The Crafting Menu as Busywork Tax

Somewhere around 2012, every game got a crafting menu. Shooters got one. Open world action games got one. Games with no survival premise, no scarcity and no plausible reason for the protagonist to own a sewing kit got one anyway, and for about a decade it was simply assumed — the way a jump button is assumed, or a skill tree, or a man with a beard.

Almost none of it decides anything. The ingredients are guaranteed by the loot tables, the recipe is displayed with a progress bar next to it, and the only question the interface ever asks is whether you would like the upgrade you obviously want. That’s a tax. You pay it in minutes and menu presses, and the game bills you for content it didn’t make.

The strange part is that the verb underneath is one of the oldest and best in the medium. Crafting is what happened to the adventure game’s combination puzzle after somebody removed the puzzle.

The verb that lost its puzzle

Point-and-click adventures ran on combination. You had a bag of nonsense and a verb — USE this WITH that — and the entire game was the question of which pair did something. The good ones made that question a piece of comic reasoning: Day of the Tentacle’s puzzles work because the answer is a joke you have to understand, delivered across two centuries of plumbing, and getting it produces a laugh and a solution simultaneously. The puzzle comedy peak is a crafting game where every recipe is an argument you have to reconstruct.

The genre also demonstrated the failure mode with perfect clarity. When the combination logic goes bad — the notorious moustache made from cat hair and maple syrup in Gabriel Knight 3 is the case everyone cites, and deservedly — the whole edifice collapses, because a combination puzzle whose logic you can’t reconstruct is indistinguishable from a lookup table. That’s the fork in the road, and the reasons point-and-click died and what replaced it run right through it. The industry looked at that failure and drew exactly the wrong conclusion: it kept the combining and threw away the reasoning. Modern crafting is Gabriel Knight’s cat moustache with the recipe helpfully printed on the wall.

Minecraft is the honourable exception and the accidental villain. Mojang’s 3x3 grid ships with shaped recipes and, at launch, no in-game documentation — you worked out that a pickaxe is three planks over two sticks by experimenting, or by being told, and the wiki that grew around that gap is one of the great artefacts of games culture. The discovery was real. Then everyone copied the grid and skipped the discovery, and now a recipe book is standard, including in Minecraft.

Far Cry 3 and the bigger wallet

The specific moment the tax became universal is easy to date. Far Cry 3 in 2012 tied your carrying capacity to animal skins: hunt a boar, craft a bigger holster; hunt a shark, craft a bigger ammo pouch. It was legible, it gave the wildlife a purpose, it made the map’s fauna into a progression system, and it worked well enough that within three years you could not ship an open world without it.

Look closely at what the decision is. You need a wallet. The wallet needs two boar. The boars are on the map, marked, and shooting a boar is trivially easy. Therefore the design is: go and do a known thing, twice, then press a button. There is no gamble, no trade-off, no possibility of being wrong. The only variable is how many minutes you spend, and the answer is always “the number of minutes the designer wanted the map to occupy”.

That’s the whole mechanism of the tax. Crafting proliferated because it converts existing content into extra playtime at near-zero development cost. You have already built the boars. You have already built the map. A recipe table and a progress bar turn all of it into a checklist, and playtime is the number the business reports upward. Nobody in that meeting is lying. The system does exactly what it was installed to do, and what it was installed to do has nothing to do with the player having a choice.

Skyrim shows the endgame of the logic. Smithing, enchanting and alchemy loop into each other so tightly that players discovered they could ratchet the numbers into the absurd — brew a potion that boosts enchanting, enchant gear that boosts alchemy, repeat until the arithmetic breaks and a dagger deletes a dragon. That’s a system with no decisions in it at all, only a rate, and a rate can always be farmed.

When the ingredient is the decision

Now the versions that work, because they exist and they’re instructive.

Subnautica’s answer is to put the decision in the gathering. You need a specific material; the material is four hundred metres down in a biome that is dark, cold, and occupied by something enormous with a scream. The recipe is trivial. Getting to the ingredient is a genuine expedition with a real chance of dying, and the thing you’re building is what makes the next depth survivable. Crafting is the progression, the ingredient is the content, and the menu is a ten-second formality between two hours of actual play. Unknown Worlds put the entire game in the supply chain.

Dead Space does the compressed version with power nodes: a scarce currency, a bench, and upgrade paths that visibly cost each other. Spend on the plasma cutter’s damage and you didn’t spend on the stasis module, and you’ll find out in about forty minutes whether you were right. The scarcity makes the menu a build.

When the act is the decision

The Last of Us found the other lever, and it’s beautifully simple: the game does not pause. Open the bag to build a shiv or a molotov and the world keeps running — the clicker keeps walking, the human with the shotgun keeps flanking, the animation takes as long as it takes. Naughty Dog turned crafting into a decision about when, made under fire, and the same recipe that would be a formality in a paused menu becomes a nerve-wracking gamble because the cost is measured in seconds you don’t have.

That’s Dungeon Master’s real-time inventory trick, thirty years on, and it’s still the sharpest thing you can do to a menu. It’s also why inventory management refuses to die — a container becomes interesting the instant opening it costs you something.

When the output is the whole point

Monster Hunter is the third position and the purest. There is no game outside the crafting loop: you hunt a monster, the monster yields parts, the parts become the armour and the weapon, and the gear is what makes the next monster possible. The hunting exists to feed the crafting, and the crafting exists to make the hunting possible, and there is nothing else in the loop.

Capcom can do that because the ingredients are hard — a specific plate drops rarely from a specific monster that will kill you, so the recipe list is a wish list with a difficulty attached, and every completed set is a record of things you beat. Breath of the Wild does a folk version with cooking: no recipe list at all, a pot, and the invitation to throw things in and see. The discovery is back. You find out that a mushroom and a hearty radish make something worth having by finding out.

The timer is the tax made literal

The survival boom deserves a paragraph, because it contains both the best and the worst of this.

Valheim gates its crafting tiers behind the world itself: you cannot smelt iron until you’ve been to the swamp, and you cannot usefully reach the swamp until you’ve dealt with the boss who holds the key. The recipe list is a map of your progress through a place, so reading it tells you where you’ve been. That’s Subnautica’s supply chain in a Viking hat, and it’s most of the reason the game held people through a spring.

Then there’s the other tradition, imported wholesale from free-to-play: the build timer. Put the ore in the furnace and wait. Not wait while you do something else — wait, as a mechanic, with a bar. This is the tax with the disguise off, because the design is openly selling you a delay, and in its native habitat the delay has a price list attached and a button that skips it for money. When that furnace turns up in a game you paid sixty pounds for, somebody has imported an engagement mechanic and left the monetisation behind — the friction of a slot machine with none of the honesty.

The test

One question, and it settles almost every case. Which part of this chain could have gone differently?

If the answer is the ingredient — you chose the dangerous dive, you spent the node here instead of there — the crafting is a design. If the answer is the moment — you built it while something was hunting you — the crafting is a design. If the answer is nothing, and the recipe is printed on the wall, and the boars are marked on the map, and the only variable is your patience: that is a tax, and you are paying it so a spreadsheet somewhere can report a bigger number.

The machines I grew up with had no crafting, for the excellent reason that a recipe table wouldn’t fit in the memory. Whatever the C64 wanted from you, it wanted it in the game. There’s an argument in that constraint worth keeping.