The recipe you keep looking up mid-game

The recipe you keep looking up mid-game

There is a category of question that only comes up when you are already playing, and that is exactly why it is so hard to find an answer for.

You are two hours into a game. You need a specific item, you are almost sure a recipe exists, and you have no idea what it is called. Every guide is written around the beginning of the game, organised by chapter, and none of them are searchable by the thing you are holding in your hand.

That is the gap, and it is a small one to close.

Recipes are data, not prose

A crafting recipe is a list of inputs that produce an output. That makes it a lookup table, not a story.

The problem with the guide format is that it optimises for reading from the start. A page per chapter is right if you are playing from the beginning and following a path. It is exactly wrong if you have one item in your hand and four minutes of patience left.

Searchable by ingredient is the format that matches the question you actually have.

HowToCraft indexes the recipes per game in that direction, with the materials as the entry point rather than the chapter. It is at HowToCraft, and the site is at https://howtocraft.net.

The difference in practice is bigger than it sounds. The guide says "you will need X later in the second area". The lookup says "X is made from A and B, and A is bought from the merchant in the second area". One of those you can act on.

The second kind of lookup

There is a related question that has nothing to do with crafting and shows up constantly in the same session.

You meet a character, they say something you half recognise, and you want to know whether they are on your side. The wiki has the answer. The wiki also has four hundred characters on it and no way to tell you which one of them was in that cutscene.

FandomGraph answers the shape of it instead of the content: a graph of who is connected to whom, per series, so the person you cannot place is next to someone you already know. It is at FandomGraph, and the site is at https://fandomgraph.com.

It is the same instinct as the recipe lookup, applied to people instead of items. You are holding one piece of information and you want the one thing that connects to it.

Why these need to be separate from the wikis

The instinct is to put all of it in the big wiki, and that is why the big wiki is hard to use.

A wiki written for people who read it over months is written for someone who already knows what they are looking for. A lookup page is written for someone who does not, and it has a different job: get to the answer in one step, then get out of the way.

The best one I have used does something very unremarkable and very effective. It gives the answer first, in one line, and puts the explanation underneath for the people who want it.

That is the whole pattern. Same content, opposite layout, and the layout is what makes it usable at the moment you need it.