Tradeskills

Once you have chosen your role in Horizons, you will have to determine what skills and activities you wish to pursue. If crafting is your profession of choice, Horizons offers you a tremendous suite of creative opportunities. Build and produce the things you've always wanted. Launch a prosperous business to sell your wares, or be generous and share amongst friends and weary travelers. Help your fellow players become distinctive with a new hairstyle, outrageous tattoos or an entirely new wardrobe.

Crafting

The crafting of items in Horizons is the most robust system ever put into a massively multiplayer game. Players have several design choices when making an item in Horizons. Swords, for example, are made of hilts and blades while a smelting tong is made of a handle and head. As a person becomes more skilled in Weapon crafting, blade and hilt styles will become available at the time of item construction. A person who has learned techniques is able to attach such things as tassels using the cloth system, visual effects using the shader system, fire using the particle system, and runes using the decal system.

All weapons and tools take advantage of the crafting system. Swords, axes, spears, daggers, maces, mauls, staves, bows, shields, and other weapons all use this system. Smelting tongs, gem hammers, pick axes, wood axes, and many other tools will also take advantage of techniques, and shaders. This gives crafters the same opportunity to have beautiful and powerful items as an adventurer.

Techniques

Techniques are earned abilities that can be applied during the creation of an item. These abilities allow the crafter to modify the item during its creation so that the resulting item has additional powers. Not all items can have techniques applied to them, and some items can have multiple techniques applied. The more powerful the resulting item, the more skillful the owner of that item must be in order to wield such power. The application of techniques also visually impacts the resultant item, so that a crafter can create very diverse appearing items as well as statistically varying ones.

A highly skilled Weaponsmith will also be able to create blades with sockets cut into them. Items such as gems, runes, and other mystical trinkets will then be placed inside the blade for skill rank and statistic bonuses, additional damage, cool special effects, etc. These gems/runes will be easily interchanged, thus modifying their equipment based on their circumstances. These additions will be visually represented in the game. There are also different styles of weapons, which represent the preferred styles of the various Living Races in Horizons.

Here is an example of how many permutations of swords one could create with the crafting system. The following numbers are representative of a conservative look at what can be done in Horizons and are in no way the final numbers as additional assets can be created very easily to add content and style. 25 different blades can be placed on 25 different hilts, 10 distinct tassels could be attached to the hilt, 10 shader effects could be placed along the blade or hilt, 10 particle systems can be placed along the blade or rotating around it and 6 metal alloys usable by crafters allow for millions of permutations.

Spell Crafting

The skill to create a magical scroll that can be exchanged between characters or transferred to a spell book in Horizons is known as Spellcrafting. This skill is developed while belonging to either the Scholar School or the prestige Spellcrafter School. A Scholar or a Spellcrafter must have: the knowledge (represented by a spell formula), the skill, the proper resources (specified in the spell formula), the appropriate tool and an appropriate work area in order to create a magical scroll. It is important to understand that just possessing a magical scroll in no way allows you to cast the spell contained in the scroll.

Spell formulae are gained through: exchange, loot, quests and as rewards for progress in either the Scholar or Spellcrafter Schools. Some spell formulae allow for the use of up to four techniques during the creation of the magical scroll. It will be possible for the crafter to apply signature techniques to such formula and create a scroll that results in a spell that is modified in multiple ways from the base spell.

One of the possible technique modifications of the base spell is to allow for rune modification by the spell caster. The spell caster can acquire runes through: exchange, crafting, loot, quests, and as rewards for progress in the magic casting Schools. The runes can be applied to the various spells in the caster’s spell book modifying the spell that is cast even further than the techniques applied during the creation of the spell by the Spellcrafter.

The spell that is cast will have visual and statistical modifications based on both the techniques applied by the crafter of the original spell and the runes applied by the caster of the spell. The tools and machines used by the Scholar or Spellcrafter come from the crafting system. They have different qualities that augment the crafter’s skill during the creation of magical scrolls. While it might be enjoyable to continue to use the low level equipment provided to you by your school, you will most probably want to eventually acquire some property on which to build your own shop. You could then have a fine mahogany desk crafted for you and placed in your shop.