AC2:Crafting 2.0 - The Ultimate Newbie Guide
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Crafting 2.0 - The Ultimate Newbie Guide
General Concepts
Crafting Towns, New Forge Concept
There are now six “crafting towns” – these are Cragstone, Cavendo, Ikeras, Hakata, Linvak Tukal, and Ondekodo. Only these towns have workshops and forges.
Workshops and forges also work differently from the Craft 1.0 forges. You no longer need to put fuel into them to make them work better. They are always at full power. But they no longer add a bonus, either. Instead, you are now required to be near an appropriate type of workshop or forge in order to make different types of items. This means you can no longer craft swords in the wilderness – you must be near a forge in order to even try to craft an item.
The main reason for these changes is simple: it helps bring people together. Crafters will go to town to craft, and other players will go there to buy things (because that’s where the crafters are). Since the new crafting system relies on cooperation to a much greater extent than the previous system, it makes sense for the game to help get people into the same area.
Craft XP (CXP)
In the old craft system, you improved your abilities by practicing recipes. This is still true, in general, but there is a new underlying system called Craft XP.
Whenever you use a Craft Skill, you earn CXP. 80% of the CXP you earn is automatically put towards the skill you used. So if you earn 10 CXP by butchering a corpse, 8 CXP will automatically go towards your next point of Butchery Skill. The other 2 CXP will go into your “free pool.” You can spend the CXP in your free pool on any crafting skill you want.
Unlike the old craft system, there are no more “tiers” of crafted items. There are far fewer recipes now, but those recipes can be automatically scaled to make items for any level between 1 and 150.
Learning Levels
When you start crafting on a particular day, your character will be ripe and ready to learn new things about crafting. But if you use the same crafting skill many times in the same day, at some point your character will stop being able to take it all in. After that, if you keep practicing the same craft skill that day, you will only earn 75% of the CXP you normally would earn. If you keep practicing more anyway, that number will eventually drop to 50% CXP, and even to 25% CXP.
This number is called your Learning Level, and you can check it any time in the Craft UI. (The game also informs you whenever you reach a reduced learning level for a given skill.)
Don’t be too worried about the Learning Levels – you have to work pretty hard for many hours to reach a reduced Learning Level. And I have a hard time imagining anyone being able to craft enough to reach the 25% Learning Level… it would be very difficult to reach that.
Also, the Learning Level for one skill doesn’t affect another skill. So if you do reach a lower Learning Level for one craft skill, you can simply switch to practicing a different craft skill.
The Learning Level resets itself the next day. (Technically speaking, the Learning Level for a particular skill resets to 100% exactly 22 hours after you first used the skill the previous day.)
Crafter Titles
Crafters who are moderately good in at least one craft skill will have a Crafting Title. You can see this title by examining a player. The titles range from things like “Initiate Crystallographer” to “Legendary Lumberjack”, and everything in between.
If you’re good at several skills, the game will pick the skill you’re best at, taking into account how difficult those skills are. If you’re really good at several different skills, you might also end up with a hybrid title – for instance, someone who is good at iron mining, lumberjacking, and silver mining might end up with the “Delver” title, indicating they’re generally good at mining skills.
Conversion from Old to New
If you did any crafting in the old system, you’ll also be given some Craft Experience Points (CXP) to spend in the new crafting system. You will get a little bit of CXP for each time you created an item that counted towards mastery of a recipe in the old system. So you get CXP for the first 25 successful items made towards the mastery of Tier 10 swords,
Craft Skill Resets
As soon as you log in and receive your converted CXP, you will have two hours to play around with crafting skills. You can spend your converted CXP however you want; during this period you can use /craftskills reset at any time to reset your skills back to normal. After the two hours are up, you will no longer be able to use this command.
You can’t use the /craftskills reset command if you didn’t get any conversion CXP.
Old Tools and Motes Destroyed
The old tools and motes are not compatible with the new system. To avoid technical problems, these items must be destroyed when you log in. (You will be refunded the gold cost of the tools.)
