Dev Update #2 – Equipment and Crafting

Two milestones landed in Ponor, and they belong together. Equipment decides what the shaft gives you: what drops, how rare it is and who can wear it. Crafting decides what you make of it afterwards. Both are built and playable now, and below I take one pair of boots through all of it.

What changed in Ponor's equipment?

The equipment now has its full rules, in the spirit of Diablo II:

• The whole rarity ladder. Normal, Magic, Rare and Unique, plus Superior: a Normal item that rolled 5 to 15 percent more damage or armor. One in ten plain drops comes out Superior.
• Rares with three to six lines at any depth: a six-line Rare can turn up on floor 1.
• Armor in three weights. Light wool and leather adds a little Mana, mail asks Strength and Dexterity, and plates ask the most Strength. Six new pieces joined, among them the Mač, a one-handed sword.
• Socket caps by type and depth. About a third of Normal, Superior and Magic items drop with sockets, up to six on a two-handed weapon past item level 40. What goes into them comes later; for now, a socketed white item is a base worth keeping.

Who can wear what?

Every item now asks for a level, about three quarters of the depth where it starts to drop, and Strength and Dexterity requirements rise with each tier. Anything you cannot use yet is washed red in every grid, so you know before you buy or drag it.

If you fall short later, say by taking off the ring that gave you the Strength, the item stays on, turns red and does nothing until you meet the requirement again.

How do I read an item?

Hover an item in your bag and its tooltip stands beside whatever you are wearing in that slot. Hold Ctrl for Details, and every rolled line adds its range and its tier as a row of diamonds, so you can tell a lucky roll from a poor one at a glance.

Why do resistances drop deeper down?

Depth is the only difficulty setting in Ponor, so Diablo II's Nightmare moment happens on the way down: every twenty floors, all of your resistances drop by twenty percent. In Kamenica, the character sheet shows them as they will be on your deepest floor, so a fire ring on Tvrtko's shelf shows what it is worth below.

How does crafting work in Ponor?

The best items are found, never bought, and crafting only ever works on what you bring up. The steps always come in the same order: find, weave, refine, seal, and two people in Kamenica do the work, Kosara the wise woman and Tvrtko the smith. Every chance is on the screen before you pay. An item's luck is seeded from the item itself and the game saves after every craft, so reloading never changes a result.

My boots for this are the Vine Grip, a Rare pair of Chain Boots at item level 32. They dropped with four lines, Gold Find, Lightning Resistance, Intelligence and Life, and two empty prefixes.

Weaving: pick the line you want

At Kosara's, you choose a property and weave it onto a Magic or Rare item, into an empty slot or over a line you do not want. It never fails and nothing about it is random. A Magic item takes one woven line, a Rare two, each starting at the bottom of its lowest tier, and a small red thread marks what was woven, so anyone can tell it from what dropped. The Vine Grip got Armor and Magic Find, for 3 Thread and a little gold each.

Refining: push the numbers up

At Tvrtko's anvil, you pick a line and raise it a tier at a time. The steps below the item's ceiling are sure. The last two are not: reaching the ceiling tier is a coin flip, and pushing a line to the top of its range works one time in four.

A line keeps its place within its tier as it climbs, so a well-rolled line stays ahead all the way up. The boots' +12% Lightning Resistance was a top roll for its tier, so when the coin flip landed, it arrived at +22%, the top of the next, with nothing left to refine.

A failure leaves the line where it was and costs the item a crack. A Rare can take five, anything else three. The Gold Find was less lucky: by the time I was done, all five cracks were spent and it still sat at +32%, short of its top.

Sealing: one last gamble

Sealing is the last thing that ever happens to an item, and it costs a Thunderstone Chip. Kosara shows the table first: four times in ten the item gets better, a quarter of the time nothing changes, and otherwise it gets worse. Blessed lifts a line a tier past its ceiling, which nothing else can do. Gifted adds a line past the usual cap, Opened a socket. Withered and Unravelled take from what you built. Boots hold no sockets, so on the Vine Grip, Opened's share goes to Blessed.

Mine came out Bound: sealed as it is. Not a win, not a loss. Either way, the item carries a red knot from then on and is finished for good.

What else does Tvrtko do?

He salvages what you do not need into materials, one item at a time with his salvage tool, or a whole rarity's worth of your bag at once, though bulk salvage never takes anything you have put work into.

He also opens sockets: a white base up to its full count, a Magic item up to two, a Rare or a Unique one.

Where do crafting materials come from?

There are three, and none of them turns into another: Iron for the anvil, Thread for weaving, and the Thunderstone Chip for sealing. Iron and Thread drop on the floors, wait in chests and come out of salvage. Chips are scarce: one chest in eighty holds one, and a salvaged Unique gives one.

They go into the Pouch, the second page of your bag, picked up on touch like gold. The stash in Kamenica has a Pouch of its own, and a craft takes from both.

What comes next?

Since then I have been working on the monsters: how they hunt, and the stronger ones among them. That is the next update. After that come the guardians at the end of every tenth floor, and later the gems and Glagolitic letters that will fill all these sockets.

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