Trade Skill HOWTO: A Guide To The Crafting Arts

Whether you are your guild’s quartermaster, see an opportunity for wealth in the growth industry of arms dealing, or simply have an urge to do something in Camelot that doesn’t involve bashing someone over the head with a blunt object, at some point you have asked yourself, “how do I make things?” It is the intent of this guide to teach you exactly this.

Starting out

To begin crafting in earnest, you will need the following:

• Some basic skill in crafting
• Tools
• A forge
• Raw materials

The first thing you will want to do is to decide your primary trade skill path. This basically is what you will be the best at crafting. You will not be limited to this skill, but other trade skills can only be up to 75% of your primary trade skill (or less – a table of this appears later), so you will want to choose wisely. Your choices are:

Weaponcrafting: the art of forging swords, axes, hammers and spears.

Armorcrafting: the craft of creating armor of various types, from studded leather to plate mail armor.

Tailoring: the ability to sew cloth and leather armor.

Fletching: the ability to create bows and arrows.

Also note that some of your choices are limited by your profession. Wizards generally have little to no interest in forging plate mail. To see if your class can learn a given trade skill, kindly consult the following table. Note that these are PRIMARY skills that can be chosen; a tradesperson can conceivably improve in ANY skill, but will only truly excel at his chosen craft.

Again, merely because you choose a skill as your primary skill does not mean that you cannot develop skill in other crafting disciplines, and in fact it is usually in your interest to do so. To give one example, many pieces of armor that you craft through Armorcrafting will require the equivalent piece of leather armor as padding to construct. Although you can easily purchase that armor from shops, it would be far easier on your pocketbook for you to craft the item yourself using your Tailoring skill.

However, at higher ranges of your craft, you will find that your other skills tend to lag behind. In the example just given, you may not be able to make leather padding for the most difficult and highest quality range of armor, nor will you be able to find it in any store. You will have to find another player who has specialized in Tailoring to create it for you.

Here follows what you are limited to in other skills, based on your chosen primary skill:

                                                                                                    Associated skills

Primary skill:	Weaponcraft	Armorcraft	Tailoring	Siegecraft	Fletching
Weaponcraft	--	75%	40%	75%	40%
Armorcraft	75%	--	75%	40%	40%
Tailoring	40%	40%	--	40%	75%
Fletching	75%	40%	40%	75%	--

Material skills, such as Woodworking and Metalworking, are always capped at 100%, or the level you have achieved in your primary crafting skill.

For now, we’ll concentrate on the three core trade skills of Weaponcrafting, Armorcrafting, and Tailoring.  Once you have decided on your primary trade skill, you should go to your realm’s capitol (Camelot, Jordheim, or Tir na nòg) and seek out your trade order’s guildmaster:

How do you find one person in a large city? Well, you could just hunt around until you find them (they’re labeled [Master] underneath their name), but thankfully there’s another option: simply ask a guard where they are. To do that, have a guard targeted, and type ”/where name” (for example, /where Hephas Elgen). The guard will point you in the correct direction. Literally.

Note that, as in the above example, if the master has a first and last name, you'll need to include both in the /where command. (Thanks to Montagne for that tip.) Asking for directions is also helpful as you learn the layout of your chosen city, both for raw material sellers and buyers of consignment items (both of which we’ll cover in a bit).

Speak to your prospective ordermaster by right clicking on him or her, and confirm that you’d like to join their order. You’ll be gifted with one skill point in every trade skill, which you can confirm by checking the Skills window on your character. Now it’s time to move to the next step: collecting the tools of the trade.

For weaponcrafting and armorcrafting, you’ll need a smith’s hammer, and for tailoring and armorcrafting you’ll need a sewing kit. Both are about 2 to 3 silver each, and they never wear out. Buy them both, leave them in the 4^th level of your backpack, and forget about them.

You can purchase them when you purchase your raw materials. Raw what, you ask? Well, each item you’ll be crafting has a “recipe” that requires different items to create. As an example, let’s look at the first item you’ll make as a Weaponcrafter, the bronze short sword.

Bronze Short Sword: 1 bronze short sword blade, 1 rawhide short sword hilt.