Care Package
As an extra little help to get crafters situated in the new system, you will also receive a bit of raw material. For every 50 CXP you are awarded from the conversion, you will get one unit of each of the five basic mined material types (but not butchered material). Our hope is that this raw material will help you play with the system and get your bearings quicker. It won’t last you for too long, though – you’ll soon have to rely on the materials-gathering skills.
Materials-Gathering Skills
The first thing you’ll notice about the new system is that items no longer have crafting traits. (All your old items will remain unaffected, except that they will no longer have trait amounts.)
So you no longer need to collect treasure items in order to create a crafted item. Instead, you must use several other Craft Skills to get the job done. The first thing to do is to make a survey-map, and then follow that map to find a supply of materials.
Surveying
Surveying is the art of creating surveyor’s maps that lead you to a lot of raw material. It’s easy to make a successful map – Dereth is rich in resources, and you can find a vein of raw material pretty easily. (In game terms, it takes 0 skill to make a surveying map.) However, finding a GOOD supply is harder. The higher your Surveying score, the better the results will be when you eventually find your vein.
You can make one map for each continent every 15 minutes. However, if you find your destination quicker than 15 minutes, you can make a new map immediately. (The 15 minute timer is just there to keep people from making hundreds of maps at once.) Also, maps can not be given to others, so if you want to be a miner, you’ll also need to become a surveyor, since you have to make your own maps.
Once you’ve created a map for one of the five types of resources (on the continent you prefer), you need to follow the map to find the resource. The map will specify the general vicinity of where you should go (there are many different possible areas, chosen randomly). But you don’t have to walk the whole way there. In each of the crafting towns is an NPC who will happily teleport you to the general area where your mine is located. Just hand them the map, and you’ll be sent to the right part of the continent.
From there, you’ll need to follow your map to the destination. But surveying maps are rough data, and aren’t as easy to follow as a modern-day roadmap. So when you use your map, you don’t get compass directions telling you where to go – instead, you’ll get a message explaining where you think you are on the map. Here are some examples:
“You’re not too far from the map’s destination, and you feel you’re headed in the right direction.”
“You're somewhere within the map's borders, but you're sure that you were much closer before.”
“You're outside the borders of the map.”
“You're close to the map's destination, and you're about as close as you were before.”
Notice how these messages actually have two parts. The first part gives you your general bearings: very far away, somewhere in between, or close by. (There are actually many ranges between “hot” and “cold.”) The second part of the message tells you how you think you’re progressing since the last time you checked your map. So if you wander around for a minute and then check again, it will tell you if you’ve gotten closer or not since the last time you checked.
Reading these cues correctly is a real-life skill that you will need to develop in order to mine efficiently. At first, it may take you quite a while to finally find the destination –ten or fifteen minutes might be required the first few times. However, as you learn how the system works, you’ll quickly get better at reading the cues from the map. A practiced map-reader is able to find their target in five minutes, and someone who has followed hundreds of maps will get even faster than that. (We have no idea how fast an expert map-cue-reader can get; none of us are experts yet!)
Once you’ve found the destination, you use the map one final time, and instead of getting another clue, the resource appears in front of you, and the surveying map disappears. You’ve found it, time to mine it for raw materials! You (and only you) can mine it three times before it disappears. So let’s talk about the mining skills!
Woodcutting
Crystal Mining
Stone Mining
Silver Mining
Iron Mining
These are the Craft Skills that you use to mine the different types of veins. You will be able to use the mine three times before it is dried up. Each time you use it, you will get some motes of raw material. How much material? That depends on several factors:
Total amount per swing = Continent Mod + Surveying Bonus + Tool Bonus + (chance to double the yield based on appropriate Mining skill)
Continent Mod: this is the basic amount of trait you get when you swing. The higher level continents have a slightly higher base amount, to reward intrepid miners who choose to hunt on those more dangerous continents. However, the difference is small enough that a miner could stay on Osteth forever, just mining there if they so chose. Osteth’s Continent Mod is 25; Omishan’s is 30; Linvak’s is 35.
