Sharing thoughts & a few suggestions

Hello!

Wanted to share that my friends and I have been playing this game and we love the aesthetic and the concept - only been playing for about 40hrs, but worlds are beautiful and story is interesting.

Here are some requests/ideas for the game -

I do like the intricate stages of crafting items, but it's a little visually contained and can sometimes be a bit confusing with what intermediatery item you need to craft. In some other games we've played there's often link to the previous item required by clicking on the item that's missing its part. (sorry not familiar with correct terminology) for example if you need wires for filament, you can access the wires recipe from within the filament recipe screen.

One way that crafting could be a bit more visually enjoyable is to have a 'blueprint' screen that sort of has a rough sketch/image of the item, (those image assests are already in the game) and then places where the different matrerial parts click in or attach to, so you can get a sense of the item being completed. This could also serve as a handy way of tracking the item you want to create.

This game's crafting is actually something that I feel has the real chance to shine and be amazing, as the steampunk nature of the world really leans into the crafting and players can feel like they are inventing these things. Perhaps something along the lines of having makeshift 'prototypes' of an item through to a masterful items which have gone through iterations of construction. just a suggestion to have a think about the crafting - you've done an amazing job of having all the bits and materials, if they can somehow be captured by the player's imagination even more so.

On a quality of life improvement, some search bar features could be really helpful in a few of the menus and also some filters to help ranking items based on level/name/etc. Also a very minor thing, but given the sheer number of items tier 2-3, could the drop down menus perhaps be default to close, not open, as I am often closing the tabs not relevant to whatever item i'm making.

thanks heaps for making this game, it's really cool so far and hope it gets to go somewhere even more amazing.