Eagle-eyed players might notice something a little different about two of our oldest crafting disciplines today. We've overhauled Archaeology and Alchemy to be more accessible and straightforward, and now the results are ready for everyone to enjoy!

Archaeology

Archaeology has always been a bit of an odd duck-- artifacts operated on a completely different system from other disciplines' items. While the idea of piecing things back together was a cool concept, in practice the RNG of getting exactly the pieces you needed to complete an artifact started to resemble getting something good out of a rather unbalanced gacha. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Archaeology recipes have been completely retooled-- artifact pieces are now non-numbered "fragments". The number of fragments needed to reconstruct an artifact is equal to the number of pieces it had previously. As balance for the fact that archaeology recipes no longer depend on obtaining a number of unique items, ore or Engineering parts have been added (as raw material or tools to reconstruct any missing pieces). 

While all activity rewards should be converted to the new system (if you still end up with some old style pieces dropping, it's a bug! Please let us know!), there's still a ton of old-style pieces still out there. All piece 1s have been seamlessly converted to the new fragment items, but if you still have any other numbered pieces,  don't worry! We'll accept them in craftings and transmutations as if they were fragments. If you really want to declutter your inventory, you can send them into Claims and one of us will convert them. Just please don't do more than five unique items [for instance, a Stone Tablet (2/4) and a (3/4) would be two unique items] or 20 total artifact pieces per claim to avoid math mixups on either your end or ours!

Additionally, legendary archaeologists have gotten a rather special present. By popular request (and as a result of how seldom we have raids), codex pages are now craftable! This is a little tricky, to suit the value of such rare items-- creating the items neccessary will require having an Advanced Alchemist (or Cook) and an Advanced Armorsmith. (Or you could just ask someone else to craft for you. :P) In addition, codex pages require offerings in exchange. 

Alchemy

The main draw of alchemy has always been the custom potion system-- put herbs in, get stats out. However, custom potions are complex and resource-intensive, and that's been called out as a particular pain point over the years. As a result, we've given potions a complete overhaul! 

The old custom potions have been completely retired. All potions currently in player inventories will still be valid, but no new old-style potions will be craftable or issued as group rewards. The new system is less open-ended, but hopefully more flexible and easier to grasp.

A potion can now only boost one stat at once, and has been standardized to require 10 herbs or animal parts (equivalant to an old-style potion with two stacks).  All ranks except for low now give a higher boost per herb, with the advantage increasing the higher rank materials you use. Using two stacks as a comparison point, medium ranked potions have gone from +20 to +25; high has gone from +30 to +50, and a legendary potion has gone from +40 to +100(!). Binding Reagants have had another price cut, with a regular reagant going from 25g to 15g, and a fateful has been taken from 15g to 10g. While items from different tiers can no longer be mixed, the new potion types allow for a little bit of a new sort of mixing and matching...

Unbound potions have also been majorly buffed, since very few players used them (for good reason!). They now give double the stat boost of their bound counterpart for a single activity, and can boost a ketucari's stats beyond the usual cap. (Hey, maybe a good combination with one of those fancy laurel shop boosters?)

Miscellaneous

As a special thank you (and to help give folks who might not have a high-statted ket just yet or have been away from the game for a while), we're doing a present of a set of special potions that can max out a ketucari's stats. Please submit to this prompt to claim yours-- just remember that you can only claim once per user!

Many legendary Archaeology items (and a few assorted others) have had their descriptions edited for clarity and in a few cases, more inclusive language. This will probably be an ongoing process, so drop a note here or in the Discord if there's anything that particularly sticks out to you! 

We're also in the process of porting more group pages off dA and onto the site-- please mind the dust! An extra special thank you to Wolfenru for handling a ton of that for us. And just to let you know, today's crafting updates aren't the only revamp in the pipe... 

-Sian (pawstepsinthesnow)