Surveying Bonus: depending on how high your surveying skill is, you will receive up to 40 extra ore per swing.
Tool Bonus: depending on how good your tool is, you will receive up to 50 extra trait per swing.
Chance to Double: The higher your skill is in the appropriate Mining skill for this mine, you have a chance to pull a critical success and get double the ore. The chance goes up to 33%.
So you can see that the tool bonus is the largest modifier. Great tools yield great results. But only experts can wield the very best tools! You can’t expect to give a delicate precision instrument to a rank amateur. In game terms, this is modeled by skill restrictions on the tools. The higher your Crystal Mining skill, the better the chisel you can wield. The higher your Woodcutting skill, the better the hatchet you can use. And so on. So increasing the mining skills (and Woodcutting) have two effects: they allow you to use better tools, and they also increase your chance of doubling your yields.
There are two other types of materials-gathering skills. The first is a sort of middle-management process called Refining.
Runewood Refining
Moonglass Refining
Dramastic Refining
Steel Refining
Tukalite Refining
Refining isn’t needed for low-level items. Early-level items simply need raw materials mined straight from the earth. But higher-level items (level 35+ weapons and armor, and high-level tools) require more advanced materials. These materials are made by refining two raw materials into a new substance.
Runewood = Stone and Wood
Moonglass = Silver and Crystal
Dramastic = Iron and Silver
Steel = Wood and Iron
Tukalite = Crystal and Stone
In order to make Runewood, Moonglass, Dramastic, Steel, or Tukalite, you’ll need some of both raw materials that make up that item. Then you visit a Refining Workshop. There are six of these in the world, two on each continent. The ones on Osteth are in Cavendo and Cragstone. When you’re near a Refining Workshop, you’ll be able to use the Refining Recipes. These recipes take an equal amount of trait of both types, and turn it into the refined trait. All Refining recipes come in 100-, 500- and 2500-unit variants (to speed up the Refining process.) Refining recipes never fail – you’ll always get some trait back. But the higher your skill, the more trait you’ll get back. At very low skill levels, you get 3.3 unit of refined trait for every 10 units of both material you put in – that is, the smallest recipe returns 33 units of steel for 100 units of wood and 100 units of iron. A master refiner, however, gets more than 80 units of steel for the same amount of initial resources.
Refining is an advanced skill, and isn’t needed at first. However, having a high refining skill becomes more and more important for very high level recipes.
The last type of raw material is butchered trait.
Butchery
Butchery is different from the other skills; it’s not really intended for the “hard-core” crafter, but rather, anyone who’s out killing monsters can be a butcher. You just kill a monster, loot it, and then butcher its corpse!
You’re only allowed to butcher monsters that you have permission to loot. This keeps people from “ninja butchering”, or following other people around and butchering their monsters. Once the corpse has been looted and closed, however, anyone can butcher it – this way, a fellowship can let one person butcher all the corpses, without letting them have all the loot. (If the looter wants to butcher it themselves without being worried about “ninja butchers”, they can just butcher the corpse before they close the inventory window.)
There’s also another restriction – the killer of the monster must be no more than 8 levels higher than the monster. Otherwise, the killer decimates the monster so badly that no butcherable materials are left behind! (This rule is in place to keep high-level players from killing and butchering newbie monsters.)
To butcher, you must have a Hunting Knife of some quality level. (You can create a newbie hunting knife from a recipe very easily, but better hunting knives must be made through Toolmaking.) The higher your Butchery skill, the better the tool you are able to use.
To butcher, you double-click your hunting knife and then click on the corpse on the ground. You will then receive some units of organic material, be it Chitin, Tallow, Bone, Hide, or Sinew. Different creatures drop different types of material, so that you might get Chitin or Sinew from a beetle, but Hide or Tallow from a shreth. The amount of material you get will be determined by the quality of your Hunting Knife. In addition, the higher your Butchery skill, the higher your chance of having a Critical Success, where you get double the amount of trait. (With a maxed-out Butchery skill, you have a 25% chance for a Critical Success on each butchery attempt.)
