What a cool mechanic! Ever since I first learned how to play Minecraft, I've been strangely fascinated by the concept of discovering new crafting recipes by experimentation rather than by wiki page. The warmer-colder crafting hint system is really cool way to guide the player continuously toward the result rather than have it be complete guesswork. Once I figured out what was going on, I stopped referencing the guide you added at the bottom so I could discover for myself the recipes I hadn't memorized yet. I'm kind of wishing you hadn't put that there. I assume other people were getting confused?
I do have several complaints though:
- Recipes should not care where you place them on the grid. If I craft a health potion on the left side of the grid, it should work the same as if I put it in the middle. If this is an issue for the way the crafting hints system works, maybe you could make the hints only teach you how to make the centered potion, but still allow you to craft the potion in any orientation if you have the recipe memorized.
- When I saw the resistances/weaknesses graphic, I thought the up arrow meant "damage to this monster of this type will be increased". But it actually means that it has a resistance to that type. (Plus, it made sense to me than an electric fan should have a weakness to electricity, not a resistance.) Maybe use a shield icon to represent resistance instead of an up arrow.
- Instead of "39% fire rod", have the wording be "39% of a fire rod". I thought that message meant that it will function as a fire rod but only deal 39% of its normal damage or something.
- The enemy item slots are confusing. I have the resources to craft a large healing potion and a small healing potion, so I craft them both and send them as loot. But then the small potion replaces the large and overwrites it despite there being another open slot. Does each slot only carry certain types of items?
- Sending weapons as loot doesn't really make sense. The weapon won't be useful until the current enemy is defeated and you have no idea what weaknesses or resistances the next enemy will have. So having an enemy slot just for weapons seems especially pointless.
- My materials box kept getting filled with junk I didn't need when all I wanted was green blocks to craft health potions. Then when I did get a green block the box was so stuffed that I would get buggy behavior. I would grab two blocks at a time and that would cause one of the two blocks to be destroyed when I placed them. (On my winning run I got way more green than I needed. Maybe you could flatten the randomness a bit so you're guaranteed to get each block at least once every n dispenses.)
- The purple blocks were dirt useless since I never figured out what the glass potion does. On my winning run, I only ever kept one purple block in my materials box just so I could craft a lightning rod if I needed.
But even with all of those issues, I had a lot of fun with this! There were a lot of tense moments where I tried to craft something really fast in order to save my player. I just think that if the game was tutorialized a bit better and had fewer confusing UI design choices it might be easier to get into. Great work!