Hey everyone, Phillip here again, Game Director on Dimraeth. This month’s design talk is all about crafting and building: how we handle recipe discovery, why food and potions matter, and how your base ties it all together.
In Dimraeth, crafting is designed to be optional, but highly impactful for players who want to lean into it. Depending on how much you engage, crafting can either sit in the background and simply keep your character fed, or it can become a serious power lever that you invest into over time.
Crafting can be done directly from your backpack, or through dedicated crafting stations. Many recipes require specific stations to craft, so as you build out more stations, you expand what you’re capable of producing.
Recipe discovery comes in two ways. The first is classic exploration: you can find recipes out in the world. The second is more experimental and player-driven. In the crafting tab, you can place items into crafting slots, and if your inputs match a valid recipe, you can craft the item and unlock that recipe at the same time. Once a recipe is unlocked, you can craft it directly from the recipe list for convenience, without needing to remember the exact combination every time.
The intention here is to support both types of crafting players: the ones who want to hunt recipes through exploration, and the ones who enjoy tinkering and discovering recipes naturally by experimenting with ingredients.
You can see how many undiscovered recipes a given item is involved in, and if you’ve already unlocked a recipe, you can also see what other items are part of that recipe chain. For example, you might notice an ingredient like tender berries still has undiscovered recipes tied to it, which is a simple hint that there’s more you can do with it than just your current potion pipeline. The goal of the Crafting Codex is to give crafting-focused players a light set of breadcrumbs to follow, while also letting you track your progress as you move toward unlocking every recipe in the game.
The most important thing you can craft is food. Hunger and thirst are basic needs, and any cooked food can keep you satiated, but that’s not the real reason serious players will care about cooking.
The real value of food is the percentage-based stat buffs, which are timed rather than permanent. On average, food buffs last around 30 minutes. Food can grant boosts like increased max health, concentration, stamina, regeneration, and even elemental resistances. In endgame, a strong food buff can often be the difference between surviving a boss mechanic or getting punished hard for one mistake. The same goes for elemental resistances when you’re preparing for a boss with a specific damage profile. To access those high-impact buffs, you’ll need to discover the recipes and cook them.
A common loop here is simple: you scout a boss that leans heavily into a specific damage type, then you come back to base and prep for it. You check your Crafting Codex for what you’ve unlocked, cook the meal that pushes you into the right stat or resistance breakpoint, eat, restock, and head back out. The fight doesn’t suddenly become easy, but you give yourself the breathing room to actually play the mechanics instead of losing the run to a single slip.
Another major advantage of crafting is resource recovery during combat. Health, concentration, and stamina can all be recovered quickly through potions, and if you want to rely on potions consistently, you’ll want to maintain a healthy stockpile.
Potions also become a co-op tool. Some potions can be thrown, meaning if your friend is in trouble, you can literally throw them a heal mid-fight. In co-op, this creates those small save moments that stop a run from collapsing: a teammate gets clipped, their health drops, and instead of backing off and letting the fight spiral, you land a thrown potion and keep the team’s momentum intact.
On top of recovery, certain potions can provide short-term buffs as well, such as a minute of increased damage. The main split here is long-term versus short-term. Food is your long-duration baseline power. Potions are your burst sustain and burst buffs.
If you keep a steady ingredient supply coming in through farming, you can turn basic materials into a reliable potion stockpile. Over time, potions stop being “rare loot” and start being part of your standard prep before heading back out.
Cures sit in a more specialised category. They matter most when you’re taking on enemies that apply heavy bleed or poison buildup. In those cases, bringing cures is less about raw power and more about keeping control of the fight by clearing a dangerous buildup before it snowballs.
Crafting also gives you access to offensive tools like throwable knives and elemental flasks. These exist to supplement your build and cover gaps. If you’re missing ranged pressure, area damage, or a reliable way to apply a certain status effect, offensive tools let you patch that weakness without having to rebuild your entire character around it.
