Devs: Play Opus Magnum

Just to give a short background, I've been playing FFXIV since late ARR, but I've only recently become an omni-crafter/gatherer during Shadowbringers. Ishgardian Restoration, Diadem and various XP-bonuses made it easy enough to get lazy me to grind through it. Three months prior, I completed a game that I think the developers could emulate a bit to benefit crafting in FFXIV.

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/stea...g?t=1587509977

The goal is to produce specific two-dimensional structures by writing lines of actions for mechanical parts to follow. You're given a few tiles where the materials arrive, you place mechanical arms that will move them and assemble the finished product, and then deliver it to another tile. Grab A, grab B, bond A to B, move AB to exit; Machine code, for those who know what that is. Gradually the game adds new ways to complicate the solutions.

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/stea...g?t=1587509977

At the bottom of that screenshot, you'll see lines containing series of symbols. These lines are numbered to correspond to the arms in the board above, and the symbols tell the arms to rotate, grab/drop, rotate what's grabbed, slide along a track, etc. You've solved a puzzle once your construction will produce endlessly without issues. An example of a finished puzzle, minus the instruction lines:

https://media3.giphy.com/media/aCUWktcTDIyIw/giphy.gif

In crafting, the closest thing we have to this is macros. Via text, you're telling the game to follow specific action casts with some built-in delays, just like Opus Magnum. It doesn't always work of course, since Condition changes... You're better off crafting manually to capitalize on Conditions, unless the recipe is easy enough that a macro runs without issues.

So the dream merger of these two games is an action-instruction-line thing in FFXIV where you could drag and drop a series of actions as an alternative to manual crafting. It would auto-play a single time, (because we don't want this to become completely automated) and return to manual crafting if a Condition change occurs. You set up a line for progressing Quality, and a line for Progress. If your instructions for finishing Quality were paused by a Condition change, you could resume instructions for Progress later if you wanted.

I think it would save mouse-clicks, a lot of tedium for bulk crafting, and the conflicts that condition changes create for macros currently. It's a visual format you could review before running, and a saved record for when you return to a recipe later. I hope something like this shows up in the distant future.