Crafting as it is is… well boring, and overly easy, especialy crafts like Engineering which only require one resource to level up, that is one of the easier resources to get.
That being said, I think it would be nice to shake it up a bit, well not changing things too heavily.
Crafts as it stands are
Fabrication
Weaponsmithing
Armorsmithing
Medicine
Engineering
Cooking exists but is not in yet so we will ignore it for now.
Weaponsmithing
So firstly, I think that we need to not have the low tier melee weapons be Vibro weapons, I think that should come later, and give them an appropriate damage boost, on that same token however, they should require power packs from the Fabrication line. This would make weaponsmithing, especialy higher level weaponsmithing reliant on Engineering, and Fabrication for parts, making it a bigger investment or encouraging player trading.
Armorsmithing, some armors simply should need metals, which would work well to make them want to work with Engineering, you could also make some higher tier powered armors as those exist in setting for some crossovers with Fabrication.
Medicine could be made to cross over with cooking once it is implemented, and if more is needed you could put hypodermics into engineering if you really wanted to but that might just give engineering too much, you could also have it cross over with weapons for hypodermics.
Fabrication. I have honestly not gone much into fabrication, but it feels like it should need stuff from every craft depending on what you are making, if you want to make metal structures you absolutely need Engineering, if you want to make a turret it should need blaster parts, an armored structure could borrow reinforcements from the armor tree, ect. There are options.
And finaly engineering, engineering is way too self contained, I think blasters need to have power cells from probably fabrication as that is what is currently used for such thing, as well as needing power cells for things like harvesters and the like.
However, as a more drastic change let’s look at refining.
Currently only metals need to be refined. That could be changed.
Currently we have
Metals, Organics, Electronics, Power Cores, and Leather.
I would say make everything require some kind of refining or processing.
Metals could goto weaponsmithing, IE move smelting into a weaponsmithing craft.
Organics can goto Cooking, and would give people a way t o raise it well waiting for the craft to be fully implamented.
Electronics should goto engineering
Power stuff should goto Fabrication
And Leather should goto Armorsmithing.
Then there can be more crossover between things, like some armors require metal, well some weapons could be made to require, leather, or power.
The end goal would be to make it so you want to work with others instead of having largely insular crafts.