ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

It's a hidden gotcha in the Technomancer evolution: by the time you have the prodigy point to buy the evolution, you'll probably no longer be able to find the amethyst you need to make your arcane dynamo. Mana coils have sort of the opposite problem: even if you find the recipe early, you can't make one until you can get your hands on a sapphire.

I really should have fixed this by now, so without further ado, I present my new Tinker Gem Flexibility addon. For now we use the same gem progression for both: agate, amethyst, emerald, sapphire, pearl (which leaves both of them with their original gem ingredient at the appropriate tier). And I have no idea whether there are any other tinker recipes that would benefit from similar treatment; here would be a good place to suggest those.

And no, this obviously isn't going into ZOmnibus.

[Implementation notes:]

Frequently Asked Questions:

Why do this?

Most tinker recipes in Embers of Rage that use a gem as an ingredient require a different gem for different tiers of the tinker; a tier-1 Focus Lens, for instance, requires a citrine, while a tier-5 Focus Lens requires a diamond. There are two exceptions, both causing minor annoyance:

• Mana Coil requires a sapphire for all tinker tiers, meaning that even if you find the tinker recipe early, you can't actually make a mana coil until later in the game when tier-4 gems start dropping.
• Arcane Dynamo from the Technomancer class evolution requires an amethyst for all tinker tiers; by level 25, though, you're probably past the stage of the game when tier-2 gems regularly drop, so if you didn't have the foresight to keep an amethyst, you may not be able to make your arcane dynamo at all.

We fix this by altering these recipes to use different gems at different tiers. Currenly both Mana Coil and Arcane Dynamo follow the same progression, requiring an agate at tier 1, through amethyst, emerald, sapphire, and finally a pearl at tier 5.