Myco's Crafting Guide

Basic guide for crafting and refinement system in taiwu.

Introduction

Crafting in Taiwu allows you to produce most items in the game on your own, this guide will briefly explain each crafting skill, what they generally make, how to get materials for crafting, and how you can improve some of your products through refining and other means.

Please note that crafting is an entirely optional part of the game, and everything you can craft can also drop from enemies or be bought, so it is just one of the many ways to get the items you need.

Getting Started

To begin crafting you will need four things, sufficient attainment in the crafting skill, a tool, a material, and a crafting building to carry out your work (you do not need a building to repair/dismantle stuff, but still need skill and tools)

Material is a bit more complicated and deserves its own section, so I will focus on the other three things first.

Tools
Crafting tools are generally grouped by the crafting skills, carpentry tools are used for carpentry, forges for blacksmithing, etc...

Tools cannot be crafted, and the easiest way to get them is to buy them off merchants from the appropriate guild. Rejuv Hall sells medicine/poision tools, Pentalake sells weaving tools, and squaremaster sells carpentry/blacksmithing tools, etc... Sword Manor sect tournament is also a easy way to get high end tools.

Tools all have limited durability, which reduces by 1 for each repair, dismantle, or crafting you've done with the tool. As a result, high end tool should only be used when absolutely necessary, since they can have very low durabilities.

Skills
Crafting skills can be learned by reading crafting skillbooks, which is most commonly obtainable from swordmanor npc and book merchants. Since skill attainment gained from reading book is largely a percentage increase based on your talent, lacking talent can make it VERY difficult to reach high enough skill to craft top tier items, so take that into consideration. You need over 400 skills to make the highest tier items, which is very hard to reach even with top tier tools if you don't at least have 50+ talent, if not more.

There are taiwu village buildings that helps improve skill for the purpose of crafting, and I explained them in more detail in my econ guide, so if you are short on skill attainment you can consider those.

Crafting Building
To craft, you will either need to be in a tile with a crafting building built (most sect will have a few crafting building related to their sect's speciality, like poison for five immortals), or have it built in the taiwu village (which you can access remotely by viewing the taiwu village, but you still need to be in a town to do access taiwu village storage)

Buildings explained in more detail in my economy guide, but the level of the main crafting building does not matter, you just need to have it to be allowed to craft, though there are other special support buildings that will help make crafting easier. Most powerful ones will allow all you to produce item 1 tier higher than the material you used, which is the only 1 to craft tier one items since there are no tier 1 materials.

Obtaining Materials

With tools, skill and proper building, the last things you need is materials. Materials are mainly obtained in three ways.

Firstly, when gathering resource on the world map, there is a chance to get materials based on the reosurce you gather. The more resource the tile you gathered from has, the more likely it is for you to get a material, as well as chance to get better material. You can definitely get t4 material this way, and though I've never seen it, T3 material should be possible as well, but most of the time you will be lucky to get T6/T5 materials.

Secondly, you can build resource buildings in taiwu to help you gather materials, this is passive and can produce a whole bunch of decent materials (t6 should be very common), but you will need to level up those building and properly staff them to see higher tier stuff, and based on resources in your village, you may not have the option to gather certain material this way. For more info you can again check out my economy guide.

Lastly, you can buy materials from merchants, pentalake in particular sells a lot of non-medicine materials, which, while expensive, can be a lot more reliable way to obtain high tier material than the first two method if you got the money.

T2 Materials
There is also a special adventure for each category of materials, that you can only get after natural disaster has struck a region (this can be seen in your monthly feed, you will get a notice along the line of "after disaster has struck xxx place, a rare material of certain kind has shown up"

You can go to the region and find an adventure to locate that rare material, which is only available for a limited time (about a year). To be successful in that adventure, you will need high skill in the associated crafting skill, and bringing with you certain material of another type to help. During the adventure, you will need to use the material you brought at each node to advance, and each advance can net you some material of the category you are seeking. If you have accumulated enough success along the way, in the end you can find a t2 material.

