If there were a Trader spell that created a little crafting-related pet, what sort of menial tasks would you want to give it?

GM Grejuva

I think the above post hits all the highlights - storage, repair, purchasing (especially for crafting outside societies - oops, out of glue, better send my imp back to town for it.).

Pipe-dream ability is to send it off gathering, small volumes/quantities of precious material and below only. But very occasionally it comes racing back, tail wagging, with a scrap of kertig or goldwood. Set it to prep ingredients for alchemy.

It would be nice if you could give it a deed to redeem.

---

“I’m sorry that your mystical, godlike powers do not instantly work as you would like them to.”

A pet light source for a pyramid or all pyramids in the room would be amazing.

Documentation is a love letter you write to your future self.

> If there were a Trader spell that created a little crafting-related pet, what sort of menial tasks would you want to give it?

It's hard to give good requests as I don't know what kind of pet it'll be, but I love the idea. Ideas and goals and potential justifications below.


Crafting Consumables and tools - Goal: insure you always have low-grade consumables to craft any time, anywhere, and manage item count. Swiss army knife/ Summon Weapon of tools.
- Your pet provides base consumables. Polish, oil, brushes and other consumables. Assuming this is an extra planar pet of some kind which can do things that don't make sense in the normal world of physics. Messaging: Get pet = You grab your pet, which folds in on itself to become a miniature version within your <empty hand>. Picking it up with a full hand will cause it to do a fluff move. Folds into a single point before expanding outwards again or something. Turn pet to <tool> = you push and pull your pet until it takes on the form of a <tool>. You can keep turning it as many times as you want. It's a medium quality tool, max store bought. If it's a consumable (meta spell required?) then there's a line of about it defying physics or otherwise the tools you created are magically unaffected. If left alone for 120 seconds, it'll revert to its natural form. There could even be metaspells or even technique slots to improve the quality of the tools themselves.

Free assembly - Goal: Reduce item count/weight/crafting time.
- You can stock it up with materials that would normally be used for assembly. Messaging: You hand your unfinished blade to <pet>. In a dervish of quick maneuvers, it assembles the blade and hilt before handing it back to you. You can see that there are [x hilts remaining] in the pack on your <pet>'s back. --- <give pet with a purchased assembly material> You carefully tuck a hilt into the pack on your <pet>'s back. It looks mildly annoyed at being shuffled around.

Enlightenment buff - Goal: reduce crafting RT to allow more reasonable training of all/most crafts.
- Your pet gives you a passive buff that reduces crafting RT by 10-20% at all times. This lets traders train more crafts.

Free assembly - Goal: reduce item count/weight/ease crafting
- It will fetch the item you need to finish your product. If it's a small animal, then maybe it steals it.

Material Gatherer - Goal: Easing the cost of work-order crafting.
- Have it gather raw, not rare, materials based on my current outdoorsmanship and scholarship ability for a task. Something like, "You instruct your <pet> on the finer points of mining and ask it to find a few nuggets for you". <pause 20 seconds>. Quantity and volume depends on how well you've instructed it. If these pets are the zenzics then the trader can ask them for ores and they'll generate a nugget. Or we can give them a nugget or ingot and they'll give us back two volumes with a slight quality drop (% depends on power of the pet/trader's negotiation).

Status Symbol - Goal: Reduce prestige decay, improve money from work-orders, and speed work-order processing (train more crafts)
- Having the pet out is a status symbol. It slows or stops your prestige loss.
- Having the pet out would impress the task-master who can give you special work-orders for a trader of your standing (1 item minimum rather than 2, pays like you turned in 5, bonus trading xp, timer).

Improve material quality - Goal: Make it easier to do hard work orders.
- The pet basically "purifies" the reagent somehow. Maybe give it a long timer, but giving it a crafting material can either increase the quality, or turn the material into one with a higher monetary value (ie: create gold from iron, or haralun from platinum).

Reduce wait times - Goal: Pet removes the time it takes to do some time-based tasks
- Ex: Give it a pyramid and it will dry them immediately.
- Give it a skin, and it will dry it immediately.

Truffle Pig, or equivalent - Goal: Higher chance at high-quality goods.
- Command your pet to force a gathering room to respawn. It'll get tired if it spawns a rare one. Moderately long CD to prevent market flooding.

Pet does prep work - Goal: Trader no longer has to do work to prepare reagents.
- Converts raw herbs to dried herbs
- Converts raw pelts and bones to usable parts.
- Converts threads to cloth.

Pet reclaims materials - Goal: Combine cloth, but the rest is a perk.
- Give a pet two thin cloth and it'll turn it into a regular cloth. Repeat all the way up to heavy.
- Same for thread.
- You can give them a heavy cloth and they'll create two thick cloth, and so on down to thin.


And please make these alterable like shadow servants.

Others have given these ideas already for the most part; I just wanted to say which would be most important to me. Caveat: I am more of a gatherer than a crafter at this moment (though I hope to change that eventually), so there may be some more crafting-focused ideas that will work well too.

- Redeem deeds. I often find myself in my shop wanting to redeem a deed for a piece of large armor, and I have to run off to do it. Making shop back rooms available for deed reclaiming would solve this problem too, but doing so with the pet would allow crafting in more remote regions.
- Resupply basic materials. When out gathering wood or ore, it's easy to run out of deeds quickly. I'd love to be able to get some directly from the pet, don't mind if I have to pay. Deeds, oil, and brushes are the main ones for me but I'm sure there are others. If it can't be an infinite source, it would still help if it could just store giant stacks of those things.
- Hold tools. Traders are not always the strongest of people, and it would be a huge help just to be able to have storage space for some tools. 30 slots would be more than enough.
- Store deeded materials. If I could fill it up with deeded material when gathering, I could hold more material before returning home!
- Process raw materials. If I could process the raw materials during gathering, I could gather more right away!
- Reduce RT. Of course this would be helpful for any task.
- Prestige Bonus. Allows us to earn more prestige or keep from decaying.
- Truffle finding. It would be neat if, when out gathering, I'd get a few more of the "rare single drop" type event. For example, when mining any metal, there's currently a very small chance that I'll get a tiny piece of some other, rare metal. Maybe with the pet that chance is doubled.

Repairing tools is something I can do myself, but I suppose if the pet could do it I would save the crafting slots. I could also see purifying or gathering basic materials as good for crafting, as well as reducing drying times.

You might also consider letting us "align" the pet toward our particular craft (or gathering), giving it features useful for that craft.

Also, please allow us a refined option for the pet. Well, ideally options for all styles, but my style is more refined so I am requesting for that reason. :)


- Navesi

Thanks all. Lots of interesting ideas to explore.

>>Also, please allow us a refined option for the pet.

Could you explain this one?

GM Grejuva

> I think she means how it looks? That was my take-away.

Mine too, and +1 for demeanors, if possible. I can work around it if this would mean no pet, because I LOVE this idea, but it's a nice to have.

Visually style-wise a pet along the lines of Bit from the original Tron movie would be cool.

Documentation is a love letter you write to your future self.