Crafting Tutorial
Crafting items is a reasonably complex system with many moving parts, so here's a guide to going about it!
Contents
The Basics - What you need to make items
Crafting uses several resources when making items. The most obvious is freecreds and salvage. You will also need builder nanites. Now, what's what and where do you lay your greedy little hands (or paws) on them?
- Freecred: Can be gained in multiple ways. RP, Social Actions, combat, quests, missions... you name it!
- Builder Nanites: This is a resource that is dropped from ferals you defeat in combat. You will (probably) need a collector or some way to increase your NaniteCollectRate to score vast amounts of it.
- Collectors: Two items spring to mind when increasing your NaniteCollectRate. The Improved Nanite Collector and Ultimate Nanite Collector. The Basic Nanite Collector does not increase this stat.
- Salvage: This is most likely the resource that will dictate how awesome an item you can make is. There are quite a few ways to gain salvage luckily!
- RPing near a salvage source is perhaps the easiest way to do so. They can be found all over the world. Try venturing outside of the Lobby once in awhile! Drag some friends along with you to a source and RP away!
- Mining an area, using either patrol points or builder nanites can be quite effective.
- Fighting difficult monsters have a higher chance of dropping a lot of salvage
- Increase Proficiencies that increase your chance of finding salvage!
- Examples of what skills might do this is: Design, Installation, Survival, Computer and Research
- Schematics: You will need knowledge of how you actually make the thing you need to make! These are available in various shops, in the elite store, in the token store as well as a few from a quest or two.
- Skills: Lastly, you will also need the skills to make the items. These can be trained once you hit level 15, and improved on with perks as well.
Schematics: Items and Modifiers
There are two types of schematics. Items and modifiers. Let's have a look at what's what!
- Items: These are the actual items you want to make. Guns, armour, shields, grenades, clothes etc.
- Modifiers: These are ways to improve upon said items! Making them more deadly, smaller and in general more awesome.
What does this mean? Well, say you want to make a light melee weapon. Perhaps a dagger? To make it hit harder, tack on a nice modifier to that item, such as extra lethal!
Crafting
Crafting is currently done entirely on the Web Crafting Interface. It also allows you to commission other crafters for a fee. While this allows you to access recipes and skill levels that you may not have, you also need to bring more salvages, Freecreds and builder nanites to fulfil the order. In extension, you can rent your skills as well by setting a tax percentage. That way, other players on the Web Crafting Interface will be able to see and use your skills and receipts for their own use.
Another advantage of the Web Crafting Interface is hat if you don't have the required salvage to build your new Portable Death Ray, it will offer you to buy them for a Freecred fee. Given you've got the bling, your Death Ray is as good as yours. Happy Crafting!
Improving on already made items
Don't be afraid of making items for yourself as soon as you can. You can always improve upon them later once you level up your skills a bit or when you finally find that dropmod that you want to add!
You can also remove most modifiers from items if you want to remove one to add another more powerful modifier. (Some modifiers can never be removed, such as cheap)
But how do you add more modifiers to an already made item? Well, keep on reading! You'll need either a craftmod or a dropmod to do so!
Craftmods and Dropmods
There are two different (yet similar..) ways to add modifiers to an already made item. Let's start with the one that's easiest to get and make.
Craftmods
A craftmod is simply a modifier made by another crafter, using their skills. You can then use this item to add the modifier onto an item.
Say you still have that extra lethal dagger we made earlier in the tutorial. It's good but you want to add the Improved modifier to it. But you don't have that modifer! And you certanly don't have the skill to add it yourself.
Asking around, you find a crafter who can make a craftmod for you. Actually making a craftmod is very simple. You do, however, need to be mindful of what level of craftmod you will need. Now, our dagger already has a modifier on it. So in this instance, we need at least a level 2 craftmod. If we had 2 modifiers on it, we would need a level 3 craftmod. And so on.
