Crafting skill essentially useless?

[onewhofound]

So I had leveled my Crafting Skill to 350%, and my friend had not put any into his. The difference in quality between our two items was about 7%.

Am I doing something wrong or is the skill essentially useless?

[𝓝𝓪𝓬𝓱𝓸𝓫𝓸𝓲]

It's a random chance for the bonus %'s. You could get 1 % or 35%.

The crafted item will tell you just how much.

[zerassar]

Crafting skill moves the RNG bell curve for your crafting quality.

You can still get a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ craft than someone with a lower crafting skill... Its RNG based.

Most people will mind wipe, spec everything into crafting, then have a focal curry... and then craft away in bulk. Grinding up whatever items were RNG'd a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ craft and keep going until RNGesus blesses them.

Then mind wipe back to the normal stats.

[Cobretti]

Don't forget to make custom food recipes while you are spec'd into crafting as well but no it isn't useless as others have pointed out.

[Liralen]

In other words, don't bother to put points in crafting skill until you can make mind wipe tonics, because otherwise, crafting skill is useless.

Edited Note: That does not mean that crafting is useless in Ark. It's actually pretty solidly designed.

You will gain a lot of exp from crafting, and can eventually build impregnable fortresses, at least in PvE. You just don't need any points in crafting skill to do that. Your real life brain suffices.

"Your real life brain suffices" is the biggest reason Ark appeals to me, but the help of others, whether in game or in this forum, or Youtube videos, is like being in an uber guild in an MMO, without the drama.

The drama caused by newbs or butt hurt people playing on official servers has no effect on my enjoyment of the game, other than every now and then, trying to help them.

[μnissiʌh]

try crafting 1.000.000 element dust into element with no crafting skill and you ll see how useful it actually is :D, not to mention you can do insane items with crafting skills above 1000%

[onewhofound]

So I mindwiped and put 850% into crafting skill. Then made 30 different copies of a recipe.... the best of which had a whopping 19% extra damage. So basically the amount of possible benefit over dozens of creations isn't even worth the mats that go into a pair of mindwipe tonics, much less multiple high-level items

[Stephen]

Originally posted by onewhofound:

So I mindwiped and put 850% into crafting skill. Then made 30 different copies of a recipe.... the best of which had a whopping 19% extra damage. So basically the amount of possible benefit over dozens of creations isn't even worth the mats that go into a pair of mindwipe tonics, much less multiple high-level items

Where does damage come from custom recipe? Perhaps you meant blueprint of weapon?

And no, crafting skill will become very useful in late game when you need some powerful stuff to do cave run and boss, provided you have some decent blueprints available.

The better the blueprint is, the more leap you get, because the bonus is percentage based. With high quality BP it's worth to mindwipe and get all crafting skills, although you can still be unlucky to get a low bonus because the lower bound is still 0% no matter what...
e.g.,
I have a 470% longneck BP, about 20% of bonus gives around 550% post-craft, that's nearly 80% extra.
If my math is correct, your BP should have base damage at around 150%, let's assume the best scenario in 850% crafting skill, you get the max bonus of 37.5% and lead to 19% increase.
I got a lower bonus than yours but my increase is much higher.

Custom recipe is however a bit different in calculation, I believe the bonus is fixed instead of a RNG according to the formula:
https://ark.fandom.com/wiki/Custom_Consumable

[onewhofound]

Originally posted by Stephen:

Originally posted by onewhofound:

So I mindwiped and put 850% into crafting skill. Then made 30 different copies of a recipe.... the best of which had a whopping 19% extra damage. So basically the amount of possible benefit over dozens of creations isn't even worth the mats that go into a pair of mindwipe tonics, much less multiple high-level items

Where does damage come from custom recipe? Perhaps you meant blueprint of weapon?

And no, crafting skill will become very useful in late game when you need some powerful stuff to do cave run and boss, provided you have some decent blueprints available.

The better the blueprint is, the more leap you get, because the bonus is percentage based. With high quality BP it's worth to mindwipe and get all crafting skills, although you can still be unlucky to get a low bonus because the lower bound is still 0% no matter what...
e.g.,
I have a 470% longneck BP, about 20% of bonus gives around 550% post-craft, that's nearly 80% extra.
If my math is correct, your BP should have base damage at around 150%, let's assume the best scenario in 850% crafting skill, you get the max bonus of 37.5% and lead to 19% increase.
I got a lower bonus than yours but my increase is much higher.

Custom recipe is however a bit different in calculation, I believe the bonus is fixed instead of a RNG according to the formula:
https://ark.fandom.com/wiki/Custom_Consumable

I was using an 240% damage Ascendant Longneck Rifle blueprint. You can't imagine how long it took to mine all that metal.

What is the "math" you are talking about? On the wiki it says you add up to your crafting skill past the quality of the BP but clearly that isn't the case. I made several more today, and got one that is 293% damage but most hover around the 255% range.

[Stephen]

Originally posted by onewhofound:

I was using an 240% damage Ascendant Longneck Rifle blueprint. You can't imagine how long it took to mine all that metal.

What is the "math" you are talking about? On the wiki it says you add up to your crafting skill past the quality of the BP but clearly that isn't the case. I made several more today, and got one that is 293% damage but most hover around the 255% range.

You can use single player and enable cheat to test them out instead of farming stuff for a long time.

But okay now it makes more sense to me, because I was assuming you got the max crafting skill bonus, and clearly you didn't when you made your previous post. Maybe you were so so unlucky to get crappy bonus even after 30 crafting, which is possible with RNG.

Base dmg starts from 100%, you need to take that out before your calculation, and add it back after. Each point to your crafting skill will increase the max bonus by 0.5%, yet the min bonus will always be 0%. Your 850% crafting skill, that's 75 points because it starts at 100% and each level increases by 10%, should give you up to 37.5% bonus if you are super lucky.
So...
240% (140% from your quality) base dmg with 37.5% max crafting skill bonus gives ~292.5% dmg, that's around 53% extra dmg from the bonus, which looks consistent to me with the best one you got right now.

And all the "math" can be found on the crafting skill and item quality page on wiki, btw.

[Lordbufu]

Honestly, playing on official like rates, i have never really used the crafting skill for BP crafting. Mainly because the increase, as mentioned by Stephen, works best on higher values. And the higher you go up in quality, the more expensive it gets, many of them could not even be crafted in the past because of the steep material requirements.

And so far, i have not needed it for boss fights\missions either, though i still have to fully clear Gen 1 & 2.

It does work rather nice for making custom food recipes though, you can make recipes that heal you for quite a bit for example, witch is handy in certain fights (saved me on Alpha Rockwell on Aberration). But you technically only need to do that once.

I guess it mostly depends on how lucky you get with drops etc, and i have never had issues finding things required to clear content Solo or on SP.