Video Game / Dawn of Crafting

Dawn of Crafting is a single-player crafting game by Goktug and Demir Yilmaz released in January 9, 2016 for iOS.

Taking place in the Late Stone Age, where you are a rescued survivor of a village destroyed by a Homo erectus attack, being taught by your rescuer, Alf, about the ways of crafting. With the help of an assistant named Minion, your job is to gather items, and craft new things from what you're given, and in the process, improve your skills at crafting, discovering new recipes along the way. From new tools to cooked meals to houses, you will eventually be able to create your own village for other people to take residence in, as you meet with new visitors, some friendlier than others.

From there, your village will eventually deal with handling an attack of Erectus raiders, and regardless of how you fare, you will be able to reset with Generational Points to start a new dawn of crafting all over again.

The game is available to purchase on iOS platforms.

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Dawn of Crafting provides examples of:

• All Cavemen Were Neanderthals: Subverted, while Neanderthal individuals and Neanderthal tools are present in-game, a majority of the characters are either H. sapiens or H. erectus.
• Anachronism Stew: The trailer states that the game takes place "10,000 Years Ago", which does fit the fact that you can eventually craft mud bricks, which began seeing use around 9000 BC. However, you and other Homo sapiens individuals live alongside Neanderthals and Homo erectus individuals, the latter of which had went extinct around 100,000 years ago in real life. Downplayed, since everything else is for the most part somewhat consistent with the set time period.
• Androcles' Lion: Give Kula and his tribe 2000 units worth of food when they're dealing with an attack from an Erectus tribe, and they will repay the favor by joining in your defense against the Erectus.
• Barbarian Tribe: The H. erectus tribe that you encounter and have to defend from in-game.
• Big Bad: Itaku, who leads a tribe of H. erectus to attack your village, destroying your creations, and if allowed, to kill your mentor, Alf. He's the son of Alf, wanting his father dead, blaming him for the death of his mother and Alf's wife, Margira. Should you stop his attack, you can choose to kill or spare Itaku, though the former choice will upset Alf, who still loves him.
• Bottomless Bladder: Averted with the fact that when eating food, you or Minion can produce Poop. By the point at which you start doing so, you don't have any toilets to do so in, until you build one yourself. Otherwise, the poop can be used as fuel for fire, or even for crafting!
• Breakable Weapons: All tools in the game have a set durability for which the tool expires after being used to craft items enough.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Better food, tools, containers, Recipe Part Tablets, and Generational Items can be purchased with real-world money besides obtaining them in-game, but they're framed as "donations".
• Broke the Rating Scale: Minion's skills max out at 100, but with generational upgrades, he can increase the cap further. You can also get crafting gloves that affect your skills to increase them past 100. One recipe requires this, with a required Tool Crafting skill of 120.
• But Now I Must Go: Alf will inevitably leave you by the end of the game, even if you've saved him and spared his son, but not before commending you for your abilities as a crafter.
• But Thou Must!: At the beginning, you can decline Alf's request to help him rebuild the village. He'll bribe you with an increasing number of bananas if you keep declining, until he calls you out for being a "greedy Sapien" and tells you to delete this game and go play something else. Saying that you're not sorry will make the game rickroll you.
• Crazy Cat Lady: One of the possible residents you can have in your village, she initially asks for food to feed her and all of her cats. You can offer to have her join your village, but if you take it back after said offer, she will have her cats attack you, making you lose energy and some of your food.
• Child of Two Worlds: Itaku, who is the child of a Sapien and an Erectus, the former being Alf. He avoids the Half-Breed Discrimination present in plenty of villages due to resembling an Erectus enough to not appear as a half-breed.
• Crafted from Animals: You can make equipment, including armor, on top of other items, out of animals' fur. There are also Neanderthal recipes which create tools that use sharpened bone.
• Crystal Weapon: The ultimate tool in the game is the Tactical Shiny Tool, which can be used as an axe, knife, or hammer, and has the highest durability of all other tools with 1000 durability. However, you can only get these from Kasino's minigame, or by getting a really high Tool Crafting skill, as explained in the game's Broke the Rating Scale example.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Alf, who has gone through a lot from his childhood to becoming an old man. His tribe and family were killed by Neanderthals, but had to live under a Neanderthal family for a while to survive, but then got banished. He gained expert crafting skills to make a living after finding other Sapiens, as well as a companion named Minion to venture with, and eventually fell in love with Margira, an Erectus woman. They tried to build a multi-race village that housed runaways from other villages, on top of their own kid, but their whole village along with Margira was killed, and Itaku began to hate Alf for it, running away and living among other Erectus. All Alf had left was Minion Jr, who is actually the Minion you cooperate with since his father passed away from sickness, and then found you.
