via Eurogamer

Tabula Rasa systems designer Mike Moore has laid out sweeping changes to the game's crafting system in a post on the official site.

Crafting is one of the most criticised aspects of Richard Garriott's sci-fi MMO. As it stands, advancing your character's crafting skills requires assigning skill points that could otherwise be used for combat effectiveness, meaning crafting is usually done late in the game on "clone" characters or not at all.

This restriction will be lifted, Moore revealed, along with a host of others that make the game's crafting $#@!bersome and complex. The list of recipes will be streamlined, and there will be a new "currency" or resource for crafting to make it easier to understand.

Characters will now be able to modify their own equipment instead of constantly transferring back and forth to a crafting clone. The overall aim is to make crafting easier to understand and more accessible.

However, this will not happen in one major update; as has been the case with Tabula Rasa to date, changes will happen gradually over time. "Let me make clear from the get-go that the upcoming changes to Crafting are intended to be incremental," said Moore.

"We aren't going to publish this as a massive, game-changing update. Instead, we're going to make small changes over a few upcoming publishes. The idea is to ease TR into a new and improved Crafting system rather than throwing it off the deep end," he added.

By the sound of it the changes will eradicate one of our major bugbears with Tabula Rasa, so as far as we're concerned they can't come soon enough.