Item-Creation Skills
So you’ve got your materials (either from buying them from someone else, or from gathering them yourself). Now it’s time to create something!
Let’s look at the weapon creation skills.
Human Martial Weapons: swords, bows
Human Exotic Weapons: staves, foci, flails, vials
Tumerok Martial Weapons: swords, axes, daggers, spears
Tumerok Exotic Weapons: handblades, cesta, hives, drums
Lugian Martial Weapons: swords, axes, hammers
Lugian Exotic Weapons: swordstaves, boulders, wrenches, scepters
As you can see, the weapon skills are broken up into different categories of weapons. Weapons that are racially interchangeable now (such as swords and foci) will still be interchangeable in the new system, so a Human Martial Weaponsmith could create a sword that a Lugian could wield. But the more specialized items are restricted to individual classes. Only a Raider can wield a boulder.
There are seven recipes for each type of weapon. Each recipe creates a weapon with different inherent abilities. The choice of recipe also determines what the item looks like.
The types of recipes are:
Light: These weapons have significantly lower vigor costs (50% less than normal). They are also the easiest and cheapest kind of weapon to make. You can make these weapons for any level, from level 1 on up.
Balanced: The variance on these weapons is significantly tighter than normal, meaning the minimum amount of damage these weapons can do is higher than other types. (Remember that weapon variance also affects the bonus damage done by skills, so this template is more potent than it appears – it causes the average bonus damage from your skills to also be higher). You can make this type of weapon for level 10 players and up.
Weighted: These weapons do significantly more damage than any other type. You can make this type of weapon for level 15 players and up.
Heavy: These have a built-in +5% chance to perform critical hits. You can make this type of weapon for level 20 players and up.
Guardian: These unusual weapons are designed to be defensive as well as offensive. They have a built-in armor bonus. You can make this type of weapon for level 25 players and up.
Champion: These weapons hit more often. They have a built-in bonus to offensive masteries. You can make this type of weapon for level 30 players and up.
Arcane: These weapons don’t have any special powers – instead, they have a third spellbinding slot, so that they can have an extra spell plugged into them. (The other recipe types have two spellbinding slots.) You can make this type of weapon for level 35 players and up.
Note that different types of weapons have different minimum-level requirements. This doesn’t mean that, for instance, an Arcane Weapon is inherently better or more damaging than a Champion Weapon – it just means that Arcane Weapons are more difficult to create and use, and this is modeled in the game with a higher minimum-level requirement.
So to make a weapon, you choose one of these recipes, and then you fill in the blanks on the recipe GUI. This will require you to have raw materials such as butchered or mined trait. It may also require refined trait if it’s a high-level item. In addition, the recipe will call for some amount of coal or another purchased trait.
Coal, along with Flawless Pyreal, Deruwood, and Imbued Obsidian, are not traits that minrers collect – these are traits that are simply purchased from NPCs. There are NPCs for these traits in each of the crafting cities (different cities have different NPCs). You just hand the NPC some gold, and you get back some of the purchased trait that they sell.
You also don’t have to drag and drop exactly the right amounts of materials into each slot, either – the craft GUI now has an “auto-fill” button. Just press the button, and the game will fill in as many of the recipe slots as it can by pulling things from your inventory.
Weapon Durability
All crafted weapons have Durability. Durability is measured in Durability Points (DP). A level 1 sword has about 300 DP, while a level 50 sword would have 1200 DP. When a weapon hits a target, it has a very small chance of losing one DP. When it reaches 0 DP, the item disappears.
How long will your crafted weapon last? That depends on how you use it, and what your play style is (how quickly can you get to the next monster between fights, etc.). But a good rule of thumb is that a typical class will be able to get 40 hours of hunting out of a 1200 DP sword.
