Recipe discovery
 

One of the things that really intrigues me about p1999, and Green in particular is the possibility of "discovering" recipes semi-legit, instead of just using wiki. The wiki gives all of the recipes, but I have searched all over the web and simply cannot find where these came from.
Yeah, you can get the basic books for most crafts very easily. But I remember the first time on blue when I "discovered" the recipe for bags simply by going to Rivervale and buying a book there. That is truly like a real RPG in my opinion, discovering something in game that describes the game itself.

After that, I was always curious how ALL of the recipes were initially discovered. Where did all of accumulated knowledge come from? Baking is not a problem. Those books seem to be everywhere and very common. But tailoring knowledge seems to be spread out a bit, and blacksmithing seems downright mystic. I cannot find a link to a book that describes the recipe for creating an enchanted sword, for example.

Where are the books, the NPC text, and the quests that give this knowledge about "something deeper"?

It's like watching "The Matrix". You can only see it for the first time once. Oh, to be able to play Everquest with NO ONE knowing any of the wiki stuff. But alas, that cannot be, but I want to be able to find out how the knowledge was found out.

The devs played the game

Same way epics were figured out, a lot of the stuff NPC's said really didn't make sense where to go next or what to turnin. Ive done the druid epic a couple times [On P99 alone] and I think its the gnome in OT? Who doesn't even say shit when you hail him. As Kavious said, a lot of dev's played, its how word of mouth spread for epics and they were figured out back in the day.

In live the the orc apprentices would drop those illegible scrolls in commons lands. You could get them translated in south ro if i rem correctly and you would occasionally get recipe books. Never did this enough to see if new recopies books would be given out thought.

Yes, I understand that there was a lot of knowledge already known and spread by word of mouth. But, the recipes cannot simply fall from the sky. They must be discoverable somehow. I never have found information that tells how to discover them. The wiki lists the recipes, but not the source.

See, now that is the kind of info I am looking for. Those scrolls must be for something, but who turns them in anymore? If they contain recipes (sometimes), then it adds (for me) a whole new depth to the game.

That is super cool, I never knew!

the animated hand in unrest drops books which have tons of recipes in them

Not necessarily. While many recipes were figured out from in-game books, NPCs, and other clues, some recipes may have been revealed by GMs and guides. It’s also possible that some recipes were discovered by trial and error, but the chances of that seem low. It probably happened, though.

could have sworn eqtraders corner <or whatever it was called> forums had info on where all the known recipes came from.