But generic crafting systems are boring.
I mean, games these days (and even MMORPGS) are a dime a dozen - you probably start by crafting iron swords, then bronze swords, then mythril swords, then ...., and all these descriptions are set by the imms.
What makes 4D different from other visual and non visual games? For a start, we could allow players to set their own descriptions, and based on these descriptions, the algorithm would determine the "crafting" cost, based on the positivity / negativity / length / sentence structure of the descriptions.
Would it be open to abuse, and for people to make hackish items that sound negative, so as to get less cost? Yep, and that's a signal to improve the algorithm, or even better, promote: "Hey, we have really cool players who have weirdish sounding equipment that you can never find in other MUDs..."
Once, back me up on this.