Illarion.org

this mainly entailes gems and nuggets, but the graphics show that there are multiple raw gems in the raw gem graphic, maybe make it one rough gem or give the cutter 1-3 gems if it is cut? this would be nice but is a proposal. nuggets, well there are tons of little nuggets in the graphic, does your character melt them together?, why not a little nugget of gold, a yellow coal graphic would seem much more like a nugget.

i only address these things because we are supposed to interpret the graphics litterally not? not major things but it would be more logical. if no one cares no biggy.

It would be very rare to find an actual nugget of gold with equal size to a lump of coal as it is in illarion now. Most gold would be found in the form of smaller nuggets that you would form together like you said to produce some work of gold. You wouldn't be carving from a block of gold but rather forming the malleable material into the object of your desire. So I think the current nugget graphic is nice. If it were to change it should have dirt mixed in instead of solid gold. As for the gems I wouldn't want to be able to cut more than one gem from each set of raw gems you found or else it would make the work of gem cutters fairly insubstantial as anyone would therefore be able to risk the chance of failure if all they had to do was attempt to cut 10 or so gems and end up with at least 3 usable gems. If everyone was honest and a good role-player they wouldn't attemt to cut gems in this way but as we all know not everyone is such a dedicated role-player and would rather try to do everything themself if that were possible so in this case, gem cutting is a fairly protected industry at the moment. Unless gems were made more rare in an equal proportion to the number of gem stones possibly cut from one stone I think only one gemstone should come from each raw gem. A possible more accurate graphic if you want to be able to visualize what you're using would be a lump of rock or dirt with the single gemstone inside (yet visible) or many small ones surrounding the larger one. In this way only one gem large enough to be crafted into anything would be visible and therefore useable but the color of the smaller gems would aid in determining which gem was contained in the lump of dirt. Personally I think the current graphics are very nice and no new alterations are needed but that is not to say that they could still not be improved. It just means that I think they're nice enough to not need to be changed.

The problem is that say there is a 50% chance of making a gem for a novice gem cutter. Once they are a master, they have 100% chance.

If we reduce it to 25%, once they are a master they still have 100% chance.

So that wouldn't work, or master gem cutters would just get more gems for the same number of raw gems.

The ratio I was speaking of lowering was that of finding raw gems. So if you were to be able to cut 3 gems out of 1 raw gem (from Gro'bul's post)then you should find 1/3 the number of raw gems as you do now. But either way I don't think this is the solution for anything and I wouldn't recomend it. Only one gem should come from each raw gem. I was responding to Gro'bul's idea of making 3 gems out of one raw gem.

Raw gems and gold nuggets look the way they are because that is how you would find them in all realism. It would be a lucky miner indeed that found a lump of gold etc. with no impurities. I think the current graphics for the raw gems and gold are perfect. They depict the minerals you would find them in nature.

A raw gem is actually very hard to depict in a graphic. If you've ever seen a picture of a raw gem you should know what I"m talking about.

A raw Emerald, for example, looks nothing more than a greenish murky crystal with a lot of dirt.

Gold nuggets also woudl be fairly hard to show, gold appears in quartz rock a lot and you need to break up the quartz to find it. The gold nuggets that are depicted are actually the type that are found while gold panning a river. I used to snipe as a hobby (snipe is gold panning rivers) and what you would do is take some dirt that could contain gold and start panning it, and after a while you get pretty close to the graphic showing gold nuggets, which would be gold nuggets with iron nuggets and ohter rocks. After a bit more panning you have most of the rocks out and are left with gold.

Maybe new graphics for raw gems could be done. Something like a coloured crystal sticking out of a piece of rock.

@adano: exist

Ah, I see. Thanks.