What are augmentations?

Augmentations are a system in which you can effectively upgrade your items.

Their goals are to make sure that a player's experience can differ from another player's experience with the same item. Which is important in a game where you only have one tier of tool.

Core Design of Augmentations

Augmentations should not intentionally turn the item into a completely different item. For example, ranged weapons should not turn into block breaking tools. If I say something bastardises an item, this is what I mean.

Augmentations should not introduce outright new mechanics, however, it is okay to build off of existing ideas.

If something similar exists, use that but have a slightly different functionality on the item.

Balance should be relative to all augmentations, there are no tiers of augmentation power. Like, just because it's harder to obtain, doesn't mean it should be more powerful.

Augmentations should be a early-mid to end of progression tree piece of content, earlygame players are too busy learning what's different to Minecraft/the ropes, so it's appropriate to have this mechanic be moreso relevant to after this point.

How does the system work.

Augmentations work on a slot system. Certain augmentations may take up more slots than others.

There are two types of augmentations.

• Special augmentations are augmentations that provide new functionality or hone in on an existing functionality of an item.
• Stat augmentations are stat increases.

You have a limit to how many stat augmentations you can have on an item, this is usually around 4 for weapons and 6 for tools, this is so optimal weapons for players aren't just stats, because specials should be encouraged.
Specials of the same type may only be applied once. This is to make balancing easier, and to encourage mixing and matching.

Example Specials

Burn (Weapon)

• Burn will set an entity on fire for a brief period of time. This may create new behaviour with specific types of entities.

Air Roll (Armor)

• Air Roll allows you to stay at the same height for a brief amount of time whilst combat rolling in the air. Think Mega Man X Dashing.
  The above would only work if combat rolling is a default feature, otherwise it'd count as totally new mechanic.

Softness (Tool)

• Softness will drop the exact block you broke if applied to a tool.

Example Stats

Damaging (Weapon)

• Increases the damage dealt by this weapon.

Haste (Tool)

• Increases the mining speed of this item.

Luck (Tool/Weapon)

• Increases the drop rate of this item for drops that don't match the source.

How to apply augmentations?

Augmentations are applied and swapped out through the same workstation. There will be a few augmentations to choose from at the beginning, but you can unlock more by finding augmentation table upgrade items through different means (usually locating them in structures or some other challenge associated with an area).

Augmentation table upgrade items are infinite use once applied to a table. You may also duplicate unlocked upgrades through the table too, in the case of multiplayer or if you have multiple bases.

Pug note:
I'm unsure if I want there to be no cost to augmentations or if I do, I'm leaning towards it not having cost besides the table and the augmentations available.