The Soul Forge: a single-level branch off Gehennom that contains a smith. The smith will take two items of the same type and forge them together into one; in technical terms this destroys one of them and imbues the other with whatever object properties the destroyed one had. They cannot both be artifacts, and if one is an artifact, it will not be the one destroyed, so the properties from the other one will be transferred to the artifact.

The smith’s price is based on how many object properties the resulting item will have, increased if it will be an artifact. In dNetHack, the smith would require payment in soul coins, but in variants without those, they may just ask for gold or some other valuable. If paid in soul coins, the requested type of coin would be random but deterministic based on the object IDs of the two items.

New role, the Artificer:

• Artificers can innately see charges on things and use wands at a higher skill level than everyone else.
• Starts with an inventory of consumables comparable to vanilla wizards’, a scroll of charging, offensive wands, a magic marker, and random tools.
• Starts with all armors (magic and nonmagic) identified and all tools identified.
• Restricted in nearly all weapon skills like a monk, or can only reach Basic in a few ones like knife.
• Quest involves lots of golems.
• Quest artifact grants double damage with tools and gives blessed charging when invoked.
• Gnome is a playable race.
• Has a special tool, an artificer’s knife, which they can use for ring crafting. This works by removing the gem from the ring and replacing it with another gem. Not specified how this works for non-gem rings or rings containing things like black onyx or pearl which aren’t obtainable gems; possibly these are just uncraftable. Crafting a ring like this may destroy it depending on the beatitude of the knife, 75%/90%/99% for B/U/C for non-Artificers, 20%/50%/80% for Artificers.

Also see dtsund’s proposed Tinker role.

With respect to other proposals about crafting (involving a craftsmen’s guild or even scattered craftsmen), the process of traveling back and forth to and from it might become busywork. So if players could craft things on their own, that might be better.

• Would probably need properly flavored terrain for workstations, like a furnace or smelter, for certain crafts, otherwise flavor is too weird. (But this creates the problem of having to travel back and forth to it again.)
• Fixed, non-simple recipes (e.g. existing scroll crafting is a simple recipe) are a heavy spoiler tax and should be avoided.
• This could be simple for certain types of items, as in requiring some silver or gold and a diamond to craft a diamond ring, but doesn’t explain where any magical effects come from, and also might weirdly tie crafting recipes to randomized appearances which have previously been meaningless.
• Probably requires a few more “base” crafting materials, some source of leather, some source of wood, etc.
  • Corpses could decay into bones, which disappear themselves with a longer timeout, but in the meantime can be used to craft bone stuff.
• One of the craftable items should be saddles, because they’re very hard to find for non-Knight characters who want to ride.
• Tallow candles should be relatively easy to make, because they can be made out of fat from slain animals.

Add a Craftsmen’s Guild to the game, as a method of advanced crafting (unlike the player’s simplified crafting such as alchemy crafting potions into other potions, or combining a blank scroll with a magic marker to make magic scrolls). The guild either has its own dedicated special level, or occupies part of a preexisting special level.

• The guild is populated with master craftsmen who work on the principle of “valuable junk items + very large sums of gold = desirable items”. They can also do some things available to the player, like increasing weapon enchantment, without needing the specific consumables needed for the player to do it.
• Would serve as a replacement or stand-in for the black market. Resolves some of the problems with balancing black market shopkeepers: if you kill the black market staff, you can have every item in the market, so black market staff must be insanely powerful. If you kill a master craftsman, however, you don’t get anything of value. Therefore, master craftsmen don’t have to be insanely powerful, or even good fighters.
• Not as good as wishes; there are some things they cannot make for you, like magic lamps, and many magical tools. You cannot specify enchantment or blessing either. For items for which enchantment doesn’t matter, the material cost will be higher.
• The interface works by #chatting to them. They will ask you what you want to create, and you enter it (using the wish parser logic to extract the proper object class), and then they will tell you the items and gold they will need for it. These could either be randomized or use certain fixed ingredients with some randomization or use completely fixed recipes; if randomized it will be deterministic for that item for that craftsman in that game. You are then prompted to select the items from your inventory.
• For gold and other balance reasons, this would probably work better the farther it is into the game; maybe it could even be found deep into Gehennom. Maybe you even have to liberate it from a demon lord.
• Craftsmen might include:
  • Metalworkers (see below)
  • Wandmakers (produce wands)
  • Scribes (produce scrolls and spellbooks)
  • Alchemists (produce potions)
  • Toolsmiths (produce mundane and some magical tools)
  • Jewelers (produce rings and amulets)
  • Sculptor (produce statues and figurines)
  • Leatherworkers (produce leather items and saddles)
  • Chefs (produce food)
  • Arcanologists (transfer charges/enchantments from one item into another, consumes only gold and not items)

Metalworker notes

Metalworkers are probably the most important sort of craftsman for many characters. There could be multiple types, each specializing in one type of metal, or just one type that does everything.

• Silvering items (or gilding, or copper-coating) should require you to use up junk silver items equal to some amount of weight proportional to the weight of the new item. The zorkmid cost of silvering should be very high.
• A forge room type (probably containing lava and maybe some junk items like iron chains) could be added which has one or more smiths in it (silversmiths, goldsmiths, blacksmiths).
  • Goldsmiths seem rather pointless right now, since there is only one gold item (the ring). They would be more useful if gold equipment existed and conferred some benefit.
  • Blacksmiths don’t have much to do as far as turning items into iron goes, but they could produce iron weapons of a type the player wants, or repair and improve iron weapons and armor (increasing its enchantment).

Consolidate Fire and Frost Brand (or allow them to be combined in-game) into a new artifact named something like “Frostflame Brand”. This weapon deals either fire damage or cold damage alternately on every hit.

Applying a leash to a club creates an aklys.

Displacer beasts could drop their hide, which can be enchanted or otherwise crafted into a cloak of displacement.

Displacer beasts may drop a hide, which can be enchanted or otherwise crafted into a cloak of displacement. (Or else this could just work with a displacer beast corpse which could be enchanted/polymorphed/crafted, without requiring a new object for the hide).

You can apply various rings to a wand of nothing to turn it into a wand of something related to the ring (e.g. polymorph ring makes a polymorph wand, increase damage becomes striking, see invisible becomes secret door detection, etc). Or instead of the ring identity, make it so that the wand becomes the corresponding material of the ring, e.g. a steel ring will produce a gold wand.

This gives a message, “As you thread the ring onto the [foo wand] it seems to twist in on itself. You now hold a [bar wand] in your hands.”

Possibly it should also work on any cancelled wand, in addition to nothing wands, which are rare and not always identified.

You can use a forge to combine elemental wands with weapons, destroying the wand and conferring an object property of cold, fire, or shock on the weapon.

Store type “sushi restaurant”, which sells sea monster corpses, kelp fronds, various sushi rolls, and sushi mats, tools which allow you to combine kelp and sea monster corpses into higher-nutrition sushi rolls. Sushi rolls include kraken sushi, eel wrap, and shark tempura.