Honestly, I really loved the game in the beginning, but the extreme grind becomes rather annoying, especially when it becomes complicated and confusing due to heavy backtracking.
But even worse is that often resources simply disappear, the ones that you craft and also the ones that you buy.
I love crafting, but when it becomes grindy and buggy, it is a real turn-off.
The characters, story, world-building -- everything is great, thus makes it even sadder.
the game is much less focused on crafting after the first chapter, and chances to find complex items (chemicals for example) were added.
items are removed if they are components for missions that you complete, if they are ingredients for something that you craft, if they are used in a combat and in the start of a new chapter. there are no known bugs that make your items just disappear. i recommend joining the discord server and write there what exactly happened in your game.
"the game is much less focused on crafting after the first chapter ..."
That's good to know. Again -- I like the game very much, otherwise I wouldn't care and simply move on.
I think the story can't develop properly when every tiny piece of dialogue is followed by 45 minutes of collecting and crafting (and yes, I visited every location each day in order to find characters to whom I could talk).
At the end of chapter 1, I'm surrounded by a dozen notepads, all of them covered with my tiny handwriting, just to be able to do the crafing. It's exhausing. I'd love to replay to explore Britt's feminine side, but the sheer thought of doing all that collecting and crafting again is enough to refrain from it.
About the bug I mentioned -- I remember at least one of them in detail:
For the birthday, I bought the cake first, but hadn't enough money for the bike, so I waited to earn enough to be able to buy the jam and the bike. When I saved enough for the 2 items, the cake had disappeared from my inventory and as far as I know, there's no crafting recipy that needs cake.
most of the crafts are the same in the next chapters, so you just get used to them. its hard to remember them in the first run of the first chapter. the Ch1 quick guide.pdf that is available for download with the chapter contains a table with the crafting recipes.
i am not sure about the cake- i checked and there is no part of the code where it is removed in this chapter other than for this mission. usually its the beer that players notice which is used for both tyr's missions and erland's mission. in later chapters the missions dont show partial completion for having consumable items in your bag.