Note that DP on weapons is lost whenever you use a skill or perform an auto-attack. Because support classes such as Healers don’t cast quite as often as the more offensive classes, they will find that their weapons last longer than other peoples’ weapons do.
Raising Weaponsmithing (and Other Item Creation) Skills
Weaponsmithing (and all the item-creation skills) go up to level 500 – that’s because it can take a LONG time to master these skills. However, there’s a rule of thumb about what you can create at a given level. Divide your skill by 3, and that’s about the level of weapon you can create. Thus, if you have a skill of 150, you can make about a level 50 sword with high chances of success. (Some recipe types are harder than others – for instance, Arcane weapons are significantly harder to create than Light weapons – but this is a general rule of thumb.)
To create the item, you open the appropriate recipe while standing near an item-creation workshop in town. At the bottom of the recipe will be a little up-arrow and a down-arrow. You use these to enter the level of the item you’re trying to make (between levels 1 and 150). As you increase the number, the color of the recipe title will change to give you a hint of how easy or difficult this recipe is for you.
Green: guaranteed success.
Blue: at least 90% chance of success (the easiest blue will be closer to 100%)
White: at least 70% chance of success (the easiest white will be closer to 90%)
Yellow: at least 50% chance of success (the easiest yellow will be closer to 70%)
Red: at least 30% chance of success (the easiest red will be closer to 50%)
Purple: at least 10% chance of success (the easiest purple will be closer to 30%)
Grey: guaranteed failure.
Note that because green-level items are guaranteed to be successful, they do not give you CXP for completing them. (But all the other colors give you full CXP for an item of that level.)
Making an item when you would have less than a 10% chance of success is just completely disallowed – the title in the recipe window turns grey and the “Craft” button becomes disabled. You aren’t even allowed to try it.
There’s another way to practice – every item creation skill has a Practice recipe. This recipe doesn’t make a useful item – it just makes a practice item, such as a Lugian Army Knife or some other basically useless thing. But it gives you good CXP, and requires a bit less raw material than an actual weapon. However, even the reduced amount is still pretty significant – you will still need a large amount of raw material in order to practice. At higher levels (above Craft Skill level 75), you’ll probably want to get your raw materials from a dedicated miner and butcher.
Of course, weapons aren’t the only thing you might want to create… let’s look at armorsmithing.
Human Armorsmithing
Tumerok Armorsmithing
Lugian Armorsmithing
Armorsmithing works very much like weaponsmithing. The craft UI is the same, and the colors for different difficulties are identical. There are four flavors of each piece of armor. The different flavors have different built-in powers:
Light:
Each piece grants faster health regeneration. The effect is very noticeable while you are out of combat (up to 120% faster than normal, if you are wearing a full set of Light Armor with a Light Shield). It also increases your healing rate while in combat – note that normally, you don’t heal at all while in combat – but if you have a full set of Light Armor on, you would heal at a rate of 30% of your normal out-of-combat healing rate. You can make this type of armor for players of any level.
Flexible:
Each piece raises your max vigor. The amount increases as your level increases. A full suit of level 50 Flexible Armor would grant 450 extra max vigor (or 550 with a shield). You can make this type of armor for players that are level 15 and up.
Reinforced:
Each piece has a different effect. This suit is for mix-n-match armaments.
Body, Legs, and Head: each of these pieces has a small chance to deflect an attack, so that it does 0 damage. If you’re wearing all three of these pieces, you’ll have a 4.5% chance to take no damage from any given attack.
Gloves: the Reinforced Gloves give a modest boost to offensive mastery, meaning it helps you hit better. The amount increases slowly by level.
Feet: the Reinforced Boots have a built-in runspeed boost. They increase your running speed by 15% (at any level).
Shield: a Reinforced Shield has a better damage rating than any other kind of shield.
You can create Reinforced Armor for players that are level 25 and up.
