crafting?

[nirocks]

i have been reading countless threads on this forum the past 2-3 weeks, basically spending my work days (dont judge) lurking PCF and learning, and then applying that knowledge when i play in the evenings

part of that knowledge was "TT = BAD" so i hoarded everything i looted in storage, all crystals, all oils, everything. it was costly but i thought who cares, ill craft it all down the road

i bought every single blueprint available from the trader, and i still can't craft sh*t. a bit of lesser elysia here and there if i bother to go out and mine, but i cannot craft anything purely from my hunting loot.

what a let down. i know i can obviously sell my loot to other people, but how do those people even find the blueprints they are going to craft with? i ended up selling everything back as i cant afford to deposit and keep hoarding without using my stuff...

now i am comfortable with the auction house and have sold some stuff already, but i would like to be able to actually use my loot. right now it feels like i cant even if i want to.

crafting is the center of the economy, no? if there are no crafters, then hunters and miners have no one to sell to. i would gladly buy from other players, but i have nothing to craft.

all that rambling to ask: how is a new player (on next island in my case) supposed to start his journey in the crafting world? do blueprints ever drop from monsters? should i put a bigger emphasis on mining? (havent dug deep into it yet...no pun intended) or should i just give up on the idea, focus on hunting and sell my loot directly without crafting it?

help

 

[Angela Draniie Cloud]

You have to craft to get new blueprints to craft other things.

but also should never use(for low level stuff) anything except very high qr(quality rating) like 90+ when crafting things.


Also you don’t want ti craft basic material stuff unless you have like a few thousand clicks of said attempts. Even then, right now, you’ll lose even more ped on most crafting.

Edit: Moral of the story, until twen is over. Kill ONLY mobs with low hp/lv and focus on getting twen tokens and selling them. It’s basically the only profit in the game right now

 

[nirocks]

but also should never use(for low level stuff) anything except very high qr(quality rating) like 90+ when crafting things.

but how am i supposed to raise the qr is not by crafting with the blueprint?

Also you don’t want ti craft basic material stuff unless you have like a few thousand clicks of said attempts. Even then, right now, you’ll lose even more ped on most crafting.

does that mean im better off just selling everything? there is no way right now with my DPS to accumulate enough for a couple hundred clicks, let alone a couple thousand

Edit: Moral of the story, until twen is over. Kill ONLY mobs with low hp/lv and focus on getting twen tokens and selling them. It’s basically the only profit in the game right now

i am not planning on profiting now or ever, just want to grow my avatar. ped is not the priority right now, but skilling is

 

[Edward-James]

also depends on which planet you are for the crafts....some planets have better "use" bp´s than others, on some planets its hard to get mats etc etc

if you want to skill up crafting lvls a bit you can also do the daily crafts on monria/ toulan / also some on NI

most blueprints are bought/sold from ppl /auctionhouse....some bp´s arent avail anymore and outdated like old wep bp´s etc..

you should think of what exactly you wanna craft in future which also depends on the pedcard to store some stuff and click quite a lot in 1 run if possible
( weps,components, armor )
gl,
Eddie

 

[Nanashana]

Crafting is an enormous ped-sink.

In my mind there are a few areas of crafting which you could look at:

• Crafting Hunting Equipment:
  • I.e. Armatrix, (L) Armours, (L) Plates
  • Pros:
    • Lots of lower level players using (L) items and stable-ish demand for other (L) gear
  • Cons:
    • UL prints are expensive, (L) gun markup is codified into the costs of the limited clicks, very margin based again.
• Crafting Enhancers:
  • Damage Enhancers Mainly which have the highest volume turnover
  • Pros:
    • Can shift large volumes
    • Seasonality, can be 100% swings based on events which effects long term profits.
  • Cons:
    • Highly competitive (beware the enhancer mafia)
    • Margin based, much more about sourcing resources and how you sell the items than your skills themselves
    • Seasonality
• Crafting Clothing:
• & Crafting Decorations & Other Misc Items:
  • Cosmetics mostly.
  • Pros:
    • Can sometimes get good markup when you find a buyer
  • Cons:
    • Low low volumes, hard to find customers. Cosmetics really isn't a huge focus for most of the player base.
    • Time-consuming and painful to skill due to a lack of UL and (L) bps.
• Crafting Components:
  • I.e. making the items that are used within the other professions.
  • Pros:
    • Generally, one of the better areas to get stable profit is relatively easy to sell small stacks of resources at low quantities at high markups for people who just want to craft a small number of items and don't want to click the components themselves.
  • Cons:
    • A lot of heavy lifting is involved, lots of stockpiling of resources, frequently watching auctions to see where the gaps are and analysing where the opportunities are.

