Diablo 3 Announces The Caravan

What is the caravan? Well basically it's taking a group of skilled craftsmen with you where ever you go. Rather than going back to a town you will have a living breathing camp that follows you from location to location giving you round the clock access to NPC's, quest givers and artisans.

Artisans will be your crafters, from blacksmiths to jewel crafters, and you will add these artisans to your Caravan as you travel the world, finding them through the main quest line. You will be working on gaining each artisan's loyalty by completing quest lines for each artisan while completing the main quest. So you are inherently working on a camp leveling system for your band of merry men, and with leveling comes upgrades. One of the great new features with the Caravan is that the artisans are fully visualized, so as you level up your artisan, the area around them will change and upgrade as well. (see video below)

Skilling up your artisans will unlock unique recipes, granting your character access to benefits that may not be found anywhere else in the world. The blacksmith crafts weapons and armor, and can add sockets to some items. The mystic creates scrolls, potions, magical weapons, spell runes, and charms, and can also enchant items. The jeweler crafts gems , amulets, and rings. The jeweler can also remove gems from socketed items and can combine gems to improve their quality.

Now here's the kicker, while you're out gallivanting around with the legion of the burning hells you will collect loot (duh!) but the loot you don't need can be broken down into salvaged raw materials. With these salvaged materials you can give them to your artisans and have them craft or enchant items for you. The higher level the loot, the higher level of raw materials you can salvage.

I know what you're asking now, how can I salvage these items, well during your main quest you will find an item, and this item will allow you to break down loot that you find in your journeys. The best part is that this item takes up no inventory space, so you no longer have to leave loot you want to sell on the ground and keep going back to pick it up later.

As everyone knows that one of Diablo's key features is looting, it's what you do, kill baddies, loot bodies, upgrade your toon. Blizzard has taken what they have learned with previous systems (World of Warcraft) and added in the crafting mechanic to give another in-depth layer to the looting system.

Professions add depth to the item collection game play that drives the action of Diablo III. We want to provide players with an alternative way to acquire gear, potions, and other randomly found items. We also want to provide additional forms of customization for players -- adding jewels, enchants, or sockets to existing gear allows players to further tailor their characters. Many rare crafting recipes and materials are only found as world drops, enhancing the item acquisition process by increasing the diversity of items dropped by monsters.

Check out the video below for an in depth look at the crafting system. I for one like the idea of having an alternative to stuffing my bags full of useless loot, just so I can vendor it later. I've really enjoyed Blizzard's use of a crafting system, and this implementation sounds like another layer to an already addictive game. Well played Blizzard.