Heavy:
Heavy armor is just denser, more protective armor. A full suit of level 50 Heavy Armor has about 70 more AR than other suits of crafted armor. (And a Heavy Shield has about 15 extra SR at level 50.) You can create this type of armor for players that are level 35 and up.
Every piece of crafted armor can receive one additional spell through Spellbinding.
Robes
Crafted robes will only come in one flavor at the moment – they are basically classified as Flexible Armor; they have reduced AR but higher vigor boost than a Flexible Breastplate and Flexible Leggings. So if you don’t plan to get hit and want some extra vigor, this may be the way to go. Crafted robes also have three Spellbinding slots, so they can be tailored more than other types of armor. You can make robes for players of level 15 or greater.
Armor Durability
Pieces of armor have Durability Points (DP). When the durability runs out completely, the items disappear. Armor pieces will last for 10 hours (low level) to 40 hours (high level) of straight hunting. (Or longer, if you don’t get hit very often.)
Whenever you are hit, there is a small chance that one piece of your armor will lose 1 DP. The piece is chosen randomly, though it is more likely for your large pieces (such as your breastplate or shield) to get hit than the smaller pieces such as your gloves or boots. However, the larger pieces have more DP than the smaller pieces, so in the end, all armor pieces will wear out at about the same rate.
Toolmaking
Toolmaking, like weaponsmithing and armorsmithing, uses base materials to create something – in this case, tools. There are two categories of tools: those needed for raw-materials gathering, and those needed for creating other things, such as weapons, armor, spellbinding, or even toolmaking.
The difference is important because it determines the difficulty. Making a hunting knife or a mining pick is a relatively easy task. Making a crucible (for Refining) or a flat hammer (for weapon crafting) is much harder.
In game terms, all tools range from level 1 to level 50. But as mentioned earlier, the creation tools are harder to make and use than the resource-gathering tools.
To create a resource-gathering tool of a certain level, your Toolmaking skill needs to be 3x that tool’s level in order to have a good chance of success. So to make a level 30 tool, you’d need 90 Toolmaking skill.
Similarly, in order to USE the resulting tool, the user must also have 3x the tool’s level in skill. So a Miner can’t use a level 30 Pickaxe until they have 90 skill in Mining.
The creation tools are harder to make and use. They require 10x the skill in order to create them. So to have a good chance of making a level 30 Shaping Hammer (for use in Armorcrafting) would require a 300 skill in Toolmaking. Likewise, an Armorer would need 300 skill in their Armorsmithing skill in order to wield the level 30 Shaping Hammer.
The following types of tools can be created:
Athame: increases Spellbinding skill
Chisel: improves Crystal mining yields
Crucible: increases Refining skill
Flat Hammer: increases Weaponsmithing skill
Hatchet: improves Logging yields
Hunting Knife: improves Butchery yields
Magnifying Glass: increases Toolmaking skill
Mattock: improves Silver mining yields
Pickaxe: improves Iron mining yields
Rock Hammer: improves Rock mining yields
Shaping Hammer: increases Armorcrafting skill
There are two different effects that tools can have, depending on what type of tool it is. Tools for mining, logging, and butchery improve your yields. The better the tool, the more materials you get. So a great Hatchet might get you 40 extra lumber per swing. Tools for creating items improve your skill, so a great-quality Shaping Hammer might increase your effective skill level by 30. (Refining is the odd man out: it is a material-gathering skill, but the tools increase skill, not yields.)
Tools also have durability points (DP). Every time they are used, there is a 50% chance they will lose a DP. When a tool loses all of its DP, it disappears.
Spellbinding
Spellbinding is the art of removing spells from treasure items, and binding them into little portable packages called totems. The totems can then be sold or given away to customers, and the customers can use the totems on their equipment. This is an advanced art, and it is considered an Item Creation Skill, meaning that there are 500 levels of this skill.
Spellbinders are always looking for two things. First are treasure items with powerful effects. (Effects that can be extracted through Spellbinding will be displayed in orange text.)
