Confused about crafting

[H2O]

First I'm guessing the only way to get clothing mods is to have the perk that lets you keep mods when you break down clothes. I couldn't find any in stores.

Second I'm not sure if im missing something but I leveled crafting to 5 which unlocked the rare specs for clothing. I went to craft some pants and the uncommon pants are better than the rare pants. They both have the same armor value but the uncommon pants have a mod slot which makes them better. Granted I'm only level 6 so I cant fully upgrade either pants all the way so maybe the rare pant upgrades further than uncommon perhaps?

It's hard to find a guide for crafting because they changed things so much.

[Crimsomrider]

For the first point, you can get mods either by the Waste Not, Want Not perk or by finding crafting recipes out in the world that let you craft clothing mods.

As for the second point, loot is somewhat mainstreamed and randomized and depends on the level of the item. For the most part however all items cap out at the exact same armor value at max level so it doesn't really matter, the only thing that does is how many slots an item has, which is unfortunately also randomized.

Crafting is pretty lackluster currently, so hopefully the upcoming overhaul improves it drastically since they're now even changing clothes to be purely cosmetic. So it has to be meaningfully intricate to compensate for that change.

[Jan]

Crafting is not worth it. Spend the point somewhere else. You craft an item and find a better one moments later. You can also buy really good gear.

And yes, gear system is kinda weird. You can find a legendary item and moments later a common item with much more armor. And armor mods feel not significant enough overall.

[Mike Hawthorne]

Crafting is the only thing in the game that I've ignored completely. It doesn't seem like it's really worth the effort.

[Larco]

Having taken my guy all the way up the tech tree crafting's... sort of ok. Ive found crafted clothes a waste of time and while you can make some nice legendary mods they're a bit niche eg legendary heatsinks.

The real reason to craft seems to be able to craft legendary weapons or, to be more precise legendary *iconic* weps - it's pretty easy to buy and upgrade legendary versions of the regular versions of weps in stores.

Thing is, iconics are a bit hit and miss. Some types of weps have great iconics you'd def want to craft, but other types of weps have ones that are pretty weak and some don't have iconic versions at all.

If you're planning a samurai build, def worth it for all the fantastic iconic katanas. If like me you just want to plug people with the plain old unity pistol, hmmm, maybe not. Wish I'd put more points in body or cool tbh.

I've made the best of it by switching to tech weapons, using grenades heavily and investing in blades as a back up, but I'm not sure I'd invest in tech on another run unless I was planning a build around a specific iconic weapons, and planning to use grenades, tech or smart weapons for the engineering bonuses.

[Tokenn]

I love the Tech weapons, and I find Crafting very useful for armour mods, weapon mods and etc. It's true that modding and upgrading clothing is far from useful...the incremental improvements are rarely worth it...but I'll upgrade weapons as far as I can take them. I can see that investing 18 Attribute points to Craft Legendaries may not be worth it when they give you nothing you can't buy.