From Today's Q&A

I’d like to allow any gear to reverse engineer for discoveries, but there’s a limit to how many recipes players can acquire. We’re looking at ways to improve that and apply systems more universally, but it’s not currently possible. Only Campaign can be reverse engineered because if we make both a Campaign and Black Hole a reverse engineering recipe, they will be the same result with different names but they will both count against the upper limits.

Bolding mine.

Does anyone know what the limit is?

well right now for armormech < level 50 you have (2 weights)*(7 slots)*2-3 (flavors) each level*(~11 levels of gear)*(17 RE'ed versions) + [40ish orange versions] + [(22 augment levels) * (4 flavors) * (3 RE levels)]+[350ish (per askmrrobot.com) level 50+ schems] = nearly 7200. I would imagine that I have over only 600+ by now.

Each person's recipe library would have to require significant amounts of information to be cached in whatever instance the player is in. That could be considerable amounts of data that would be filtered and queried regularly with the most recent filter (or at least the database query) requiring cacheing.

This does give me a suggestion idea though...Craftable Schematic Holodisks...more to come in a separate thread.

This does give me a suggestion idea though...Craftable Schematic Holodisks...more to come in a separate thread.

Or let us unlearn a schematic, there really is no reason to craft low level gear once you hit 50 (not even for alts or guild mates), it takes money away from people leveling still and crafting gear their level to make money on the GTN.

I thought I read somewhere that the non-trainer schematic "limit" is around 100, but it might have been in reference to a bug causing people with more than 100 learned schematics to be bugged when opening the crafting window.

I've got a little over 60 orange schems learned, and 10 blue schems learned for my 400 armormech and my 400 synthweaver. I'm going to slow down on learning any newly acquired schematics, I don't want to hit that 100 schematic level and find out that I'm affected by the bug too.

Or let us unlearn a schematic, there really is no reason to craft low level gear once you hit 50 (not even for alts or guild mates), it takes money away from people leveling still and crafting gear their level to make money on the GTN.

I disagree with this. I find the lower level orange schematics worth more than the higher level ones, especially once the class restrictions are taken away. They're easier to craft multiples of to crit and you can outfit your toons early on, especially if you happen to like how some of the lower level designs look.

If i had to make a educated guess, I'd go for a power of two and have a limit around 1024 schematics. This is just a guess though.

Technically, there could be no upper limit but an artificial limit was set to solidify stubility of the crafting schematic system. An artifical limit would also keep loading lag of said system within reason. If object oriantated programming is being used a long with memory arrays, there is only so much you want to load at once or even store in system memory.

Being a 32bit peice of software there is also a limit on how much system memory the OS can alucate to the game.. i believe the limit was around 3GB.. even if you have 16GB system memory the game is still limited. Of course to get around this teh game itself could detect how much system memory you have and if you do indeed have 8, 12, or 16GB memory it, itself, could create a RAMdrive to store highly accessed data - this would bypass the 32bit limit.

As far as we know though, TOR dose not do this (nor dose any mmo or game). It would be awesome if they did since, as of patch 1.2, we are loading all resources from scratch every zone. Pre-1.2 you could of disabled the splashscreen and zone faster and when changing characters, change before the game unloaded resources making total character swap times under 10 seconds (thats on my 7 year old computer).

Ahh well..

tl;dr - My guess is the limit is around 1024 schematics and is artificially limited to optimize the sub-system. The game is 32bit this it has memory restictions and you don't want to store huge chunks of crafting data in limited memory. A ram drive could be created by the game to store this data as long as the game can detect the end-user has extra system memory to use.

I'd assume/hope the "known schematics" are simply bitflags. As such it would/should be fairly trivial to make it as large as you want. ('Course, also means each character would be storing "worst case" for whatever his crewskill is)

Now, displaying all of them... that'd be a different problem. And if they decided to keep track of number of RE attempts, or crafting attempts on a per item basis or something in order to cutshort long failure streaks? That'd get messy...

I have over 1400 schematics on my armormech so far.

True true - I forgot that there are several schematics per base schematics. To save a ton of database space all the derived should just be another "variable-switch or setting" in the root schematic object.

Example: you have 3 green schematics that you learned all the possible derived schematics from, you'd have something like 45 total schematics. If all derived schems were just nested in the root schematic object, the total would be 3 unique schematics. Sure these objects would be slightly larger memory wise but they would be significantly smaller then 45 unique schematics.

How dose Bioware store their schematics objects.. No one knows. So right now either 3 unique schematics or 45 unique schematics is the correct answer using the above example. :-/

From Today's Q&A

 

 

 

Bolding mine.

 

Does anyone know what the limit is?

im more concerned about the "cant learn black hole" schems since i've been re'ing earpieces trying to get something worth selling as a cybertech.

How poorly designed this game is...

A better approach would be to show all the green/base values first (simple query) . At selection, query again to get the rest of the known set for said base schem. How taxing could that possibly be? Hell, even if the ENTIRE schem list was an XML dump, it's not hard to store that and reference it.

Seems like a string of rookie mistakes OR epic limitation due to the off the shelf engine.

Swijr

Or let us unlearn a schematic, there really is no reason to craft low level gear once you hit 50 (not even for alts or guild mates), it takes money away from people leveling still and crafting gear their level to make money on the GTN.

This! Until I hit level 35, I was purchasing all the schematics for my Bounty Hunter. I highly doubt I will be making any Assault Cannons any time soon as there hasn't been much call for them on the Imperial side so far.

How about, when opening the crafting table, having each category "minimized". Then the player can open the category they want to look at. As it is, the first thing I do I try to minimize each category to reduce the amount of loading time, and the size of the scroll window in general. Then I open up the category I am working in. Right now, my Cybertech and Biochem crafting windows are absolutely huge, and I dont even have all the earpieces learned.

Bioware would have to make the minimized categories more evident, as many players would freak out when they opened the table and found no schematics loading. But they would get used to it.

My statement wasn't very clear. The schematic limit doesn't affect you in game, and never will. You can acquire every single schematic available to your skill plus all research variants without issue.

The limit I was referring to is a very soft internal cap that could cause problems if we suddenly increased the possible schematics you can acquire by a factor of 20, but it would still not impact you.