At higher levels, forge talisman in UL could pretty much feed itself.  A smith could spit out pretty much everything he needed with a minimal amount of time, especially if he was in a sanctuary and had no fear of collapse.

In reclamation, I think you need to include another factor other then just straight cost.  How about a raw material item that is used in forging.  I have an idea for one, essence shards.

Essence shards are items with varying strengths, much like a mare essence talisman, (entrap mare in UL can produce superior essences).  The way to get shards is through a rudimentary dreamsmith art, "Salvage" using this art breaks any talisman, including essence talismans, into essence shards.  The quality of the shard is based off of the quality of the item and the level of Salvage art used.  Shards always have a power of at least 1.  The efficiency of the art is a percentage directly related to the level of the art.  I will note you can even power tokens from houses should be salvageable, giving a house a means to stoke a depleting armory by sacrificing strength.

Essence shards, of course, are not subject to recharge, though combining talismans works upon two shards for one who wants to conserve pack space.

There's two ways we can go about essence shard and forging, I shall call it the easy, and complex system.  I'll leave it up to the powers that be if they decide that any of this is a good idea to decide on what one to go with.

The easy way, all essence shards are the same with the exception of power.  When you forge an item, the quality of the item creates a multiplier which is mutiplied by the intended amount of charges.  The art then begins deducting that much out of the shards in your inventory.  So let us suppose you are trying to make a chakram who's options give a multiplier of 2, and your intended charges are 20, giving a total cost of 40.  Now let us suppose you have 5 shards in your pack, one has 15 charges, one has 5 charges, one has 10 charges, one has 7, and the final one has 13.  The art would go down the the list of shards, vaporize the first 4 shards by using up all their charges and then the final one gets drained of all by 3, and you successfullly forge the chakram.  If you salvage the chakram with a salvage art level of 50, you'd only get 1/2 of the materials used to create it and end up with a single essence shard with a rating of 20.

The complicated way has essence shards comming in 5 flavors; will, resilience, insight, lucidity, dreamsoul.  When making an item, the art would decide how much is needed basewise, like above, but then it would split up the result among the elements depending on a table of item compositions hidden away amongst the code.  Let's say, for example, that a chakram requires 50/50 dreamsoul and the keyed element, and this smith was making a fatesender chakram, he'd have to have 20 worth of dreamsoul shards and 20 worth of lucidity shards.

Salvaging items in this system would depend on the target, regular talismans would break down into a fraction of their base components.  Dreamer essences would give you results based on the levels of the dreamer's elements and orbit.  Nightmare essences would be a random grabbag, power tokens would give you an equal amount of everything.  In this system I would strongly suggest that one would have the salvage art automatically fuse the result with any existing shards of that type in the dreamer's pack, otherwise the dreamer will run out of space VERY fast if he's salvaging some complex items.

The end result is to force a smith to get up and do some scrounging prior to any forging binge, which should hypothetically put a bottleneck on how fast he can spit out items.  The idea is to adjust the rates for each item during beta and how much he getes from various sources until what a smith can produce fits a nice comfortable model. 

Of course the ability to forge items using essence derived from dreamer and mare essences should raise several moral questions, which is all something I consider a bonus of this system.

Awesome idea. Kind of reminds me of Star Trek Voyager using replicator shards to create food and such in the replicator, by putting in useless objects to make the food with. :D With something like this in the game, Forge could really be unlocked as a powerful art and still be balanced by needing more than just the necessary DreamSoul to evoke. I really like it.

Only suggestion is about the charges. I think the system should be the same as UL with the charges, where they equal the level of the art. Seers with Recharge would be a much easier alternative than wasting shards on putting more charges on a forged object. Then again, forging it would defeat the risk of recharge vaping the item. Its an idea to toss around though.

One thing that almost scares me though about shards is how easily this could be used as a money system in the game. Imagine folks trading, saying "I'll give you 50 shards for a Fastest 40 Gold Tan!" That's potentially dangerous to this game if we're trying to stay away from any type of money system. One way to defeat this is for any Salvaged essence shards to be non-transferable, as in only the Salvager can have it. Kind of like how we evoke our blade, if you try to drop or give it, it vapes.

The thing is, shards are only useful to forge.  In the past a few times DoL did try to work with mare essences as a form of currency for buying supplies as a means of encouraging fence sitting freespirits to give their hard earned mare essences to DoL.  So it isn't the first time an odd item would be used in barter.  The thing that is interesting in UL and in reclamation is nothing is specifically denoted as "money" therefore items have their own intrinsic values which develop among the players and barter systems build up from the ground up.  If shards get a value it'd be a natural development instead of this "ok, we are going to make this otherwise worthless item useful because we say it is worth something."

As for charges, I never said forge had no limit on the charges.  I just said shard cost is factored by the charges of the item you are creating.  So, a low levelsmith who is making weak items of low charges will be working with very small amounts of dreamshards.  I was concentrating primarily on this system and adding it on to forge.

Now, for an interesting expansion on this idea, how about this little idea.  How about when you forge, a box appears in the dialog where you can drag and drop additional item(s).  Items on top of the shard cost though would be optional and the affect would be slight with common items and you'd need a rather rare item to do something actually useful.

An example, since all smiths are their own focus, we can presume focus does not affect color choices.  But, what if the type of item you were fashioning affected the colors you could select.  Now, what if you could drop a weak elemen into the recipie and it would unlock the colors keyed to it's element, broadening your choice of colors on the fly.  Or possibly, have it so when you drop a mare essence into the mix the item takes on an organic look with nasty boney spikes everywhere, and your color selection becomes limited to fetid black and decay brown, (A must for all those sinister fashion conscious people out there).  Those are just cosmetic changes for real simple items.  Now, if the smith had his hands on, well lets presume tehthu exists and the smith had tehthu's essence, perhaps dropping it in the mix would cause the weapon damage to go real wide but deam heavier damage then any other weapon of it's level.

It would be interesting under that system if Lyra had a means of flagging essences from particular individuals (largely dark mares and GM type chars in rather elaborate rp's) to have special potency in item creation, yet that sort of stuff WOULD raise moral questions, which is always interesting in a game like this.

Basically though, all the recipie extras wouuld be undocumented stuff for the smith to explore with and toy around to make unique items with a bit of scrounging.