Okay just another edition, I've tried Erion's crafting system, and it's actually really fun. There is woodworking, leather crafting, mining, smelting, gem crafting and then a unified crafting skill which incorporates all of them.
The first thing I like, is that you can gather resources literally anywhere, any corpse can be skinned, and lots of different tiles have clusters of ore to mine, meaning that you can do it as you explore the game.
At the moment the only place to find a tanning vat for making leather or crucibles and an anville for smithing is in the craft hall, but presumably others will be coming soon.
The second thing I like, is the way crafting works, since rather than having a bunch of different skills to make items, basically you gather resources, and then craft them with one crafting skill.
What I mean is, say you want to make a sword, you first look at the requirements, which might involve steell and leather, you then go out and get the materials, and then just "craft sword" when you've got everythinng.
The skills also hit that balance of requiring you to interact, without being super complex, so for example, whilst mining you'll need to occasionally clear dirt from clusters of ore, and smelting you'll need to stoke the fire under your crucible and occasionally skim off the dross from the smelting ore.
Indeed, in another more recent skill, Fishing, Erion has one of the better fishing systems I've seen in a mud, including having to jiggle the hook to attract fish, throw chum into the water, and check the state of the fish as a hole. What's also cool is both crafting and fishing give you experience for doing them. You probably would get a wee bit board advancing through crafting alone, Erion is a combat game after all, but it is a nice alternative if you get sick of slaying things.
There is also potion crafting in the game which requires recipes, though I've not got into that myself.
The only thing I don't like, is that at the moment when your felling axe or pickaxe break, there is no way to repaird without the repair skill, and since up to now the repare skill has been a very rare one in the game, this can make crafting mildly frustrating at times, since you keep needing to run back to the craft hall to get your gear fixed.
hopefully though the system will be expanded in the future, indeed with it's pregenerated quests and the like, I'd love to see Erion include crafting bounties in the future.
I also suspect cooking and maybe other skills will be coming but we'll have to see.
As it is though, this is a great edition to the game.
With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)