Here we are, well into 2025, time for the first ramblings of the new year. This time, I will explain the philosophy and mechanics behind repairing. Repairing you wonder? What is fancy about the hidden tax on using items you wonder? Well, here we go.
Let's first look at the way item wear and durability usually work. You craft or buy an item and as you use it, be it for combat, mining, or whatever else, it becomes damaged. Eventually, it either breaks or becomes unusable.
In most games, you can repair using currency. Think of for example in World of Warcraft, you craft yourself a weapon, go fight, die a couple of times, uh oh, it needs repairs. Have you ever thought, "I just crafted this thing, why can't I repair it myself?" And why can the repair NPC do it for gold, no resources needed? I guess there is an underground material market for repairs nobody knows about. Because of this, the resources needed to craft decline in price. There is less and less demand for new items.
Other games find more or less creative ways to destroy items, like using them in higher blueprints as a base. Or they are lost in certain scenarios, like permadeath.
But enough pointing out the bad standard, let me explain why CoRE has a much better repair system.
Let's start with the philosophy that if something can be repaired, it should be repairable by players. No savant NPC who can repair anything and everything.
But how can a player repair their gear? Do they need to be a master crafter to repair their high level gear themselves? Or do they have to find one to repair (whoever played Ultima Online knows this can be annoying). The solution in CoRE is what I call Echoes of Creation, in short EoC.
Echoes of Creation are created when material is destroyed. For example you can destroy wood to get wood EoC or stone for stone EoC. The echoes can then be used to restore durability on items, according to what was needed to create said items. For example, a spear created from wood and stone will require wood and stone EoC to repair it, in the respective proportions. I won't go into the deep math here, but as repairing should be generally less expensive than creation, you need roughly 50% of the material to repair 100% of durability.
This means as items are used, there is a natural demand to obtain resources to repair them. Resources are always in demand if they are needed for crafting and repairs. It also leads to a natural ebb and flow, because shortages and high prices will likely make people switch to alternate items where repair costs are cheaper, which should reduce demand and prices on the former mentioned resource.
There is also the aspect of echo creation, as supply is limited by the amount of players creating echoes. While it is simple to get wood or stone to create wood or stone EoCs, refined, more complex resources would require someone capable of creating them. So for example a steel EoC would require someone to create steel first, which will then be destroyed. If there are not enough players capable of creating steel, it would naturally be in lower supply.
Which gets me to the last part, convenience. Let's assume for a second that you don't want to create echoes and go through all that economic stuff. You just want to kill things with your shiny new battleaxe - and you want to repair it using currency, just like in other games.
You don't want to bother with creating echoes or scouring the market and managing your stocks? Well you are in luck, the Citadel maintains stocks of all echoes of creation which you can use for a small fee.
All you need to do is !repair and everything will be taken care of. But doesn't this make the Citadel the savant NPC who can repair everything? No. Because the Citadel actually maintains a dynamic buyorder (a fancy market tool I will explain once it is ready for player use) to keep the stocks of echoes high and supply it to players.
So not only can you just !repair without concerning yourself with echoes, you can also always find a buyer for your overstock of echoes in the Citadel.
The way dynamic buyorders work, the Citadel will lower its prices depending on the stocks available. This leaves room for players to eventually take over the repair market, but that is a bit further in the future. In the event that the Citadel simply doesn't have the required echoes in stock, it also has the fallback possibility of simply creating echoes out of nothing at double the price. This is to ensure that you can always repair, but the higher price should encourage players to jump into the breach.
So as you can see, a fancy system which allows players to repair their gear themselves - or even provide repairs for others. All while creating constant demand for resources to limit resource inflation.
At the same time, this can all be ignored for a fee. This fee is, for the most part, paid to other players and not just a hidden tax on gameplay. I encourage you to give the game a go, because while it's still in beta, it already has a carefully crafted, player friendly game design. You can read up on what the game already offers and get more information on philosophy and design in the other ROA(M)D posts. I'll see you in the game! https://discord.gg/WUfU2qQvXR.
br,
thatclaimgamedev
P.S:
The effort to streamline and improve the user interface and experience is at the forefront during the beta, so feedback is always welcome.