PlaneShift

That’s how all crafting skills work. You could call it a balancing issue, but in my experience, this “exploit” is the only thing that keeps crafters halfway sane (or at least me). The powerlevelling will stop soon enough once you reach levels where you don’t get any more experience from the simple transformation steps.
Crafting useful things requires “combine” steps that cannot be stacked anyway.

I’m clearly understand what most of players use it in that way, but it’s just simply illogical. In that case it is significant imbalance as compared with smithing for example, where character should craft something with his hands… Anyway I thought planeshift is mainly roleplay game. Perhaps with removing this “exploit” more people will be able to communicate with each other near other spots, not only in Harnquist’s smith. For now it looks like somebody standing near the table and after about ten minutes he leaves this place with full backpack of finest crafts.

Making crafting harder than it’s already nowadays will not help roleplay in any way. Playing an animation while the process is happening seems to me a better idea. I will check if all those processes have a crafting animation set.

Animation is a good idea indeed. But how about using queue for those transformations which logically should follow one each other? In that case all the actions from player would be the same as before. It just would take more time for transformations. And also you may add transformation speed which would depend on the character skill.

transformation speed already depends on character skill and adding a queue to auto-containers is not a good idea in my opinion. The preparation table should not probably be an autocontainer but that will surely slow-down many crafting steps for many crafting skills (it’s a widely used tool). We would like to make the game more exciting, not more boring, for this reason I would rather leave it unchanged.

I’ve just wanted to point the area where realism suffers a bit (about realism)… It is rather complex issue. In my opinion whole community should decide what to do with that.

I fully agree with Minks and Eonwind.

It is not a bug, it works as intended. It’s a feature request to change the general way crafting is done. And I think there are many many, much more pressing issues to invest developer time.

Changed to feature request and lowering priority. It seems not many would agree to change the way the leatherworking table works.

Back in 2009, all crafting / cooking containers were changed to auto-containers (meaning they will self-start when loaded) and bulk transforms on stacks was implemented for several reasons:

1) Items in containers are guarded, thus it was possible for someone to fill them with junk and effectively shut them down for everyone else.
2) Wrong items left in containers would just sit there forever…now they will self-clean of garbage in time no matter what you put in them.
3) Slots and containers are limited, and being able to work on stacks took some of the pressure off, making the containers easier to share.

Crafting can be a tedious wrist-wrecking experience. Being able to do bulk work on a stack was the much-asked-for and well-received solution, and along with that came quantity-factored transform time, so the larger the stack, the longer it took. Also with that was the small risk of ruining a whole stack if one of the items went to “slag” or similar garbage item of the craft, and the losses could be mitigated by splitting to a few smaller stacks without having to go all the way to singles. These were deemed acceptable tradeoffs by the player community and devs of the time. Practice formulas were set up to award based on the stack size where appropriate, and it was decided that some work would not give practice in light of the bulk processing (e.g. heating things). As has been mentioned, final completion generally still must be done in exact quantities for combines, and the higher practice awards came on the finishing steps, versus the rinse-and-repeat work.

Even so, some bulk processing has been removed, for example casting ingots for Metallurgy. It was at one point set up so that stacks of certain quantities would produce stock, and any other stack count would produce a stack of ingots. I was sorry to see this taken out. This particular setup was done in favor of armor and helm crafting that takes a lot of ingots and it was intended to make it easier for crafters to produce them. Yes, I know you can hold shift and click really fast to split a stack, but even that is hard on the wrist and hands after a while, and shouldn’t be necessary. For some container work you don’t have to stand still while it works…you can go and do other things, so a long process time can be used productively.

To speak to leather work, if anything I’d say the Puncher should not be a container at all…it should be a Use item like the Anvil and Riveter.