Monthly Archives: April 2021

Friday Feature! Powerups: Cornerstone of an Empire

Posted on by
Reply

In today’s Friday Feature, Demiurge once again provides insight into another important aspect of crafting – powerups! So without further ado…

—-

Powerups: Cornerstone of an Empire

Last week, I wrote about Armorsmithing on EiF.  This week I wanted to write another article to address questions, opinions, and concerns about crafting in general in SWG.  Crafting comes in many forms in this game.  More and more often, I hear people commenting on how it’s impossible to gain a foothold into it or compete with established players.  This article is intended to specifically address that misconception.

Most people who have played on EiF for any length of time know who I am.  I am primarily associated with the crafting of armor, even though I also make weapons, artisan wares, some architect items, and every now and then clothing, BE, and medical items too.  But here’s one of my biggest secrets: I make a large chunk of my credits crafting an item that a new player can make within a day or two of character creation… Powerups.

So just like with last week’s write-up, I will break down what it takes to craft them.  As you might suspect, Powerups are one of the easiest items to craft in the game.  There are no subcomponents and each craft takes a combined 10 resources: 6 minerals and 4 chemicals.

Here are the essential factors that will determine your success or failure:

  1. Your resources – This is the single most important factor in determining a Powerup’s statistics.
  2. The crafter – Are you a Master Artisan?  That’s all you need.  No need for any extra tapes.  No need to be anything other than a 10 point crafter.
  3. Your crafting tool – The stats of your crafting tool matter (again, the crafting station does not). You will want a Weapon, Droid, and General Item crafting tool.
  4. Where are you performing the craft – Crafting in a player city is always the most desirable way to make something.  As with other types of crafting, Research Centers are the best location to craft a powerup (as each individual craft will use a ton of single-point experimentation rolls).
  5. PATIENCE – I mention this one last, but it is really just as important as the resources you use.  This is because it takes a tremendous amount of patience to craft, scrap a craft that isn’t exactly what you want, and try again.  I have been known to scrap over a thousand attempts for a single one I like enough to turn into a factory schematic.

Food and Drink are irrelevant for crafting powerups, as are Skill Enhancing Attachments.  They are not needed, and even without them, you will still be able to craft server-capped powerups. Please note: while it is not important to have more than 10 experimentation points for powerup crafting, having +25s to both assembly and especially experimentation will still be beneficial in the sense of improving each experimentation roll to help with its quality… but it is not mandatory. Before I get into the discussion on how to make a powerup, I would like to share an old website that has a lot of valuable information pertaining to the crafting of powerups.  I will fill in the blanks as they apply to EiF, since the website’s data is not 100% accurate for us.  Nevertheless, Agock wrote an excellent guide for its time, and I still reference it on occasion to remind myself what stat combinations are possible.

https://www.swgemu.com/archive/scrapbookv51/data/20070205033706/index.html

What Exactly is a Powerup?

A powerup is a simple crafted item that is added to any normal weapon you might want to use (heavy Commando weapons such as a flame thrower or acid rifle and a Bounty Hunter’s Light Lightning Cannon are examples of weapons that can not be augmented with a powerup).  A powerup consists of a primary stat modification, and any number of smaller, secondary stat modifications (anywhere from zero to five, depending on the type of powerup crafted).  The primary stat modification is the major upgrade.  For purposes of example, please see the picture below:

This is a basic, 4-stat melee powerup.  The primary modification is the first stat listed (Attack Speed).  The other stats listed below are secondary modifications.  EiF has modified the “uses left” stat for our server.  On any other server I’ve seen (including live), powerups each have 100 uses.  Here, they last 10 times as long (1000 uses).  This is a major quality of life improvement for players because, for some end-game content (or PvP), it would be extremely easy to blow through those 100 uses and have to worry about placing another PuP (short for Powerup) on your weapon, mid-battle.  As someone who has crafted them for years, I will also tell you that they still sell daily.. so it is not a market killer (as you simply sell them for more than elsewhere).