The other thing Spellbinders will be looking for are trophies from monsters (such as banderling teeth and grutt legs). In order to create a totem, you’ll need an appropriate monster trophy.
Trophy Essences
Every type of trophy that you can get from a monster, from Phyntos Wasp Wings to Tyrant Eyes, is comprised of two Essences. For instance, a Nefane Pearl has the Essences of Caution and Vigilance. A Reedshark Spike has the Essences of Reason and Valor.
In order to pull the enchantments off of an item and put the enchantments into Totems, you will need a trophy with the appropriate Essence. If you use the minor Essence, you’ll pull one random enchantment off of the item and get that enchantment back as a Totem – and the item (and any other enchantments on it) is destroyed. The other Essence pulls ALL the enchantments off of the item, and gives you back a Totem for each enchantment. In either case, the item is destroyed after you pull spells from it.
Melee Weapons: use Essence of Anger to pull one random enchantment, Essence of Wrath to pull all enchantments
Missile Weapons: use Essence of Cunning to pull one random enchantment, Essence of Guile to pull all enchantments
Magic Weapons: use Essence of Courage to pull one random enchantment, Essence of Valor to pull all enchantments
Human Armor: use Essence of Reason to pull one random enchantment, Essence of Inspiration to pull all enchantments
Tumerok Armor: use Essence of Empathy to pull one random enchantment, Essence of Wisdom to pull all enchantments
Lugian Armor: use Essence of Tenacity to pull one random enchantment, Essence of Fortitude to pull all enchantments
Shields: use Essence of Caution to pull one random enchantment, Essence of Vigilance to pull all enchantments
Creating Totems
When you try to extract totems from an item, you must succeed at Spellbinding. (If you fail your attempt, the item and trophy is lost, and you get no totem.) The rule of thumb is that you need 3x as many skill points as the item’s level requirement. So if the sword requires level 30, you’d need 90 skill in order to be able to extract totems from it to reliably pull one random enchantment from it. If you use the Essence that pulls ALL enchantments from the item, the difficulty is about 30 levels higher, so you’d need 120 skill for a level 30 sword.
So let’s walk through how a Spellbinder might use his craft. Say he has found (or been given) a sword with Sea and Toxicity enchantments on it. He has a Banderling Tooth, which has the Essence of Wrath, so he has all the stuff he needs. He visits a crafting town and stands near a Spellbinding Workshop. There he opens the Major Melee Spellbinding Recipe. He inserts the tooth, the sword, and some raw mined materials, and presses the Craft button. His skill is high, and he is successful today, and he gets back two Totems: a Totem of Sea, and a Totem of Toxicity. All the items he put into the recipe are destroyed.
If he had used the Minor Melee Spellbinding recipe instead, and substituted the Banderling Tooth for a Bloodstone Core (which has the Essence of Anger, he would have only gotten back one of the two Totems (chosen randomly).
Using Totems
Totems are the completed product of Spellbinding. They can be sold just as they are – anybody can install a Totem onto their item. There is no skill involved – everyone can always successfully install a Totem. (It also earns no CXP for the user.) To use a totem, you just double-click the Totem, and then click on the item you want to receive the power. If the item can receive the power, it works, and the Totem disappears. Otherwise, nothing happens (but you get a message explaining why).
There are several reasons why you might not be able to put a totem on an item. Weapon totems can only be used on weapons, shield totems can only be used on shields, and armor totems can only be used on armor. So it’s possible to pull a spell off of a bow and put it onto a sword, but it’s not possible to put that same spell onto a shield or piece of armor.
Another restriction is that Totems can only be used on items with requirements that are similar to the item from which the Totem came. The target item must have a level restriction that is no more than 5 levels below the original item’s level restriction. Similarly, if the original item had an Arcane Lore requirement, the target item must have a lore requirement that is no more than 20 points lower than the original item.
So, to continue our example, if the original Sea/Tox sword had a 80 AL requirement, the Totem could only be put onto an item that had a 60 AL requirement or higher. If the original Sea/Tox sword had required level 30, then the Totem could only be used on items that require level 25 or greater.