For example, if you are looking for the T2 wood material, you should have high carpentry skill, and bring with you a lot of Iron type materials, the higher tier the better. Essentially the adventure is you making axes with the iron you brought to chop your way through a forest to get to the t2 Tree. (The exact material you should bring is not always obvious, so make sure to read the adventure description.)

Material Types

Materials are generally grouped into broad category based on their associated crafting skills, and more specific types. The specific type of material used is what ultimately determines the end product. In most cases each type of material will have variants between tier 2-8.

For example, Wood and Bamboo are two type of material for the carpentry skill, where as Fabric comes in the animal and vegetal variants (Cooking,Medicine, and poison are a bit different and i will explain them separately)

Generally, the two category allows same tier of items to be crafted with different focus. For example, Wood and linen can both be used to make gloves. Assuming material of the same tier is used, Wood gloves are more hard hitting and physical damage focused, bamboo gloves are quicker hitting but still physical damage focused, both also have more balanced style allocations. vegetal fabric Glove are extremely quick, but also almost entirely internal damage focused with very bad armor pen, and animal fabric glove is a bit of a hybrid between physical and internal damage, with balanced stats.

These difference in material allows you to fine tune products based on your skill and material available. If this seems too overwhelming for you, a good note keep in mind is as follows:

- Most material category have a "hard" subtype, like wood, and a "soft" subtype, like bamboo.

- The hard type tends to lean towards physical damage, defense, and slower but more powerful attacks, the soft type tends toward speed, finess and internal damage.

- While subtype matter, the overall category is still the most important, no metal sword will be able to do much if any internal damage, so using "soft" metal will only give you quick hitting swords. Likewise you are not making a full physical damage glove out of linen/hide.

-Since usually a player's build focus towards external or internal damage, picking blacksmithing for external gears and sewing for internal can generally be a safe pick.

Crafting

Having prepared all materials, you can now use the craft option in the appropriate crafting building to begin crafting your item.

Preparation
You will need to pick the tool used, material used, and the type of item you wish to make, note some item have further subtypes (for example, fabric (vegetal) gloves can come in variant focused on quickness or finess）

The attainment you need to craft an item depends on the material used,there will be three thresholds, the bare minimal is what is needed to use the material at all, and will let you make product 1 tier below the material's tier. The next level allows you to produce product the same tier as the material. If you have the special building that lets you produce item 1 tier higher, the third threshold is what you need to produce product 1 tier above that of the material's tier.

You can check all the above requirement by hovering over the displayed product. Please note that in cases where an item can come in more than one variant, like fabric (vegetal) glove as described above, selecting the variant you want will further increase the attainment threshold required. (if you don't choose, result will be random).

Resources

Besides picking material and tool, you will also need to invest resources into crafting the items, the resource invested will allow you to further fine tune the product's stat sometime. In some case, such as say a wooden carriage, you just need to invest a bunch of wood resource. But in case of weapon and armors, you can invest some metal, jade, and linen as well, which will affect item's final stat somewhat. The effect isn't super strong but helps with min max

Crafting Time
Investing resource, you can start crafting item, item will be available for pick up usually in 1-3 months, if the time required is 0 month (usually for low tier medicine and most foods), it will be instantly made. You do not need to remain in the area while the item is being made and is free to do whatever you want, just remenber to pick up your item.

Please note that the item will be left in the exact location of the crafting building you used, so if you made the item in a sect, you have to go back to that sect to pick up the item. That is why I suggest doing crafting in taiwu village whenever possible, since taiwu village can be remotely accessed from any town.

Improving your Items - Perks and Refinement

Once an item is made, it may gain a special perk, as far as I know, these are entirely random. These perks can be quite powerful, if situational in their niche. Currently, the crafts person aspiration allows you to reroll an item's perk if you have 30% progression in that aspiration and have the necessary attainment.