Unlike other games, you won’t be finding these materials as monster loot or by mining the landscape. Instead you craft them from raw materials, which for now are freely available for sale on vendors in the city. (This will change as you reach the pinnacle of your craft and begin questing for magical item components.) Using our example, the bronze short sword blade requires 10 bronze metal bars. (You’ll see how we’re reading these recipe requirements in a moment.) So, the first thing we’ll need to do is buy some metal bars. To do that, you’ll need to find your friendly local metal merchant. Here’s a list of merchants for each city:

Find your metal merchant (in our example, we’re in Midgard so we’ll find Om) and buy 1 stack of 20 bronze metal bars and a smith’s hammer. Note that 20 bronze bars is one “stack”, which in this case sells for 1s 75c for the entire group of 20 bars. You don’t need to buy 20 “stacks” of bars (for one thing, you probably couldn’t carry that many!). Note that raw material vendors are labeled [Merchant]. If you can’t find Om, don’t forget that you can always ask a guard for directions! In Om’s particular case, he’s right by a busy forge, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble.

So you’re ready to make that blade, but a good sword requires a hilt as well. In this case, a rawhide short sword hilt. This will require 1 bronze metal bar (not an entire stack, just one bar), 1 rowan wood board, and 1 piece of rawhide leather. First find Dalla (or your own leather merchant if not in Midgard) and purchase your sewing kit and a stack of rawhide leather, and then find Ottar the wood merchant and buy a stack of rowan wood boards.

Now you have everything you need to build your first sword … except the forge! Forges are large and heavy, so you probably don’t have one in your backpack. You’ll need to find one. Just look for where all the people are… if you still need help, try /broadcasting for directions. (/broadcast is a chat channel that only works in cities; when plying a trade it’s a good way to both attract business and get to know your fellow crafters.)

(While armorcrafters will also need to find a forge to ply their trade, fletchers will need to find a lathe instead of a forge for creating bows. Fletchers can manufacture arrows in the field without a lathe. And tailors, well, they can whip out the needle and thread wherever they choose.) You should be ready to start your career in armorcrafting – you have your initial skills from your ordermaster, your smith’s hammer and sewing kit, a few raw materials to begin with, and you’re standing near a forge. Let’s get crafting!

First, you’ll want set up a quickbar so that you can craft the sword and its component parts. Click the small arrows at the top of your quick bar until you find one that’s not being used. You can switch between them with Shift-# - for example, pressing Shift-3 goes to your third quickbar. As a crafter, you’ll have quite a few quickbars set up before long.

Go to your skills page on your character display, and drag the Weaponcrafting icon to the top of your quickbar. Next, drag the Metalworking and Leatherworking icons to the bottom of your quickbar. It should now look like so:

Now, let’s set the quickbar up so that you can make a bronze short sword. Click the weaponcrafting icon open (or press 1 since it’s in position 1) and you’ll see the swords that you can make. Click on “short sword” to open that list. As you can see, the only short sword you can make right now is bronze since you only have a skill of 1.

Click on the “sword” icon by the word bronze, and drag the icon that appears on your mouse pointer to your quickbar, right under your Weaponcrafting icon so that it is in  position number 2.

Go ahead and press the new icon. It tells you that you can’t make the sword because you need a blade and a hilt. (You can always tell what items are required for a given item by right-clicking the item’s icon in your quickbar.) Well, we’ll just have to make those as well. Go ahead and click open your Metalworking icon (in position 7 if you’ve been following along) and click open “short sword blade”.

(Yours will probably only list bronze, again. This screenshot came from a character who was a little further along in Metalworking, so he is able to make iron blades as well.) Drag the sword icon by the word “bronze” to your quickbar, right under the first sword icon. To make a hilt, do the same with your Leatherworking icon – click it open, click open “short sword hilt”, and drag the sword icon by that to your quickbar underneath the others. Your quickbar should now look like this:

Click the icon in the “3” position (or press the 3 key) to make a short sword blade. There’s three things that can happen:

• You make the short sword blade successfully
• You fail at making the blade, but don’t lose any metal bars in the process
• You fail spectacularly at making the blade, and wreck some of your precious metal!

Hopefully you are able to make the blade without too much fuss. Keep trying until you succeed. If at any point you run out of raw materials, go buy some more (you’ll use metal bars the most, and there should be a metal bar vendor close to the forge). Next, try making the hilt by clicking the icon in the “4” position (or pressing the 4 key). Again, you may succeed or you may fail, but eventually you should end up with both a blade and a hilt. Now, it’s time to try to make the short sword itself! Click the icon in the “2” position, or press the 2 key. Again, three things can happen:

• Oh no! Not only did you fail at making the short sword, you destroyed your new blade and hilt in the process! This is the most painful outcome, but thankfully doesn’t happen very often. If it does, you’ll need to start over.
• More often, you’ll fail at making the sword, but still have the parts ready for another go.
• And finally, eventually, you will succeed (more than likely, on your first try, actually, as bronze short swords are pretty easy). Not only that, you probably got skill points in Weaponcrafting, Leatherworking and Metalworking! Congratulations!