As kind of evidenced above, Crafting is much more about bankroll management, having good identified sources of cheap resources and good buyers lined up either though good shop placement and advertisement or networking. I honestly wouldn't recommend anyone seriously attempting to go into crafting without 10's of k of ped ready to burn or lock up for months at a time.

Skilling

Skilling on the other hand is slightly different, there are number of ways that you can improve your skill through other professions (Mothership repairing runs, mining, and repeatable quests mainly). And I'd probably advise that a new player looks to get skills outside of crafting till at least L5-10 to always be maxed at all times. Mainly due to the success % you see on the crafting screen is effectively your tt return %, if that's at 85%, that's a lot of ped going poof.

Reccomendation

So to answer your specific question I'd recommend the following:

NI tends to be great at providing significant swings in demand of resources on VU days, introducing new blueprints for cosmetics and unlocks which tend to spike quite heavily in demand. You want to focus on positioning yourself as best as possible for those occurrences, stockpiling clicks, materials (crystals, NI specific hunting loots) ready to be able to sell them.

Also look for people who appear to be crafting incision plates, serpent scales etc... as those players will have a large requirement to use crafted materials to perform those upgrades and could make larger bulk sales direct without the AH tax.

But ultimately, keep reading, keep studying what sells and what's in demand and keep trying to find a slice of the economy that works for you.

 

[nirocks]

Crafting is an enormous ped-sink.

In my mind there are a few areas of crafting which you could look at:

• Crafting Hunting Equipment:
  • I.e. Armatrix, (L) Armours, (L) Plates
  • Pros:
    • Lots of lower level players using (L) items and stable-ish demand for other (L) gear
  • Cons:
    • UL prints are expensive, (L) gun markup is codified into the costs of the limited clicks, very margin based again.
• Crafting Enhancers:
  • Damage Enhancers Mainly which have the highest volume turnover
  • Pros:
    • Can shift large volumes
    • Seasonality, can be 100% swings based on events which effects long term profits.
  • Cons:
    • Highly competitive (beware the enhancer mafia)
    • Margin based, much more about sourcing resources and how you sell the items than your skills themselves
    • Seasonality
• Crafting Clothing:
• & Crafting Decorations & Other Misc Items:
  • Cosmetics mostly.
  • Pros:
    • Can sometimes get good markup when you find a buyer
  • Cons:
    • Low low volumes, hard to find customers. Cosmetics really isn't a huge focus for most of the player base.
    • Time-consuming and painful to skill due to a lack of UL and (L) bps.
• Crafting Components:
  • I.e. making the items that are used within the other professions.
  • Pros:
    • Generally, one of the better areas to get stable profit is relatively easy to sell small stacks of resources at low quantities at high markups for people who just want to craft a small number of items and don't want to click the components themselves.
  • Cons:
    • A lot of heavy lifting is involved, lots of stockpiling of resources, frequently watching auctions to see where the gaps are and analysing where the opportunities are.

As kind of evidenced above, Crafting is much more about bankroll management, having good identified sources of cheap resources and good buyers lined up either though good shop placement and advertisement or networking. I honestly wouldn't recommend anyone seriously attempting to go into crafting without 10's of k of ped ready to burn or lock up for months at a time.

Skilling

Skilling on the other hand is slightly different, there are number of ways that you can improve your skill through other professions (Mothership repairing runs, mining, and repeatable quests mainly). And I'd probably advise that a new player looks to get skills outside of crafting till at least L5-10 to always be maxed at all times. Mainly due to the success % you see on the crafting screen is effectively your tt return %, if that's at 85%, that's a lot of ped going poof.

Reccomendation

So to answer your specific question I'd recommend the following:

NI tends to be great at providing significant swings in demand of resources on VU days, introducing new blueprints for cosmetics and unlocks which tend to spike quite heavily in demand. You want to focus on positioning yourself as best as possible for those occurrences, stockpiling clicks, materials (crystals, NI specific hunting loots) ready to be able to sell them.

Also look for people who appear to be crafting incision plates, serpent scales etc... as those players will have a large requirement to use crafted materials to perform those upgrades and could make larger bulk sales direct without the AH tax.

But ultimately, keep reading, keep studying what sells and what's in demand and keep trying to find a slice of the economy that works for you.

thank you oh so very much for your detailed reply, it shifts the way i see crafting. i thought i would be able to pretty much craft anything but it seems to be much more than that, i am used to games putting the focus on killing monsters and crafting is usually just the secondary activity but it seems to be much, much more than that here.

i will take your advice and try to focus on other areas until i can get some of those basic crafting skills up. my mentor did tell me about that but we never really got deep into crafting

thanks Nanashana!

