Item, recipe and crafting editors
Every item has an identity block, an inventory block and an optional recipe. Ore and refined materials feed the crafting chain; the recipe says what goes in, the output count says how much comes out.
The item editor is the least glamorous editor in Fantasy World Manager and the one that decides whether your economy works. A faction that cannot craft food or equipment does not equip soldiers, does not hold zones and does not start wars. All of that runs through this panel.
The four blocks of an item
| Block | Fields | Why it exists |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | ID, display name, type, subcategory, description | How the library finds it and how it sorts |
| Presentation | Icon, visual | How you recognise it in a list of two hundred |
| Inventory | Stack size, base value in gold and silver, rarity, craftable flag | How the economy values it |
| Recipe | Output count, ingredient list | How it enters the world |
Every item has the first three. The fourth is optional, and an item without a recipe is an item that has to come from somewhere else - a drop, a spawn, a starting stockpile.
Types and the material families
The shipped library groups materials in a way that tells you what the crafting chain is meant to look like. Ore is split into distinct metals and stone - coal, copper, gold, iron, silver, stone and tin in the example content - and there is a separate refined family for gems and worked metal.
That gives a two-step chain: raw ore, then refined output. A refined gem or bar is itself an item with its own recipe, which means the refining step is where you can insert cost. If you want an economy where wealth is hard to convert into power, make refining expensive; if you want fast escalation, make it cheap.
Stack size, value and rarity
Three fields carry most of the economic meaning:
- Stack size - how many fit in one inventory slot. The example library uses 99 for a refined gem, which is the sort of number that makes bulk materials pleasant to move.
- Base value - split into gold and silver, so an item can be worth 79 gold without also being worth a fractional pile of silver.
- Rarity - the band the item belongs to. Rarity is a label that other systems can key on, not a price.
Value and rarity are independent, and that is worth exploiting: a common item with a high value creates a trade good, and a rare item with a low value creates a collectible. Both produce different faction behaviour.
Building a recipe that means something
The recipe block asks for an output count and an ingredient list. Two design rules make recipes readable in play:
- One output, multiple inputs. A recipe with four ingredients and one output is a bottleneck you can reason about. A recipe with one ingredient and four outputs is a duplication machine.
- Cost in the right place. Refining expensive and crafting cheap gives you a world where raw material is the scarce thing. The reverse gives you a world where labour is scarce. Pick one deliberately.
The ingredient library is browsable by category - items, food and so on - so building a recipe is a matter of searching rather than remembering IDs.
Craftable, and who crafts
Marking an item craftable makes it available to the crafting systems that use it. For factions, the important craftables are food, items and equipment - those are the three categories the faction crafting system produces, and the results can be distributed to heroes and soldiers.
An item that is craftable but has no recipe with affordable ingredients is effectively not craftable. The panel will happily save it, and the faction will quietly never make it. That is the most common silent failure in this editor.
Reading the library
The item library shows counts per group as you filter, and the count is diagnostic. If an entire category shows zero, you have a hole in the chain: recipes that need it will not be buildable, and any faction depending on them will stall.
Check the whole chain once, early:
| Step | Should contain | If it is empty |
|---|---|---|
| Ore / raw | At least one metal and one stone | No refining is possible |
| Refined | At least one bar or cut gem | Recipes cannot terminate |
| Food | At least two kinds | Factions cannot feed populations |
| Equipment | At least one weapon and one armour piece | Soldiers never improve |
What comes next
Items feed equipment, and equipment feeds the derived stat preview. The equipment and power score guide covers that second half, and the item tables page lists the shipped material families and item fields in one place.