Now you have a bronze short sword. This is almost identical to the bronze short sword that you would buy from a vendor in your starting village – except that it is actually of superior quality to an otherwise identical store-bought blade and will do more damage in battle. You can give it to a grateful young player, or sell it to finance your growth as a crafter. The choice is yours.

IMPORTANT NOTE! Be aware that you will gain NO skill in trades until you gain some rudimentary skill in your primary trade skill. Rumor has it a certain nameless Mythic developer was testing trade skills while writing a how-to guide about them, and he just couldn’t understand why his ARMORCRAFTER failed to gain any skill while cranking out bronze short SWORDS for over an hour… :P

”I think Sven said he was looking for a sword like that…”

As you continue to grow in your chosen craft, you’ll find that learning a trade can be expensive. You can continue to “powerskill” your way to mastery (as we touch on briefly below), but this will require significant investment, either from your own adventuring or from your guild. However, there is another option. You can actually make a good profit while working on your craft through accepting consignments.

These are very similar to “tasks” that you might find out in the realms, in that an NPC (in this case your ordermaster) gives you an assignment – to craft a given item and bring it to another NPC somewhere in your home city -- that you can quickly complete for a minor reward. However, consignments are a little different:

• You only receive them from your ordermaster, not from any other NPC
• You never receive any experience from consignments, only a cash reward
• You will only be assigned consignments if your primary tradeskill is under 650.

However, your assignments not only will often result in skill gain as you craft the item assigned (as they are assigned to you based on your skill level) but you will also receive a good deal more financial reward than you would for just creating the item and selling it to an NPC. While crafting items repeatedly and selling them back to NPCs will eventually result in a net loss (since the items will sell for slightly less than the cost of the raw materials, even before taking occasional failure and resulting item loss into account), a diligent crafter through the use of consignments can make a significant net gain over time while learning his chosen skill.

In short, unless a kind stranger or tolerant friends are completely financing your new career, you will definitely find it in your best interest to pursue the opportunities that consignments offer.

Here’s how they work. You’ll need to find your order master (the NPC you first learned your primary skill from) and select him. Then type “help”. You’ll be given the name of an NPC somewhere in that town, an item that they would like you to make for them, and a general indicator of where they are located.

Now, you should go make the item, which most of the time will be at the level you should be working at for maximum skill gain. Sometimes it will be easy for you, and sometimes it will be difficult, but usually it should be right at where you need to be. As you can see, my smith gained every possible skill completing the order. Not bad!

The actual range of skill that may be required of you for a given consignment can be from 25 below your primary skill to 15 above. Material working skills are not taken into account and you should take care to ensure that they do not lag behind. You may wish to consult the information on trinket crafting below if this is the case.

Now to take the order to the person that ordered it. You have two tools here – you can type /task to remind yourself who gave the order and how long you have to complete it, and as always, the guards are always happy to point you in the right direction.

Once you find your customer, just drop the item you crafted onto them. If they’re the NPC who ordered the item, he or she will thank you and give you your reward.

If they’re not the correct person, they’ll give you the item back (which can be handy if your assignment is to deliver something to a guard, all of whom are named identically).

Young Man In A Hurry, or Powering your way to greatness

The one downside to skill gain through consignment is that it will take you longer to gain skill, simply because you’re spending time wandering the city looking for your customers. If the raw amount of time that it takes to gain skill is more important to you than any other factor, you want to “powerskill”. Basically this means doing the absolute fastest crafting possible to gain skill, no matter what the cost to your pocketbook.

What you want to look for when powerskilling are recipes that take very little raw materials (for armor, things like gloves and boots). You’ll want to continue doing them even when you don’t gain as much skill as you would from a tunic or helm, simply because they take far less resources and you would have to make less trips to the material vendor.

One thing that might help your cash outlay a bit using this method is the ability to salvage material from items you’ve constructed (or, really, any craftable item). Simply drop an item on the ground, target it with your mouse cursor and type /salvage (chances are if you’re powerskilling you’ll want to /macro /salvage so you can have a salvage action in your quickbar). The item will dissolve and you’ll have a portion of the raw material used to assemble the item appear in your backpack.