• The Discovery of Fire: You have to learn how to make a fire, which lets you access more skills and recipes for crafting, like cooking food or creating pottery.
• Dumb Muscle: Minion, who can only do the more physical assignments, including hunting other animals, and will gather items at random primarily, unless you have the proper "Communication Skill" level to make him get specific items. He also mainly speaks in gibberish where everyone else is capable of proper communication.
• Equipment-Based Progression: Some recipes require tools of a sufficiently high level to create, even if you have the proper materials. Said tools may also require a specific (though lower) tool level to craft as well. Additionally, Minion needs enough "Power" from equipment and weaponry to hunt and catch higher-level animals.
• The Exile: Eroca, an Erectus who was exiled from his people, and the only way to un-exile himself was to kill a Homo sapiens, and you happen to be his target.
• Fetch Quest: Other characters can put you up to these, including Alf himself.
• Fishing Minigame: One of Minion's skills is Fishing, which he can do provided a rod and bait you provide to him. As Minion levels up in this skill, he can catch not only bigger fish, but even walruses, sharks, and even whales! The trailer even lampshades how ridiculous this feat is.
  "Did he just bring a WHALE? What the -BLEEP-"
• Funny Background Event: In the background, leaves will be flying on the wind as you're crafting things. However, on very rare occasions, bananas will be flying along the wind in place of leaves for a small duration of time.
• The Gambler: Gambler Kasino, who appropriately lets you play a casino-like game where you match slots, and get an item should you get 3 matching slots.
• Game Hunting Mechanic: Minion, if given a weapon (as well as armor) to equip, he will go hunting for animals to bring back to you. You can skin and cook said animals to level up the respective skills. As Minion's hunting skill improves, he can catch bigger animals, including dire wolves, giant sloths, and even mammoths, all on his own. Given enough equipment and food (and a big bag to hold it all), and he'll come back with hundreds of said beasts to be feasted on!
• Gameplay Automation: Once you populate the land around you with houses and villagers, you can assign other residents to do tasks like gathering water or trapping animals.
• Genre Mashup: It's a game almost entirely centered around crafting and handling inventory, with elements of a civilization-building game, and the ability to reset the game for newer perks like some incremental games.
• Get It Over With: Should you defeat Itaku and his Erectus, he realizes that you're Alf's crafting successor, and in disgust, tells you this word-for-word, which is more heart-wrenching given that Itaku is Alf's biological son.
• Golden Ending: To minimize the destruction caused by the H. erectus attack, you have to set up a big village with a high enough population, on top of having the best equipment you can craft for yourself and Minion, as well as helping out Kula and his tribe so they can all help you fight off the Erectus.
• Good-Times Montage: A text version of this is narrated if Alf dies. It goes from talking about the first time Alf taught you to peel a banana, helping you make a fire, and also watching you burn your poop for fueling your fire.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: Sorting out your inventory can become tricky since some ingredients produce more than one kind of item when crafted together. Each slot can store up to 100 of the same item, and any excess items will be instantly discarded if there's no more space. You can increase your storage by crafting containers and hideouts, but even if the containers are empty, the game treats them as taking up a full slot each and will prevent you from putting more items directly inside them if the other slots are filled.
• Item Crafting: Your main role in the game, being the central mechanic of the game. More active tasks like hunting, fishing, and collecting are done by Minion. More than half of the UI is dedicated to either crafting or items you store and craft with. You take on the role of crafting and similar actions like cooking, tailoring, and eventually, building, as a result of being mentored by Alf, a "Master Crafter".
• Lethal Joke Item: The Crafting Gloves that decrease your skill level instead of increasing it. Their purpose seems downright negative and counter-intuitive, but since you can only improve your skills by either completing new recipes or failing them, using them to gain a probability of failure for recipes with 100% success rate otherwise can let you improve skills more easily.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Tribes and villages don't really support the idea of humans of different races in general. A Neanderthal and Sapien couple can be encountered, and if they are told on, their tribes will send them to their deaths. Alf is the one of the few people who notably opposes these prejudices. This proves more significant later when you learn from his diary that he had an Erectus lover named Margira, who died saving their son, Itaku, from people raiding their original home village to kill off runaways and interbreeds.
  Alf: Not a lot of races approve of their young mating with a different race. History has proven lots of conflict because of this reason alone.