Continue reading →

EiF Armor Crafting 101

Posted on by
Reply

In today’s feature, we bring you a very in-depth write-up on armorsmithing by the illustrious armor crafter Demiurge. In this article, Demi outlines what it takes to be a successful armorsmith on Empire in Flames as well as give insight into the changed systems you’ll find, some best practices, and tools of the trade to help any aspiring crafters become the best they can be and in his words, “knock him off of his pedestal”. Thank you, Demiurge!

——

EiF Armor Crafting 101

Artwork courtesy of AgentOrangeJuice

Introduction

The purpose of this guide is to explain how armor crafting works on EiF and demonstrate how it is different from any other server you might have played on.  I intend to explain every important aspect and consideration in order to teach you how to craft armor with the exact same stats that I am able to currently make.  I have been making armor continuously on our server for the last three years.  In that time, due to the among of sheer work I’ve put into it, I believe I have become the dominant armor crafter here.  I hope to teach and inspire you to be able to match what I am capable of, and ultimately to surpass me.

For those of you who have experience crafting armor on any other SWG server, a good bit of this will be familiar or previously understood the content.  But what makes armor different on EiF is the usage of armor cores.  The purpose of an armor core is to allow all types of armor to be of similar or equal stats.  A core consists of up to three armor segments, with each segment containing zero to nine armor layers.  Armor on EiF requires one to five armor cores, depending on the armor type.  This means that, unlike other servers where specific segment types are required for its corresponding armor type (composite or advanced composite segments to go into any piece of composite), the same armor core can be used in ANY armor type.  This modification to the system allows basically all armor types to be craftable within a very tight range of stats between one another (I will explain further below) and opens the door to a wide array of looks, styles, and viable options.  You won’t just see people running around in RIS or Composite.

Before I break down layers, segments, and cores further, it is important for you to understand how a piece of armor gets its stats.  On EIF, 95% of the stats provided to a final, crafted piece of armor comes from the armor core itself.  The remaining 5% are derived from the final assembly resources that are specific to a type of armor.  For example, crafting a piece of RIS would require (among other things), a specific resource like Platinite Copper, while a piece of Bone armor would require a generic resource such as “metal”.  This fact alone allows Bone armor to have a much wider array of possible resources to satisfy that requirement.  This is critical because all resources have min and max possible stats in several key areas that are very important to armor.  Plantinite has a less advantageous range of stats than many other types of metal, such as steel, iron, or even other types of copper.  This deviation in final assembly resource requirements is what allows a range of 1-5% variance between what you might see on the final crafted product (speaking specifically on the final types of damage resistances).  The maximum craftable resist per damage type is a theoretical 55%.  If perfectly sliced by a Smuggler, this value can reach 60%.

Halyn, and sometimes in conjunction with various staff members, has made numerous design decisions that set EiF apart from how things are done elsewhere.  In an attempt to completely eliminate spawn camping, the team has removed the ability to use looted components from various mobs as augments to crafted armor pieces.  Items like Janta Hides, Rancor Hides, etc, are not used in armor crafting here.  Therefore, the essential factors that determine your final product are:

  1. Your resources – This is the single most important factor in determining armor’s final quality.
  2. The crafter – Are you a 12 point smith, fully taped for assembly and experimentation?
  3. Your crafting tool – The stats of your crafting tool matter (while the stats on the crafting station itself does not).  The maximum stat of a crafting tool is a 15.0
  4. Food/Drink – Foods such as Pyollian Cake will offer a decent assembly bonus to your crafting roll, helping your chances of crafting an amazing assembly.  Drinks such as Bespin Port will do the exact same thing for each of your experimentation rolls.  Experimentation is the more desired buff of the two (though both can be utilized at the same time).
  5. Where you perform the craft – Crafting in a player city is always the most desirable way to make something.  A level 5 player city gains the ability to set a “city bonus”.  Two of these (Manufacturing Center = Assembly bonus, and Research Center = Experimentation bonus) grants bonuses to every craft that occurs within its city limits.

