
Originally Posted by
Amineri
/snip
How?
The simplest way would be to make all recipes require at least four ingredients, and to have nearly all ingredients be the result of a crafting process, and not simply dropped / gathered items. To keep gathered / dropped items relevant, the synthesis chain from material to ingredient should be no longer then 1 or 2 (e.g. ore ~> cobalt rings, ore ~> ingot ~> plate, fibre ~> yarn ~> cloth). Further, the recipes that make up ingredients should be more inline with the final synthesis. Finally, the ingredient synths should produce, as a general rule, only a single ingredient.
/snip
If the recipes are balanced in terms of requiring 4 to 8 manufactured ingredients, and if these ingredients are of a rank close to the resulting item, then the requirement that all ingredients be HQ in order to achieve an HQ result becomes a balancing restriction. The process of creating an HQ item shifts from "gathering the easy parts, spamming careful on low rank parts, skip the hard parts, make many HQ attempts", to "gather the high rank materials, spend time making every ingredient HQ". It is different, but it is not necessarily easier.
/snip