Holy War X crafting: blacksmithing, potions, cooking and fishing

Sub-skills

The Movie's progression act lists what you level besides combat: blacksmithing, flight, stealth, lockpicking, weapons, cooking, magic, fishing “and many more”. Discord posts add theft, climbing and potion making. All of them feed your overall level.

All the subskills are important parts of the game and tie into the progression of the game in some way or another … apart from fishing. We fish just to fish.

Blacksmithing

Weapons and armour upgrade from zero to six stars. An upgrade needs four or five items:

• Gold.
• Ores, mined in mine shafts on different islands. Some shafts are better for rare ores.
• A core for that weapon or armour class, such as a long sword core. Cores drop by chance from chests, hostile NPCs and world mission chests, and the game leans towards dropping the core for the kit you are using.

Upgrading raises base damage, skill damage and posture damage. Gauntlets upgrade the same way, so a fist build keeps up with mythical weapons.

Potions

The developer describes potion making as Minecraft's brewing with the game's own ingredients. A potion with an effect is made of three things:

1. A base drop from one of the five races: the Movie names giant's foot, fairy ears, human heart and goddess feathers among them.
2. A rarer drop from a particular monster, such as an orc king's tusk or the horn of a red demon.
3. An earthly ingredient found on the islands: a four-leaf clover, seaweed, a mushroom.

Then up to two modifiers:

Potions can be drunk or thrown. Two examples from the Movie: stench keeps nearby mobs away from you, and fragrant draws them all in, which is why people throw it at friends. Rarer potions, including transformation and invisibility, need boss drops and rare plants. Recipes are meant to be discovered, your success rate rises with the skill, and potions can be sold on a world market. Fairies with Synthesis magic can fire potions from a gun.

Cooking and hunting

Meals are cooked at a campfire or, at a higher cooking level, an advanced pot, and give status effects that help with later quests. Salt is also used in high-level meals. Ingredients come from wildlife: most animals run, a few fight back with moves that finish you off if you are careless. There is a cooking skill but no hunting skill. You have a saturation bar to keep up.

Fishing

• A fishdex tracks the fish you catch by island region, with side quests tied to it (March 2024).
• Better rods catch rarer, larger fish, which make better meals.
• You can pull up things that are not fish: enchantment scrolls for weapons and armour, and capes and jackets.
• Sit long enough and your character settles into an idle pose with its own music, which changes when a fish bites.

More fish, mutant variants, bait types and a second minigame for large fish were listed as planned.

Chests and lockpicking

High-level chests in deep caves need lockpicking, which is a minigame. A chest's glow shows the rarity of its best item, and chest size does not limit what is inside. The same skill opens cells in Baste Prison. Prison breaks.