If you want to make the craft mod yourself, here's the command
Craftmod <modifier>=<tier>
Hence, if you wish to craft a level 1 Insulating mod, type as follow
Craftmod Insulating=1
As stated previously, a craftmod adds modifier with the skills of the maker of the craftmod. This means you can actually make items that you perhaps don't have the skills for to make. The actual formula for how difficult items you can make is: (max(Item's crafting-level, your crafting level) + max(modifier's crafting-level, your crafting level)) / 2
The cost of adding a craftmod is modular. That is to say, you pay for what it would have cost you to have added the modifier when creating the item in the first place.
With our level 2 improved craftmod in hand, we simply use it from our inventory, and the game will ask what item you want it applied to. Enter that item's number in your inventory. And that's it! One light melee with extra lethal and improved! The ferals won't know what hit 'em!
Dropmods
Dropmods are basically craftmods except they have the DROPPED property (Hence why most call them dropmods). They come in a two different Tiers as well (Not to be confused with levels as in craftmods)
A dropmod usually has significantly higher skills attributed to them then a craftmod. Infact, a dropmod can have skill levels of 100 or more, making them quite valuable. Most importantly, this allows us to add modifiers to item well beyond the skills of a crafter, enabling us to make 5-modded items or even 6-modded items.
They also come in different tiers. A Tier 1 dropmod simply has those higher skills to it's advantage. A Tier 2 dropmod however also conveys a 5% bonus, making items with a T2 dropmod even more effective. There are even T3 dropmods that convey a 10% bonus. You can even use two T2 dropmods on the same item for a higher bonus.
You can find dropmods most commonly from rewards. You can also actually buy these from the token or mako store. However, keep in mind, if you apply a purchased modifier, note that it will charge you the cost of a fully new item, not the modular cost. The game will notify you of this, though.
Recipes and Recipe Modifiers
See Recipes and Recipe Modifiers. Note that not all recipes and recipe modifiers listed are actually available in the game yet.
Newbie friendly items
Here are a few examples to make your life beating up ferals a bit easier. They aren't terribly costly (around 1-2 uncommon bits of salvage each) but as stated earlier, you can start with one or two of the modifiers and add more yourself as you become more of an expert crafter!
Heavy Melee=basic spread,extra lethal,miniaturized,heavy Hard hitting, hits multiple targets as well!
Physical Armor=heavy,improved,miniaturized,overwhelming More HP and a whole heap of PhysicalDamageResist. All around a good bit of armour!
Module=Cool,Heavy,Modular,Overwhelming More Accuracy, Haste and Recharge for a very small loadout and upkeep.
Continuous Costs
After an item is made, it has to be maintained. It costs a number of cred and salvage to keep an item functioning. This cost is based on how much it cost to make, how easy it is to maintain, how much you have to maintain, how much you use it, and how good you are at maintaining your gear.
First off, this value is based entirely off of the base costs. It doesn't care how deep into overcrafting you go. Next, it doesn't require builder nanites either to maintain, only to initially craft.
Here are some of the numbers!
- All items get a bonus self repair of 3 per point of technical you have.
- All items get a bonus self repair of 3 per point of Upkeep not in use.
- All items get a bonus self repair of 1 per 2 points of Installation until 30. 1 per 4 points after that.
- Each item gets 135 Self Repair for Nanite Shielded, and/or 100 Self Repair for Durable, if placed on the item.
- Some items have Self Repair already applied to them.
- Efficient Tinkering reduces the Freecred cost by 25%, flat value.
- Expert Repair reduces the salvage cost by 25%, flat value.
- Turning on the Cred Repair option reduces the salvage cost by 40%, while increasing the Freecred costs by 100%, flat values.
- If the item has the expiring flag, it will multiply the costs by 12, making these extremely expensive, in terms of your costs.
Now for the actual math. Take costs of item, multiply by 1 - total self repair / 100 + total self repair. Apply Efficient Tinkering and Expert Repair. Apply Cred Repair option if turned on. Then, take this number in salvage and divide by 3600 for your cost per hour of use in salvage. Take this number in cred and divide by 2160 for your cost per hour of use in freecred. Let's look at an example.
- I have 3 technical, 20 Installation, 10 points of Upkeep not in use, and my item has Nanite Shielded on it. Its Self Repair value is 184. So its total cost is multiplied by 1 - (184/284), or .647 (A reduction of 64.7%).