• Mammoths Mean Ice Age: Averted, it isn't snowing at all, but Minion can still hunt mammoths for you to skin and cook meat from.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: When you and everyone else are attacked by an Erectus tribe, Alf will always die, unless you are gunning for the good ending, in which your goal is preventing his death.
• Misplaced Retribution: Itaku wants to kill Alf as revenge for letting Margira die when their home got raided by people from other villages, and it isn't stated that he went after those same villages responsible for killing his mother.
• Morton's Fork: You may encounter someone begging for some food. If you choose to give some food, your gift is wasted as someone mugs him for the food. If you decline his request, he will go mug someone else for food. Either outcome will lead to a mugging, but the difference is whether the beggar is the victim or perpetrator.
• New Game Plus: Through the Mating Chamber, you can pass down items and skills to your next generation with GP (Generation Points), to replay the game more easily with special items that making crafting and learning skills easier, on top of upgrades to your max energy capacity.
• Non-Action Guy: You, for the most part. You rely on Minion for many of the "tougher" actions like hunting animals. You are able to fight off a lone Erectus on your own, but you don't pose any threat to a thief named Sonka, who is far more experienced in combat, and you can contribute to fighting against the Erectus raid, but Conservation of Ninjutsu is not a thing here. You'll have to rely on others' help to deal with the raid.
• Not Always Evil: While Erectus people do attack you, one Erectus attacker, who reveals his name as Eroca, can be interrogated to find out that he was forced to attack you due to being banished. He needs to bring back the head of a Homo sapiens to come back. If you spare him, he doesn't continue his attempt to kill you, but he notes that he is still exiled, and has nowhere else to go, leaving after.
• The Philosopher: Parodied with Filos O'Fiero, who claims to your character that they are all characters within a video game. Your character borders toward Existential Horror in great disbelief of such claims, believing Filos O'Fiero to be insane.
• Poison Mushroom: The Goop that's created whenever a food recipe fails can be eaten by you or Minion, but it'll deplete 1 energy per Goop. Same goes for certain unprepared food such as chestnuts and walnuts, which have to be cracked open first.
• Practical Currency: A good amount of NPCs use food to trade or exchange, since people rely on bartering. After all, the setting isn't at the point where there is any official currency is present, let alone the concept of "money", although "Shiny Stones" are the closest thing to such.
• Primitive Clubs: You can craft these for hunting purposes.
• Random Drop: Skinning birds may randomly drop eggs, which can be used to cook omelettes.
• Redemption Rejection: If you spare the leader of the Erectus raiders, Itaku, Alf's attempts to hug him in an attempt to bond with him are literally pushed away, with Itaku choosing to run away instead, greatly saddening Alf.
• Red Riding Hood Replica: One NPC that can join your village is Robin, a girl in a red hood who wore a red fur hood gifted by her grandmother. Said grandmother was eaten by a big bad wolf, but with a hunter's assistance, she ate the wolf right back, for you to point out that she indirectly ate her grandma, to her disgust.
• Stat Grinding: You gain proficiency at skills by failing at them, which depends on RNG unless your skill level is high enough to prevent failing at it.
• Suffer the Slings: You can craft a sling, which uses rocks as ammo to hunt animals.
• Take Your Time: After you build a Mating Chamber, an Erectus attack will begin within the next few quest prompts. Though you can wait to take said prompts as long as you want since they won't advance until you press the quest button.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • You can catch the Sapien and Neanderthal couple, and tell on them to their villages, which Alf implies will get them both killed as punishment. When you make a village, one visitor named Abena can be personally killed by you to get his Shiny Stones. You can also refuse to give food to everyone who asks for it, including Kula's sister, and Kula's tribe later on (doing this will result in them all perishing later on).
  • You can also overwork Minion to the point his energy drops to the negatives, but his movement speed will be slowed down. There's even an achievement for that called "Oh my God! They killed Minion! You bastards!"
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Not feeding Kula's tribe to help them deal with the H. erectus attack will mean you won't get the support needed to fully fend off the H. erectus attack that you have to deal with later, leading to more of your property being raided and Alf's death.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: You need to assign Minion to gather food for you so you can cook them into meals, which restore your energy and his.
• You Have Researched Breathing: Downplayed example, as you start with 0.0 skill on everything, meaning that even simpler tasks like peeling an orange or banana has a chance to fail (also creates Goop in this case), until your skill is high enough to avoid this. Also justified since in the time this game takes place in, humans' crafting skills are primitive at best, with only few humans being experts at crafting.

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