To start with, crafting (of any kind) is a totally inappropriate game mechanic for Elite at its current stage of development. Why? Because Elite has no concept of personal inventory, no concept of "tools," and no system of materials or ingredients other than the crap they shoehorned in just now to force their Engineers idea to work. You want to know how a decent, rudimentary crafting system should work? Look at No Man's Sky. In that game, everything is made of *something,* all of those somethings can be useful, and different locations have different types and quantities of Somethings which require varying degrees of time and skill to acquire. As your toolset progresses you become better able to harvest the different somethings from the different places, and this in turn allows you to expand your toolset even further. You modify your spacesuit to explore toxic environments, you modify your jump drive to travel further, you modify your multitool to break down harder substances or shoot more dangerous monsters, which in turn yields rarer and more potent materials for crafting yet better equipment. Crafting flows into exploration flows into combat flows into crafting again. None of it is a side activity it is all gameplay.
Or look at minecraft. Or space engineers. Or better yet look at *modded* minecraft: the Tinker's Construct mod is a perfect template for how a weapons and equipment upgrade system should work. Or look at Thaumcraft for another inspiring example.
Now look at Elite. It doesn't have the systems to support a good crafting experience. It's gameworld is static and insubstantial. There is no persistence from one place to another, and everything, everywhere, is essentially a randomly spawned isolated event with no connection to anything else whatsoever. In-game crafting mechanics, when they work well, are compelling because they highlight and accentuate the interconnectedness of the ALREADY INTERCONNECTED systems in the game. Elite doesn't have any tightly interconnected systems. There *are* some *loosely* interconnected systems: PowerPlay and the BGS. But these systems are opaque, inconsequential, and heavily reliant on RNG.
The what, when, where, and why of almost every "event" that you will experience in Elite, is the result of a dice roll. The gameworld functions like a boardgame in most respects. You land on a given space, roll the dice, and see what happens. Sometimes it's space pirates. Sometimes it's a distress signal. Sometimes it's a canister of coffee floating out in the void. There is nothing you can do and no place you can go to influence this dynamic; all you can do is Deal With It.
And that in itself is OK. Boardgames can be fun, sophisticated even. But they can't simulate a living world very well and they can't accommodate a crafting system. The best you can do is give people lots of different powerups, which is what the 2.1 update does.
You want a compelling system of Crafting and Tinkering for Elite? Sorry, but you have to do the real work of making an interconnected world of systems first. Once you do that, you can add a good crafting mechnic, although at that point you might not even need it. If you don't lay down a solid foundation where your world has Place and Materiality, then "crafting" is always going to end up with social-media style cell-phone game mechanics like we're seeing now.
