How to Play — Crafting

This guide explains how crafting works in general — the loop that every trade skill shares — and then points you to the right tool, skill page, and recipe list for each trade. Crafting turns raw materials (gathered or bought) into finished goods: weapons, armor, clothing, furniture, tools, food, scrolls, potions, and more. For where the raw materials come from, see Gathering resources and the resources reference. For a worked starting build, see the Blacksmith template.

Definitions used on this page:

Trade tool — the item you double-click to craft (a smith’s hammer, sewing kit, tinker’s tools, etc.). Each trade has its own tool.
Craft menu / craft gump — the window that opens when you use a trade tool. It lists categories of items and the items within each.
Exceptional — the highest quality result, giving better stats and the option to stamp your name on the item.
Resource / material — the ingredients consumed when you craft (ingots, boards, leather, cloth, reagents, etc.).

The universal crafting loop

Every trade follows the same five steps (verified against the craft system in Scripts/Services/Craft/Core/):

Have the tool and materials. Put the trade tool and the required raw materials in your backpack. Some recipes also need you to be near a station (a forge & anvil for smithing, an oven for baking, a loom for cloth, etc.).
Double-click the trade tool. This opens the craft menu (the CraftGump).
Pick a category. The menu groups items into categories (for a smith: weapons, armor, shields…). Click the category to see its items.
Pick an item. Each item shows the skill required and the materials it consumes. Items you lack the skill or materials for are marked.
Make it. Click Make Now (or set a quantity to batch-craft). Your character works for a moment, then either succeeds (the item appears in your pack) or fails.

You can keep the menu open and craft repeatedly. Each attempt trains the governing skill (see Skill gain).

Per-trade entry points

Each trade uses a different skill, tool, and menu. The skill ranges and full recipe lists live on the linked pages — this table is just the entry point:

Trade	Skill	Tool (double-click)	Recipes
Smithing	Blacksmithy	Smith’s hammer (at a forge & anvil)	/crafting/blacksmithy/
Tailoring	Tailoring	Sewing kit	/crafting/tailoring/
Tinkering	Tinkering	Tinker’s tools	/crafting/tinkering/
Carpentry	Carpentry	Saw / dovetail saw	/crafting/carpentry/
Fletching	Bowcraft/Fletching	Fletcher’s tools	/crafting/bowfletching/
Inscription	Inscription	Scribe’s pen	/crafting/inscription/
Cooking	Cooking	Skillet / at an oven	/crafting/cooking/
Alchemy	Alchemy	Mortar & pestle	/crafting/alchemy/
Cartography	Cartography	Mapmaker’s pen	/crafting/cartography/
Masonry	(skill + tool)	Mallet & chisel	/crafting/masonry/
Glassblowing	(skill + tool)	Blowpipe (at a forge/furnace)	/crafting/glassblowing/

Browse all trades from the crafting overview. The tools themselves are in the tools catalog.

Materials and where to get them

Recipes consume raw materials that must be in your pack:

Ingots for smithing — smelt mined ore at a forge. See Mining and Gathering resources.
Boards for carpentry and fletching — chop logs into boards. See Lumberjacking.
Leather/hides and cloth for tailoring — skin corpses for leather, or run the cloth chain. See Gathering resources.
Reagents for inscription/alchemy — bought from NPC mages/alchemists or gathered. See reagents.
Food ingredients for cooking — flour, raw fish/meat, etc.

Exact skill gates and the colored ore / leather / wood tiers (which require higher skill and yield better items) are listed on the resources reference — link there rather than memorizing numbers.

Success, exceptional quality and maker’s marks

When you craft, the outcome is one of three things:

Failure — you fail the attempt (see Failure and material loss).
Normal success — a standard-quality item.
Exceptional success — the best quality, with bonus durability/stats and the option to mark it. The exceptional chance rises with skill above the recipe’s requirement (computed by GetExceptionalChance in CraftItem.cs; some recipes can never be exceptional, and certain items/talismans add a bonus).

Maker’s mark: when you craft an item exceptionally, you may be asked (via the QueryMakersMarkGump) whether to stamp your character’s name on it (“Crafted by <name>”). Marked exceptional goods are prized and sell better. You typically set a preference once and the menu remembers it.

Higher skill therefore matters twice: it lets you craft harder items at all, and it raises the share of those items that come out exceptional.

Failure and material loss

Crafting can fail, and failure can consume some of your materials. In general:

A failed attempt may destroy part of the resources for that item (the craft system rolls this per attempt). Cheap, low-skill items rarely hurt; expensive colored-resource items can burn material on failure.
Your failure rate falls as your skill rises above the recipe’s requirement. Train on cheap items before risking rare materials.
Exact loss amounts depend on the recipe and resource and are not restated here (unverified specifics) — practice on common materials first.

Repairing items

Worn weapons, armor and tools lose durability and eventually break. You can repair them with the matching trade skill (per Repair.cs):

Double-click the relevant trade tool (e.g. a smith’s hammer for metal armor/weapons, a sewing kit for leather/cloth, a saw for wooden items).
Choose Repair in the craft menu (or use a repair deed).
Target the damaged item.

Success restores durability; a failed repair can lower the item’s maximum durability, so repair with high skill. Each trade repairs the item types it can make — smithing repairs metal, tailoring repairs leather/cloth, carpentry/fletching repairs wood, and so on.

Runic tools and enhancing (brief)

Two advanced features let high-end crafters make magic gear (mechanics are expansion-dependent — treat the specifics as unverified):

Runic tools — special, limited-use trade tools (runic hammers, sewing kits, etc., often from Bulk Order rewards) that craft items with random magic properties. You craft as normal while holding the runic tool.
Enhancing — taking a finished item and re-forging it with a better resource (per Enhance.cs) to add that resource’s bonus. Enhancing can destroy the item on failure, so it is risky.

See the individual /crafting/ trade pages for which runic tools and enhancement options each trade supports.

Resmelting (recovering metal)

Smiths can resmelt crafted or looted metal items back into a portion of their ingots at a forge (per Resmelt.cs) — useful for recycling failed or unwanted metal goods. Use the smith’s menu’s smelt option and target the item near a forge.

Bulk Order Deeds (BODs)

Bulk Order Deeds are the crafting reward loop. An NPC shopkeeper for a trade (e.g. a blacksmith or weaver) periodically offers a BOD: a deed asking for a quantity of a specific item (optionally exceptional, and of a specific material).

To use a BOD:

Get the deed from the relevant NPC (ask for a bulk order / use the context menu).
Craft the requested items and drop each onto the deed to fill it.
Turn in the completed deed to an NPC for rewards — gold, rare materials, runic tools, recipes, and large BODs that combine several small ones for bigger prizes.

BODs are the main path to runic tools and other crafter-only rewards. Reward tables differ by trade and shard configuration — check the trade’s /crafting/ page.