consideration was the order of the recommended recipes.

If one recipe produces an ingredient used by another, it makes sense to show the producer first. The planner accounts for those dependencies, including cases where some intermediate crafting remains manual.

We also had to consider what happens when Craftworks consumes ingredients that are needed directly for a quest hand-in.

The planner flags these potential conflicts rather than assuming every available ingredient is safe to consume.

These explanations are important because the recommendation is still a planning estimate. It doesn't know exactly how you'll play, when you'll gather materials, or when you'll collect your crafted items.

The player still makes the final decision. The planner's job is to make that decision easier to understand.

Generate, review, and refresh

Another design choice was deciding when recommendations should change.

The Quest Tracker's information can change whenever you update your inventory, complete quests, or adjust your settings.

Automatically recalculating the Craftworks setup after every change might sound convenient, but it could also replace a plan you're still following.

Instead, we chose to make recommendations something you generate when you want them.

The planner uses your tracker information at that moment and saves the latest successfully generated result.

That result remains available after reloading, including its original generation time, selected mode, slot count, and explanations.

Changing your tracker information or settings doesn't automatically replace the saved recommendation. Mode and slot-count mismatches are flagged, and you can use Refresh to generate a new plan using your current inputs.

You can also generate a recommendation while your inventory is outdated, although the tracker will continue showing its existing warning.

This keeps the recommendation under your control rather than treating every tracker update as a reason to change your Craftworks setup.

Where the build stands

The Craftworks Planner is nearing its planned release in v0.6.0, with a few finishing touches and checks still remaining.

What started as an idea for bringing quest and crafting information together has developed into a system for comparing possible Craftworks setups.

Some of the more important decisions came from working through how recipes share ingredients, how inventory limits affect preparation, and how to compare different configurations without making the recommendations unnecessarily complicated.

For now, the feature remains focused on quest preparation.

It won't configure Craftworks in-game or optimize for mastery, profit, or production time. Those are different goals, and I don't want to expand the planner beyond what I can confidently deliver in this update.

The goal is still to help answer three questions:

What should I automate, which producers should come first, and what work remains mine?

I'm looking forward to getting this into players' hands and seeing how useful these recommendations are in actual gameplay.