Question for all... what do we want to do with metals in this server? One thing that's always bugged me, is that Rusty, Copper, Dull Copper, are all better materials than Iron... Being a metallurgist by trade, this causes me much pain. I want to, at the very least, reorder these materials, and I'm wondering if there are any we can do away with entirely... If I were to rank them in their current form, I would go:
Old Copper
Dull Copper
Copper
Rusty
Iron
etc....
Old Copper, Dull Copper, and Rusty straight up don't make sense to me. When you smelt the ore from the ground, you get the pure metal, not a corroded form of it. Should we nix these entirely? Or do we want to replace them with something that makes more sense? Another possibility (this would be slick) is to figure out how to set an age timer on iron and copper, so that as they age, they turn rusty and tarnished forms of copper, and have stats diminish with those changes as well. And if the armor/weapon isn't repaired within some time of that degradation, then it will simply disintegrate. I like this idea the best. Might be a bear to script, but I don't know, we'll have to see.
Another thought I've wanted to implement, is alloys. Realistically, the strongest and best materials are never pure metals, they're some alloyed combination of different materials. What I am conceptualizing (and this is probably going to be nigh impossible to script...) is to have a menu that says add x bars of Shadow and y bars of Mythril, and you get x+y bars of some new material that has combined/averaged properties of the two. Even capping the system at only 2 different types of metal, and like 1-3 bars of each, the number of combinations would be through the roof. This would give RIDICULOUS customizability to player armor. I can see players going through and testing all different combinations, then testing the armors out to see which ones actually work better than others, and when they find a really solid alloy, they keep the recipe to themselves, or maybe sell it. I'm sure it is doable, I just don't know if it's something that is doable within our scope for this server, as it will probably be a massive project.
Anyways, comments appreciated.