These are the five factors to keep in mind when you craft something.  Other factors, such as a crafter’s current battle fatigue or wounds do not factor into the crafting equation!  With this in mind, let’s look at the single most important factor in your crafting process: the resources used.

Continue reading →

An Accounting

Posted on by
Reply

“Awaken,” the voices whispered together.

Rix started, shaking his head as his office came back into focus. The Feeorin shook his head again, trying to clear the cobwebs away.

Accounting was dull, by most standards, but it seldom put him to sleep.

“What a strange dream,” he murmured aloud. “I need caf if I’m going to finish these projections.”

He rose, a bit unsteadily, and walked out of his cramped, tiny office and headed toward the break room on the thirty-eighth floor of the Corellian Engineering Corps’s Tower Two skyscraper. The walk was only twenty-two meters, took him past his boss’s office, and offered a spectacular view of Coronet at night.

Lights blazed across the city, shining in the dark of night. Rix blinked as he slowly walked down the hall, the normally enjoyable view somehow putting him on edge. “What was that dream?” he asked aloud.

“You had it, too, didn’t you?” another voice rasped in the darkness. Rix stopped abruptly, squinting into the darkness as the voice resolved itself into form: his boss, Nrohk, eighty-four kilograms of scaly Trandoshan.

“Boss?”

“You had the dream. The voices. Calling.”

Rix frowned. Something was wrong in Nrohk’s voice. “What dream?”

“Don’t lie to me, Rix. I can feel it. You had the dream.” The Trandoshan lumbered forward, his very movements predatory. “You’re a rival.”

“I don’t…” was all Rix could get out before the Trandoshan leaped.

Reflexes slowed by sleep, the Feeorin couldn’t slip out of the way before his boss hit him, sending him flying backward into thin cubicle walls. The duraplast crunched and shattered, slowing Rix and sending him sprawling to the office floor.

“I will brook no competition, Rix,” Nrohk growled. “Whatever this power is, it’ll be mine.”

“You’re welcome to it,” Rix muttered as he fumbled for just a moment before he swept the small holdout blaster up. “I’ve got no interest in it. Why the hell do you think I became an accountant?” He squeezed the trigger.

The blaster flared, illuminating the walls bloodred. Nrohk stumbled backward, his scales smoking.

For a moment, Rix thought it was over.

Nrohk began to laugh, somewhere between a wheeze, a hiss, and a chuckle, with all the warmth of deep space. “I can feel the power now. You think your little toy will do you any good?” The Trandoshan rushed forward.

Rix fired again, but Nrohk didn’t even slow. Another shot, and the grip of the blaster pulsed in his hand to warn him the charge was depleted. The accountant hurled his spent weapon at the Trandoshan, aiming at his eyes.

The solid impact of hot metal hitting scaly flesh sizzled. The Trandoshan barely flinched, but it blinded him for a critical second. Rix dropped to the floor and swept his leg, tangling the Trandoshan and sending him sprawling.

“Guess not,” Rix panted, rage rising in his chest as the Trandoshan rolled over and began to charge at him on all fours. The Feeorin braced and met him in a tangle of flesh and scales, punching, biting, scratching, gouging.

Nrohk was getting stronger.

Rix brought a knee up into the Dosh’s jaw. Nrohk stumbled backward for a moment, shaking his head. The accountant backed up, could feel the transparisteel at his back.

“Nowhere to go, rival,” the Dosh snarled.

“Agreed.” Rix braced.

Nrohk charged.

Rix met his onslaught, grabbing the Dosh by his suit, and swung him into the window with his attacker’s own momentum.

Transparisteel fractured, cracking.

The Feeorin stepped back and kicked with all his might.

His boss plunged thirty-eight floors to the streets below.

“Dammit,” Rix muttered. “So much for accounting.”

A Curiosity to Sate

Posted on by
Reply

My children.
Awaken.

The voices – if they could even be called voices – were a duality in themselves, sounding both like a raucous cacophony and tender whisper in perplexing harmony with one another. A battle raged around him and yet he heard the voices clearly above all else, a persistent tug at the corner of his mind.

Awaken. You are needed.
One has awakened who will upset the balance.