Items can further be refined by using special refinement material. These are not the same material you use for crafting, and can be found in adventures, bought from merchant, and obtained from dismantling gears.

Below is a nice refinement table prepared by Neyhoum:


You can place up to 5 refinement material in any gear to obtain their corresponding effect, but inserting refinement material require the respective skill of that material, instead of material of the item. So if you want to place fabric on a sword, you need to have sewing, not blacksmith to do so. Higher the tier of the refinement material, higher the skill requirement.

Please note currently it doesnt seem stats gained from refinement will show up on your character stats, but they are applied.

Refinement material can be removed or insert at will, provided you have the material, but each refinement will cost you some basic resources.

Cooking, Poison, and Medicine

Crafting for these are slightly different, as each has more than the usual 2 hard/soft sub-category of materials.

Poison

This is probably the easiest to complain, poison material are based on the 6 poison type, and there are 6 category as a result. Poison mats are special in that they can be used without being made into poison, just less effective. This is also a very smart and easy way for player to tell what mat is for what poison.

The poison crafting building, the cellar is also where you can apply poison to weapon, armor, and food. Effect of poisoning weapon and armor is explained in detail in the combat guide, poisoned food can be used to poison NPC you gifted it to.

Food
Food is more broad than poison in that it is generally divided into a few broad category that all makes food with similar effects. For example, fish, crab, shrimp of different tier produces dishes with similar effect, while grain types does produces dishes with similar effect.

Since food buffs are relatively minor, the main use of food in my opinion is as strong gifts. Unlike other material, with enough attainment, you can make extremely high tier food with extremely low tier materials. T9 material can make T3 foods if you have extremely high skills (400+). (Having high tier mats usually just make the skill requirement lower.) Do note you still need the special +1 product tier building if you want to make t1 food though.

This means it is very easy to craft very high tier food with basic materials, and it is very easy to have high end gift this way. As a result, while food are pretty meh buff items, learning cooking is extremely useful since it makes it incredibly easy to befriend people.

Medicine

Medicine crafting is argubly the most complex since each medicine can essentially be used to make either a higher tier (2 tier higher than mat) medicine of a certain type (with a very high attainment requirement), or a lower tier(1 tier lower than mat) medicine of another type (with a very low attainment requirement).

Unlike poison there is no good indiciation as to what makes into what, so I suggest taking a look at all the medicinal material of various type and make a note of the useful ones. It is for this reason I generally buy my medicine, though some of them does give very nice buffs, so you may want to mass produce them.

Useful Things To Make

All crafting can be a good source of weapon/armor to fit your need, so your choice here largely depends on your build, here I will note some non-weapon/armor item that can be useful.

Jade - can be used to make many very useful stat increasing accessories.

Carpentry - Notable for making carriages that increase your carry capacity and travel speed, if you did not buy a mount, carriages are a must. (Even then, they are still superior to mount in some aspects.) Carpentry also has all the poison resist accessories, in case you need them.

Sewing - With the new aspiration system requiring your char to be dressed in proper clothing for your aspiration, sewing lets you produce these cloths on demand. They can also make many decent accessories, notably animal fabric makes the attack speed increasing accesory.

Food - As mentioned above, best source of mass produced gifts for people.

Poison - For a poison build high tier poison is necessary, since basic attack with poison coated weapon is the best way to apply poison consistently.

Medicine - If you can find the appropriate formua, attack speed, move speed, and int/ext pen medicines are all very nice.

Blacksmithing generally have worst utiltiy, it just makes weapons and armors, but for most external build you probably still going to end up using metal weapons.

Note: Alcohol and Tea, while very useful buff items, are not associated with cooking and cannot be crafted. They are part of the appreciation building chain and can be harvested in two high tier appreciation buildings.

Closing Words

I think this about covers most details in crafting. Time permitting I will add a few more image showing the crafting interface if I can get a few eng mod screen shot, but I think the interface should be relatively straight forward.