A core part of progression in Dimraeth is unlocking new spells, and your base plays a role in that too. As you recruit NPCs into your settlement, some of them will be able to craft spell books for you based on materials you gather from monsters and bosses. These spells are almost always reflections of the creature you took the materials from, and they can become a major pillar of your build once you unlock them.
Unlocking more spell books through these NPCs is tied to broader progression. As you complete quests and push the main story forward, you’ll gain access to more options, deeper spell pools, and more ways to shape the direction of your character.
Equipment crafting is not in the game yet, but it’s something we plan to add later. The intent is for equipment crafting to be an end-game activity for players who want to min-max and fine-tune their builds. The idea is that once you’ve unlocked certain item sets, you’ll be able to craft them repeatedly in an attempt to roll the perfect stat baselines for your setup. This is a longer-term plan and will likely land later in Early Access.
We still want monster drops to be the primary loot path for the majority of the game. So equipment crafting is designed as a late-game supplement and optimiser, not a replacement for hunting gear out in the world.
Moving away from item crafting, building is the system that supports long-term production. The primary purpose of building is to establish your item pipeline. If you want steady access to the things that make your character stronger, you will need to build the stations, farms, and storage to keep production running.
The loop is straightforward: you return to base, you restock, you queue up items for your next adventure, and you gradually expand your base so that it supports more recipes, more farming output, and more long-term convenience. Over time, your base becomes the backbone of your progression outside combat.
Building also has a purely decorative side. We have a full isometric, tile-based building system for players who want to create their dream pixel art home. That includes furniture, wall decorations, rugs, lighting, and more. If you want to treat your base like a functional production hub, you can. If you want to treat it like a cosy creative project, you can do that too.
Farming is one of the core tools for sustained production. If you want a steady supply of health potions, you will need a steady supply of ingredients, and that means farming. A simple example is tender berries: if they’re part of your potion pipeline, you’ll want them growing constantly so you’re never bottlenecked.
Farming in Dimraeth is intentionally simplified. You build farming plots, plant seeds, and harvest them when they mature.
Beyond seed plots, you can also build production structures such as wells and animal or monster pens. These provide a reliable stream of basic resources over time, so as the game progresses you’re less reliant on constantly going out to gather low-tier essentials.
If crafting and building aren’t your thing, that’s fine. We’ve designed them to be impactful, but not essential.
Most, if not all, essential items can be purchased from NPCs at a premium. You may also gain access to some of those supplies later than you would if you were crafting them yourself, but you won’t be hard-blocked. In Dimraeth there are multiple paths to power. Crafting mainly changes your timing, consistency, and convenience, but you can still reach comparable strength through other lanes like gear progression, leveling, and general exploration.
The more you engage with Dimraeth overall, the easier time you’ll have. Crafting and building is one strong path, not the only one.
So now for some broader development news. We’ve been steadily working toward polishing for our next playtest, which we previously announced. As a reminder, we’re planning to host another open weekend playtest at the end of the month, running from January 30th to February 1st. We’ll also be letting our Discord members in a little earlier, so there’s still time to join if you want early access.
This upcoming playtest is primarily a technical and localisation test. Our main priorities are our new multiplayer lobby system (to make it much easier to find and join each other’s games), our Brazilian Portuguese localisation, and our new controller and Steam Deck support.
That said, this playtest still includes new content. You’ll be able to try a revamped tutorial, a new boss, and a new zone filled with three new monster types. So even if you’re not here for multiplayer testing or localisation, there should still be plenty new to sink your teeth into.
If you’re interested in what you’ve seen here, please consider wishlisting and following Dimraeth on Steam if you haven’t already. It genuinely helps us a lot, and it makes it easier for us to keep building the kind of RPG we’re outlining in these posts. And if you’re curious about other aspects of the game, or there’s a crafting, building, or progression system you’d like us to cover next, let us know in the comments.
You can also join our Discord at https://www.discord.gg/dimraeth to talk builds, share crafting discoveries, and follow development more closely alongside the rest of the community.