He was not one for being taken by surprise and yet the voices had done just that, and caused a distraction just long enough for his opponent to take advantage and aim a vicious slash aimed at severing his head from his body. The tip of the vibroblade ghosted along his jaw and left a thin trail of blood as he reared back just in time, his eyes flaring with annoyance as he only barely managed to deflect the rest of the strike. He countered quickly, sliding his pike down his opponent’s extended blade and pushing the back-end of it forward to knock into the man’s side.

To keep the balance…
…you must awaken.

The other man staggered and he quickly pivoted to bring the pike’s blade down onto his opponent’s exposed collar and cut deeply into flesh. He withdrew the bladed end, watching the man gurgle in surprise before kicking him away to finish choking on his own blood just as the voices sounded in his mind again.

You have heard the rumors…
…and you must find the source.

Shifting the pike into his left hand, he absently brought his right to the familiar long hilt at his waist as he turned his head as if searching for the source of the grating, yet soothing, call.

Go, seek, and gather help.
Go, conquer, and gain power.

Brow lifted with curiosity, he reached out to sweep his awareness over the ship, hoping to sense what was amiss. He could feel the low hum of the vessel’s engines and his flagship beyond, feel the vibrant energies of his crew as they moved through their prize, feel the thick cloud of death that hung like a low fog around those that they had cut down. Nothing out of the ordinary.

There are many places…
…places of strength

Places of center…
…places of pain

Seek the planet where in ancient times the sides sought wisdom…
…and now a new conflict has arisen where they seek dominance.

“Cap’n?”

His quartermaster’s voice, far more tangible than whatever was calling out to him, had broken him from yet another disjointed trance and he returned his focus to the Falleen that had managed to come up behind him

“Bridge secure,” he gruffly stated, turning cold eyes towards her. “Have the vanguard sweep the rest of the ship. Secure what we were after from the hold, and rig the engines. After that, recall the men back to the Interitus and prepare to get her underway. I want to be back in port in seven standard hours.”

“Understood,” she nodded, peering around him at the bodies laid strewn about on the bridge. “We takin’ prisoners for ransom?”

There others will gather to share knowledge…
…or subvert to your will.

“No. Kill any you come across,” he answered immediately, rolling his neck from side to side and slowly dropping his hand from his belt. “Before we jump out, turn the batteries on the prize’s engines and finish her. Should take care of anyone we miss.”

He heard her give a sound of assent before he stalked past her, no longer interested in the prize or the stash of valuables that was supposed to be in her hold. Instead, he headed straight for the hull breach so he could return to his flagship and make his own, separate preparations –

Awaken.
Awaken.

– for Kaius had a new objective, and a curiosity to satiate.

Summoned

Posted on by
Reply

A sigh escaped her lips as she settled into her meditative posture. As the heat from the sand began to radiate through her body, the morning’s tensions slid away. She inhaled deeply and used her slow exhale to blow the hair from her face.

The slowly revolving wind soon slipped her hair back into her mouth. She resisted the urge to spit it out, forcing herself to focus. Inhale, slow exhale. Inhale, slow exhale. The process repeated itself until she was no longer aware of the hair.

She submerged herself in the Force feeling it ebb and flow about her. The familiar warmth buoyed her spirits. Teaching was hard and, often, thankless. Her meditation times were a moment of clarity amidst the chaos of students and academia.

As she shifted deeper, her sense of self hung suspended. In that quiet contemplation, voices whispered to her. She had trouble at first distinguishing *the* voices, but they emerged gaining strength until she could identify that there were two speakers.

To keep the balance
You must awaken.

You have heard the rumors
And you must find the source

Go, seek, and gather help.
Go, conquer, and gain power.

The voices began to recede. Her confusion was interfering with her connection to the Force. She gradually inhaled and exhaled. The disciplined movement cleared her mind and she heard:

Awaken.
Awaken.

The voices disappeared.

Sash opened her eyes. She chewed on her lip as she disentangled her hair from her horns. She had a sabbatical coming up. Perhaps now was the time to begin that.