The target item also has to have a Spellbinding Slot in order to receive a Totem. All crafted items have at least one Spellbinding Slot. Most Crafter Armor has one slot; Crafted Weapons have two, and some types of crafted items have 3 slots. In addition, some random treasure items also have Spellbinding Slots. Using a Totem on an item takes up one of the item’s Spellbinding Slots.
Treasure Items with Spellbinding Slots
When you find a random item in treasure, it will have one spellbinding slot if it’s a weapon, and between zero and 1 slot if it’s a piece of armor. (Whether a new piece of random armor receives a slot is determined randomly.) However, all items created prior to the June update will all have one slot.
Using a totem on a treasure item is just like using it on a crafted item, except for one thing: When you use a totem on a treasure item, it gains Durability Points (DP). When those DP run out, the item will disappear.
In other words, it’s possible to empower random treasure items with an additional spell, but the price is that the item will no longer be permanent – though it will still last for many hours of use.
When a treasure item is given DP in this way, it receives the same number of DP that an equivalent Crafted item would receive, so you can expect a level 50 item to last for 40 hours or so of active playing. (This number is very dependent on how you play, but it’s a rule of thumb.)
Practicing Spellbinding
There are Spellbinding Practice Recipes, much like the practice recipes for armor and weaponsmithing. They still require a trophy, but they don’t require as much other raw materials. So they are a more efficient way to practice.
Dyeing
Dyeing is now a “free” craft skill. Anyone can dye any object, and has no chance of failing. All you need is the proper dye plant. You just open the proper recipe (they are in the relevant race’s Armorcrafting Misc. section). Then you insert the dye, the item, and some gold, and that’s all there is to it – the recipe always succeeds.
What’s Missing, What’s To Come
The new Craft 2.0 system is well-featured and has all the major ideas that we wanted to present. However, there are a few little bits missing that we will attend to in future updates.
Unextractable Enchantments
Not all enchantments can be extracted from items – this is intentional. Some effects are forever stuck in the item that they first appeared in. However, for our initial June release, some of the enchantments that we intended to be extractable are not. This is due to technical issues with those effects, not balance issues, so we expect that these effects will become extractable in a future update.
This isn’t a widespread issue. Most effects that are supposed to be extractable are extractable in June, but there are a few rare effects, like Frangere, that will not be.
In many cases, this won’t be backwards compatible – for instance, items with the old Frangere effect will never be extractable; only the Frangere on newly-found items will be able to be extracted. Again, this is due to technical limitations.
Confusing Spellbinding “Stacking” Limitations
When will spellbinding enchantments “stack” and when will they not? It can sometimes be tricky to tell. For instance, if you put two different armor-boosting effects on your robe, only the highest-quality effect will work. The lesser effect will still take up a Spellbinding Slot, but won’t improve armor. That’s because those two effects don’t “stack.”
The trouble is that it can be confusing to tell which effects stack and which don’t. In future updates we’ll look into ways to cut down on this confusion – perhaps by not letting people put two nonstacking effects on the same item.
Some Items Undyeable
There are a few pieces of craftable equipment that cannot be dyed. The recipe appears to work, but the items don’t change color. This isn’t a new bug – the items that cannot be dyed in the new system could also not be dyed in the old system. However, we hope to fix these items in future updates.
More Craft Skills in the Future
One of the big advantages of the new crafting system over the old one is that we can easily add new Craft Skills in later monthly episodes. (We were more limited in what we could do with the old code.) We are still discussing what additional skills we’ll add in the future, but in time, the sky’s the limit.
Conclusion
Once again, the Turbine team would like to welcome you to Craft 2.0! Although there will no doubt be minor refinements in coming months, we think this new system is a vast improvement over the old system, allowing many more people to enjoy crafting in Asheron’s Call 2. Have fun, and I’ll see you at the workshop.
- Citan