This kind of took profit away from forgers. I know when I was a forger I made approx 400 credits by doing kata weapons.

I understand the frustration and all for monks finding a forger though, so I don't mind the change.

Don't use wood. Wood is one of the Most Used Comms and will probably be costlier than gold itself!

What might be a cheaper, more available, non-smeltable comm other than wood?

EDIT: Cloth and marble nekai? What about a "chintin" nekai made of 200 weevils?

Marble?

It makes me chuckle that Lusternians live in a world where wood is more valuable than marble.

In Lusternia, a stack of five sheets of paper would cost more than the Hope Diamond.

It's pretty common to see humorous incongruities like wood being more valuable than marble, silver being more valuable than gold, and silk being more valuable than sapphires in a massively multiplayer game.

Some of this is due to the fact that, in real life, we have no great love for common, functional tools and items, yet we will dig gigantic holes three miles underground to unearth metals and minerals for the sole purpose of staring at them (and, far more importantly from a historical perspective, as a way to show other human beings our wealth and status). It's somewhat reversed in a computer game, most times... everything's "for the stats" and then vanities come after that.

Given the many ways that even jewelry is "for the stats" here, I think it's less about that, and more about imbalances caused by things like jeweler's hammers existing without equivalents in most other crafts, the entirely arbitrary units for commodities and their equivalence when used in designs, and the fact that diamonds come from something even lowbies can find and kill, but wood comes only from something that many people consider sacred (even Avechna protects some of it!).

If the admins really wanted paper to cost less than diamonds, they could just make a 200cr Lumberjack's Axe which could only be used with the Chop skill (not as a weapon) but which produced twice as much lumber, and suddenly wood's availability would shoot up and prices would come down. It wouldn't take a lot of tweaks like that to make the relative values of the commodities approximate those in real life (though it'd only be an approximation).

Well, keep in mind my comments were of a more general nature, rather than being specifically aimed only at Lusternia. That being said, you're pretty much spot-on on all counts.

In Lusternia's case, yeah, it's pretty clear that the developers weren't really concerned with "realistic" supply quantities for most materials, which I actually consider to be the proper approach for a "nested planes of existence" high-fantasy setting. It's quite reasonable to say that some earth elemental-type creatures have diamonds encrusted in their bodies, whereas forests are jealously guarded by resident druids, making wood relatively scarce.

Of course, as you say, Lusternia (IRE in general?) went a step further and implemented arbitrary, abstract commodity units, which further exacerbates these quirks.

And that's why a simple dining room table is worth an entire rucksack full of diamond-and-gold jewelry!

Why was Alchemy effected by this? Or was it?

It was not.