 

[Alina]

QR 1 start with 82% tt return btw but will rise fast

 

[nirocks]

QR 1 start with 82% tt return btw but will rise fast

when you say "fast", is it a set number of clicks to have it go QR1 to QR100? or is it "random" like skilling is?

 

[Nanashana]

when you say "fast", is it a set number of clicks to have it go QR1 to QR100? or is it "random" like skilling is?

There's a definite rule of thumb of average # of clicks to get to QR100, but it's super fast to QR40 and drags past QR70, And you're already at 94%+ at QR70+ So it's very much a non-linear scale.

 

[nirocks]

.....i dont know if i get that 100% wrong but it seems to me that unless i have a specific reason to craft (such as stocking a shop or crafting something i need) i should just try and sell the loot instead of re-purposing it through crafting.

grrr. too many things to do in this game, yet so little time.

 

[Droob]

.....i dont know if i get that 100% wrong but it seems to me that unless i have a specific reason to craft (such as stocking a shop or crafting something i need) i should just try and sell the loot instead of re-purposing it through crafting.

grrr. too many things to do in this game, yet so little time.

Every 'activity' you do will cost you in TT value. From when you hunt/mine the materials and each extra click of crafting / refining through the production to an end product. As each of these steps is costing the player (and filling MA's pockets), the player is going to add their own markup for each of those steps.

Unless you have a specific reason to craft an item, it is likely that you won't be able to properly extract the MU from the crafting process. It will either sit in storage taking up your bankroll, or you will just TT it (costing you the TT cost of crafting / hunting the materials)

Of course throughout this process, you will be competing with other crafters' costs (who will likely have maxed BPs and required skills)

 

[Alina]

There's a definite rule of thumb of average # of clicks to get to QR100, but it's super fast to QR40 and drags past QR70, And you're already at 94%+ at QR70+ So it's very much a non-linear scale.

its also based on the planet for instance D-class bp is soooo slow

 

[The Great Adventurer]

Crafting requires two things;

Skills and Blueprints

Skilling can be gathered by repairing on motherships/cargo ships but it's not as cheap anymore since they changed the welding wire Blueprint formula.

The cycle here is that the Welding Wire and the RK-0 blueprints are level 1 and 95% already so you can mine and hunt for the resources specific to those blueprints, sell the rest to buy blueprints off the market, craft it then go skilling.

You'll want to skill up until you get to use the RK-25 which is a good baseline to know you're ready to move into other things. If you're doing the other crafting missions (some repeatable) giving you engineering and other crafting skills it'll start to stack up decently fast.

As you're doing this, the next level of crafting is typically enhancer and components (some of which you'll already have started collecting) thus you'll want to start collecting those blueprints next. Try and fill your books for those, it'll take time but be careful as some aren't really useable or are crazy expensive to buy for literally no reason. Enhancers are great to craft since you can use them on your gear and/or sell them.

Don't limit yourself to one planet. Welding Wire crafting will have you travelling to various other planets if you want to collect the resources yourself.

All the professions play into themselves and connect. It's possible to craft what you use to hunt and mine (that you use to get materials to craft) but you need to be patient, otherwise you can buy off market to speed that process up (and sometimes it's cheaper to buy than to acquire yourself).

 

[SoberPhil]

Basic crafted items have little MU, and you're gonna have trouble selling them in large quantities outside of Calypso, wasting your basic mats on this is a bad idea. Generally speaking, when you want to craft something, look at the MU of the item you want to make and the MU of the mats, the first need to be high, and the second low. When you go out hunting and mining focus on MU, don't go after cheap stuff specifically, it's easier to just buy that.

The cheapest (but not the fastest) way to skill up a little bit is to do the crafting daily on Monria - takes about 1200 clicks, with EP1 that's 24 PED, most of witch you'll get back, can loot even a little extra sometimes. You can use this BP outside of the daily too for long crafts. Bad part is, for some unknown and inexplicable reason EP BPs don't drop and you have to buy them from reselles, which often are scammy. You can do EP1 on a low budget even, but for anything serious, as
Nana said, it'll take a lot.

I think reaching 100QR on a BP requires a little over 20k clicks, unless it varies from BP to BP, you can also buy BPs with good QR.

 

[nirocks]

a LOT of very good information in those replies, thank you everyone who takes a minute or two (or 15 in the case of Nanashana, thx again mate!) to reply

the more i read the replies the more im inclined to focus on one area at a time, at least until i am "mid-level" in all three or when i know what i am actually doing lol.

i have the answer i was looking for, but tips are always welcome