Richard Garriott (joined by environmental artist Scott Jones) was the host of the most recent Shroud of the Avatar Hangout of the Avatar session on Google+. The topic this week was crafting:

Over on the Shroud of the Avatar forums, someone with the handle vjek has transcribed much of the session. Some relevant snippets:

For those of you who watched the RTX demo that we put together, the first two tables that were dropped into the game were the sawmill as well as the carpentry table. And with those you might have seen .. and Scott may be able to pull those two up if you happen to have them handy .. what you saw with those two tables is our general theorem of crafting. Which is that you’re first going to go out into the field, you’re going to harvest raw materials that could be.. in the case of the arc we tried to show in RTX, that would be: You’d chop down some trees, and find some .. get from those trees, logs. In fact those logs that you bring back, right now there’s only one tree you can chop down, or one type of tree. But eventually you’ll be able to chop down a variety of types of wood to use as a basis, that you could then bring to your saw table which I see that Scott now has up on his screen…on that sawmill. You would be able to chop logs into boards and dowels and other small parts that you might need for making furniture. And then you could go over to his.. the.. And by the way, that step for us is Processing the raw materials. So for most crafting loops, or many of the crafting loops, you start with things you can harvest out in the wild; could be meat or leather from animals, it could be herbs or berries for cooking or reagents. Could be timber like for the logs that we’re creating, then once you’ve processed the raw material into the usable parts of a finished product, you would then move over to a second phase of crafting, which is the assembly of the final product.

…and if I may jump in here, Scott, one of the nice things about this too, is that these tables allow us a great deal of flexibility. Recipes can now be very diverse, you can cut down oak or ash or whatever types of wood we decide to put in as the entrance into the recipe all the way through to all different kinds of furniture we eventually let you build, will make a very large pantheon, so to speak of furniture or items that could be crafted there with that table. And that same theory holds on all the other kinds of crafting that we do, for example, just today I was filling out the Cooking.. resources through final product, .. getting started on it, by the way, it’ll be months before the full list is done. But when you think about Cooking, I don’t think cooking is one of the ones you’ve done, I think you’re working the Butchery table I believe which is part of the process…Good, predecessor to cooking, but if you think about Cooking, you’re going to have things that go, first of all, you’ll need Tools, not for the Butchery side that you’re looking at now, but on the Cooking side, you might need pots or skillets or a mezzaluna, or I learned a new word, Ulu, today. Cleavers, flay knives, paring knives, peelers, cooking tongs, soup ladles, graters, mashers, spatulas, strainers, steamers, rolling pins and zesters, might all be part of the process you would need to do, to use the Cooking station. But then the ingredients, one of the ingredients, is meats! So what you see here is the table that Scott is working on for the preparation of meats, so that after you catch a fish or hunt some game, you’ll bring it down here, back here to this game table to do the field prep. And you’ll start with the carcass of some animal that you brought back from the field, but in here is where you’ll end up with.. whether it’s beef fillets, rabbit fillets, snake meat picked off the bone, trout or salmon, or whatever else it might be, this is the station where you’ll do that Resource Processing. So again you would gather the Resources in the field, fish or game, you would Process it into the steaks or fillets that you might need to cook it at this table, separately by the way. There’s a whole other path for collecting your culinary herbs, I was just putting an herbs list together today of things like mint, thyme, rosemary, dill, coriander, lavender, basil, and parsley; and I can probably get anything else in there you’d like. Vegetables of course, fruits of course, grains that you’ll be able to harvest, and then all those things will then be taken over as the raw ingredients into the Cooking station. So we should be able to have a marvelously diverse set of creations, just with this standard pattern of give you as many possible things to hunt or gather in the field, Process the raw materials whenever appropriate at one of these types of stations, then move it over to your finishing station, be it Cooking for food, or a similar arc for.. and Scott, I know you’re reticent to show some of our crazy little sketches.. but even if you held them up in front of your camera, of things like.. another one we’ve been .. is next in his queue are things like … if you kill a or if you harvest a sheep you would get the wool, the wool you can then spin into yarn on a spinning wheel, that yarn you can take to a loom and weave it, and then you would take that cloth to a sewing station.

Scott Jones, for his part, also released a work-in-progress image of the butchery table:

Click on through to read the rest of vjek’s transcription, and to comment on crafting in Shroud of the Avatar. From this preliminary state, it sounds like the game will more than rival Ultima 7’s much-vaunted world simulation systems!