Converterizer

From Hellgatewiki.com

Not the machine's actual name, but since no one seems to remember what it was called when it made its debut at the May 2007 Community Day, it'll do for now. This machine is basically a non-portable Horadric Cube -- raw materials go in, a finished product, usually a weapon, comes out. Various recipes are listed when you click on the machine in town, and all of them (as seen at community day 2007) required a lot of ingredients.

Testing revealed that weapons and armor could be "broken down" into raw materials by using the control on the new Interface Wheel. One rifle or pistol resulted in one unit of scrap metal, and the easiest recipes in the Converterizer required 50 units of scrap metal, and a handful of other raw materials that were obtained by breaking down other types of items.

As you can see from the recipes, these are long term projects; you don't leave town and return with enough materials to make three new rifles from scratch. The Converterizer is a gold sink and something you work at over the life of your character, consistently picking up junky items and breaking them down into raw materials for eventual reuse. Raw materials are very portable, auto-stacking up to 250 in just one inventory spot, and with the handy interface wheel items can be broken down as quickly as you can click the mouse twice.

October 2007 Update: This function seems to have been replaced by an NPC present in most stations. He/she has a list of items, usually of one type, that is randomly generated upon entering the station. As with the machine on community day, the items take a great deal of raw components to craft.