Resources, Items, and Crafting
This page owns the distinction between settlement-side resources, actor-held items, and the crafting layer that transforms one into the other.
Core Distinctions
- Resources are settlement-facing or world-facing quantities such as grain, timber, stone, ore, fuel, or warding materials.
- Items are held objects such as tools, weapons, armor, supplies, relics, or crafted goods.
- Crafting is the transformation layer that consumes available inputs and produces useful outputs.
- Labels such as Gold, Food, Wood, Metal, and Stone are resource-stockpile or UI labels. They are not the primary settlement channel canon.
Design Rules
- Keep the resource layer readable at strategic scale.
- Keep item identity meaningful for the MC and other named characters.
- Let crafting bridge the two layers instead of collapsing them into one generic inventory bucket.
- Tools, facilities, sites, and skills should influence what can be crafted and how efficiently it can be done.
Current Direction
- Early acts care about fuel, food, shelter inputs, basic tools, and survival gear.
- Settlement acts introduce processing chains, workshops, storage, and larger throughput questions.
- Later acts expand into rarer materials, military supply, ritual support, and realm-scale logistics.