Im looking for crafting games that offer more than “item A for item B” where you just make a generic item like in pretty much every open-world-survival-craft game. Some good examples are:
Enchanting in Morrowind: being able to add effects and fine tune their parameters while balancing against the limited amount of “enchanting points” is satisfying to me. Even more so, because with the right knowledge it is possible to create completely busted items. (Skyrim and oblivion do it much worse)
Item crafting in Soulash 2 (the specific effects and numbers are made up, I dont remember the real ones): the recipe for a dagger calls for “1 metal bar” and the kind of material gives you different stat bonuses. Adding copper gives “+1 lightning resist”, iron gives “+5 hp” and so on. Some recipes have optional components that increase crafting options further. This allows 1 recipe to create many different items based on the needs of the player.
Ship outfitting in Starsector: each ship type has “ordinance points” you can spend on upgrading your ships base stats, adding special modifications like replacing shields with more armour or arming the ship with weapons. Additionally, ships have a predefined number and type of weapon mounts (missiles cant be mounted to a ballistic slot).
Wand tinkering in Noita and Magicraft: each wand has a limited number of slots for spell effects / modifiers. You find and combine various spell effects and modifiers to make spells.
Rune factory 5: I love the forging in this series, how you can upgrade any equipment 5 times with various items (“+1 defence” from iron, “+3 attack” from wolf fang, “double last upgrade” from double steel). It ends up feeling like Morrowind enchanting, but instead of sliders you modulate values of stats with items used for forging.
Examples of things that I want to avoid:
Skyrim:
Buy item from vendor: pay 147 gold. Smithing the same item : pay 5 iron and 2 leather (147 gold worth of materials). This is the standard crafting system used by most games. Even if there is no merchant to buy the materials from, the core issue is the same : you pay materials for a generic item.
Vintage story: Its the same thing as “materials for generic item”, but now there is a tedious minigame.
Path of exile: The game does not have a crafting system, it has a slot machine you feed materials into, maybe you get the thing you want, mostly you get disappointment. If you use specific materials and “crafting” benches in a specific order you can nudge the RNG ever so slightly in your favor... and still waste your materials not getting what you want, because you didnt hit jackpot.