It’s possible to gain skills very fast using this method. It’s boring, and expensive. But it’s possible.

Angling for a promotion?

As you continue crafting, eventually you’ll be notified that before you’ll gain any more skill, you need to speak to your ordermaster. Once you do so, you’re given a promotion (from Apprentice to Journeyman, for example) and you’ll find new recipes have opened up for you.

Eventually you’ll find that you’ve outgrown your homey little forge. You’ll have to take consignments from other ordermasters out in the realms, and the highest quality items are only available in the frontier wilds. However, by this time you should be a very valuable member of your guild – or even better, known to many guilds as a reliable supplier of the materials of warfare – and there should be no shortage of people willing to guard you as you continue your quest for knowledge and skill.  Not coincidentally, this is also when you begin to learn the mechanics of Siegecraft and Enchantment – both of which are beyond the scope of this guide.

Pretty little trinkets, my dear

And finally, a note on trinkets. You may find as you work on developing your skills, that some of your associated material skills such as Woodworking and Metalworking may lag behind, to the point where they cause you to fail crafting more than you should at your level of skill.

Remember that material working skills have a natural cap of 100% of your primary crafting skill. In other words, if you have a 245 Weaponcrafting as your primary skill, you should be able to gain up to 245 Metalworking, 245 Woodworking, 245 Clothworking, and 245 Leatherworking. If any of them lag behind, you can create trinkets to work up your skill

Trinkets appear at the bottom of your material working recipe lists, and aren’t used in any particular recipe, but are solely something inexpensive that you can use to gain skill.

They don’t take much in the way of material components, and sell for almost as much as they cost to create. So if you find your secondary skills lagging, it’s worth the small time it takes to get them caught up through trinket crafting.

Repairing Their Goods And Your Reputation

One skill that you now possess as a crafter that other adventurers will likely seek you out for is the ability to repair arms and armor that becomes battered in the field. To do so is quite simple:

• Have the prospective client drop the armor or weapon that he or she would like repaired on the ground (fear not: unlike in other games that you may have played, others cannot pick up items that you carelessly drop in such a fashion)
• Once it is on the ground, you should target the item by clicking on it with your mouse cursor.
• While it is selected, type /repair (you may want to make a macro for your quickbar for this at some point by typing /macro /repair)
• You then proceed to repair the item to a level close to its pristine state.

Note that eventually an item will fall apart from disuse regardless of how often it is repaired, but this eventuality is postponed greatly through frequent repair.

Your skill at repairing items is based on two values:

• Your skill in the given craft
• Your skill at working with the given material

Your skill in the craft should be fairly explanatory – if the item is a sword, you will use Weaponcraft, if a studded leather tunic, you will use Armorcraft, etc. What this is compared to is the skill level that you start working with material that the item is crafted from (for example, an iron studded leather tunic uses iron), halved. (Fixing something is somewhat easier than creating it from scratch, after all.)

What does this mean? Well, someone with an Armorcrafting skill of 150 would have an excellent chance of repairing an iron studded leather tunic (you begin working with iron at a skill of 100, which gives it a repair value of 50). That same crafter would find it impossible to repair a chain hauberk crafted from asterite, since a crafter begins working with asterite at skill level 800 which when halved still has a repair value of 400. Plus, said crafter would probably be too busy drooling over such a rare piece of equipment in any event. It’s not like asterite falls from the sky! Well, actually it does. But that’s another story.

It costs a crafter nothing to repair an item save the investment he or she has already made gaining skill in their craft. You can of course charge other players for your time and the time you’ve spent raising your skill. Or you may just ask that they keep you from untimely deaths when making your appointed rounds. Adventurers excel at that sort of thing.

A Young Person’s Guide To Wealth And Power (Also Of Use To The Elder Amongst Us)

And now you should have learned enough to master the art of crafting. Whether as a valued member of your guild, or as a means of creating your own wealth, or simply to ensure that you never again wander the realms in cheap tattered leather, you should now have a firm footing on where to go next.

Your next source of information should be other players. They will know of many things not contained in this guide – whether it be particularly profitable recipes or simply web sites and bulletin boards where the crafting community for your realm and/or server might gather. Remember that your fellow players make the game what it is – and don’t forget to help out the new crafter who’s just learning where the forge is. Don’t think of them as competition – think of them as the newest member of your bond of crafters.

And don’t forget the most important rule of all – to have fun!